David Frankel is a man on a mission against robocalls
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem. Ignoring the actual scam part, the companies terminating the calls (that is: your phone provider) is making money on two ends: they get paid by the originator, and they get paid by the consumer they're delivering the call to (you). The telco originating the call is getting paid by the spammer. Spam is profitable for everybody.
> I think that we’ll be able to push the genie a long way back into the bottle. The measure of success is that we all won’t be scared to answer our phone. It’ll be a surprise that it’s a robocall—instead of the expectation that it’s a robocall.
I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention. I almost never answer my phone for that reason, not just because of spam. I'd just rather interact asynchronously via text or email, without interrupting whatever I happen to be doing. If I'm able I'll reply quickly, and I'm happy to switch to a synchronous phone call if it makes sense (I'd still prefer that over dozens of back-and-forth texts where nuance is tricky and it's easier to misunderstand each other).
It's at the point if my spouse or most close family/friends actually phone me, my reaction is "Oh no, what's wrong?"
That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have the phone so that I can receive spam calls. If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service.
Are there many people without any phone service?
If you're roaming on another carrier's network, I'm not sure how the economics work there, but I suspect the other carrier gets paid regardless.
Definitely agree with this. Over the past five or so years I have adopted the following approach that ensures have control over 95% of the interruptions:
- I have "silence unknown callers" enabled in iOS
- Focus mode is on 100% of the time.
- I disable notifications for all apps except for Reminders (interruptions I have configured) and the Phone app (calls from people in my contact list).
To your last point, the people I am actually interested in talking to only call if something is too important/time sensitive to do via text, so this works well. Any other callers will leave a voicemail if it's actually important.
Now, do I charge my employer when I get a scam call on the work phone while I’m on-call? Technically I should.
Also doesn’t help that callerids get forged to be similar to your own number, which looks like the corporate block of phone numbers we have. Tho I think the networks have someone cut down on the ease of doing that (or at least tagging them as likely fraud).
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It's shocking how quickly the phone system has just up and vanished, replaced by a simulation of a phone system running over the internet, with little wireless supercomputers taking the place of the landline phone's 19th Century technology. Oh, pockets of the old circuit-switched voice network still exist, but they're rapidly being decommissioned.
It didn't hit me until one of my dad's friends called him from an unfamiliar number - because he was forced to get a cell phone for the first time in his life. My parents are on a VoIP service with their old phone number, and it works nicely, but it still depends on working internet - a reversal from when getting TO the internet required working phone service.
Needs to end as soon as possible. Calling on the phone is one of the most rude things someone can possibly do.
Edit: my point is it’s already not a demand, it’s a notice: somewhere out there, someone thinks either you know something they should hear ASAP, or vice versa. What you do with that is up to you.
That's a rather apt description for the feelings that telephones cause.
> there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind)
Voice messages. All modern asynchronous messaging services support them.
> it doesn’t answer itself
It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes people up from their precious sleep. For basically no reason whatsoever. Usually because some asshole wants to pitch his products.
As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it.
Isn't this a configuration issue? iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage scenarios.
> As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it.
Characterizing an unsolicited phone call as wrong or rude seems backwards to me. I don't see fault being the caller's but rather the recipient's for not availing themselves of the resources at their disposal to control access to their attention.
I would agree that if you want better outcomes, you should learn about and use the mechanisms built into your phone to reduce distractions, but telling people it's their fault that others are treating them with rudeness seems a bit much.
No. It's a "people think phone calls are the most important things in the world and they override all other concerns" issue. It's quite visible in the design and implementation of phones and smartphones.
> iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage scenarios.
They do not allow calls to be completely disabled. Even with all those configurations applied, all my Android phones still show a notification that someone is calling me and that calls were missed. The notifications cannot be disabled. Phone still manages to be an absolute pain even when completely silenced. I got two of those notifications while writing this comment. Literally right now.
The voice mail notification was the worst. It was impossible to get rid of. I tried killing the phone apps via debugger and they still came back somehow. Would not go away until I listened to all the voice mails in full. Of course companies would leave ads in the voice mail. Words can't describe how much I hated that thing. Mercifully I managed to turn voice mail off at the phone company itself after performing some arcane dialing incantations that I don't even care to remember.
> I don't see fault being the caller's
Well I do. Callers think it's OK to interrupt others. That's presumptuous and rude in of itself. The same attitude of an advertiser.
I don't think this intrusive app would pass either major store's guidelines. This kind of device takeover/intrusion would be totally unacceptable to many (most?) users.
But, since we already have a concept of what a "phone" is and have gotten used to it, culturally we let it slide.
I don't regard people who are call the same way you do. That's just a difference in our experience and outlook. I don't think calling someone is inherently rude. Some people who call me have rude intentions (advertisers, scammers), but I've done what I can to insure I'm not bothered by those people while allowing the people who I want to share my attention with (family, friends, paying Customers) to reach me asynchronously.
I can heartily share being frustrated with the whole "phone" product category. I think phones should be portable general purpose personal computers, completely under the control of their owners first and "phones" second (or third, or fourth). The market seems to disagree (and lots of people make special pleadings about how "phones" shouldn't be under the control of their owners because "they're phones" and not "computers"-- much to my frustration).
You're literally complaining about your own inability to manage the devices you own.
If there is any violence here, it's you. You with an active phone number, misconfigurating it, then blathering on about the results to others.
Disabling calls altogether can't be done. You bet I looked for that knob. Calls are literally baked into the OS. I even asked the phone company to turn off calling. Nope. So I have to live with constant useless annoying notifications that some bot is trying to call me whenever I'm actively using my phone. Welp. At least I managed to turn off voice mail. That was an especially horrible advertising vector.
Only reason I even have active phone numbers is WhatsApp. Technically, I only need SMS for the verification codes. Explaining that to the phone company is futile though.
Anyway, this only fixes part of the problem. Every other person in my life carries a phone with them. Older folks even have landlines. All those phones ring. A lot.
I don't generally make a habit of "configurating" other people's phones, for obvious reasons. I've tried convince them. It didn't work. They're OK with being routinely woken up by useless phone calls every single day because someone somewhere might one day need to call them on that phone to relay important news or something. It has a visible, measurable impact on their quality of life but they refuse to get rid of the phone. I think that's incredibly inhumane but it can't be helped.
More fundamentally, I have a problem with interrupting synchronous communication, and especially the cultural acceptance of it. As I noted in my original comment.
>> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention
> Needs to end as soon as possible.
I love getting calls! I love hearing a human who actually wants to talk about something! Voices are much more pleasant than flat text. Voices have inflection and emotion and you can hear people laugh at jokes and anecdotes!
Via text things like sarcasm are harder to recognize and it's not obvious how the person on the other end actually feels about what they're writing about - which makes some text conversations very confusing without lots of clarification.
In a way, it's like getting a hand-written letter. It's more effort but it also feels more genuine and less sanitized than a text.
I used to incessantly get the Car Warranty scam call, but that's been gone for years at this point. Now essentially the only calls I get are from real people.
If I'm really busy or stressed or whatever (or at work), that's what voicemail is for. Then a reply can go out via phone, text, email or whatever.
I'm skeptical. I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network. Like I would definitely consider switching carriers if one of them genuinely solved the problem. Given the amount of mobile network advertising I see, there's gotta be way more money in actually fixing this and gaining new users, than there is in getting a couple fractions of a cent per completed call.
It's not even a hard problem to fix. Just have calls sourced internationally set to default-deny for every account. If a user actually wants to receive internationally-sourced calls, they can turn it on. The number of people turning it on would be so small, spammers wouldn't bother at all anymore. Then, prosecute anyone sending spam calls from within the US (I assume we are already doing this). Boom, you've solved the phone spam problem.
Now someone go implement it so I can start paying you for your superior product.
Also, if the monthly bill is less than $1 in spam charges, then the charges should be dropped. Spam charges aren't intended for one-off annoying calls.
Few problems:
- have to pay upfront to send messages. - might have problems with liquidity finding traders to redeem with - Major mail providers such as Gmail may block forwarded encrypted content "for security" - would require add-on client to decrypt - people are sick of hearing about shit coins - need very low gas fee shitcoin - if shitcoin server goes down, email goes down
I suppose you could do this in a cashless way and just request tokens from a miner. And if you ask for too many, too fast, you get denied or have to pay the miner. The idea would be to distribute them sparsely among people who don't send many messages. Maybe the shitcoin could somehow enforce not holding too many send tokens.
This makes it prohibitively expensive to send low value email, free to send high value email, and slightly expensive to send “probably valuable” email.
If you genuinely had free choice of multiple otherwise similar quality options, which is not the case in all markets/areas.
Also, I wouldn't put it past the networks to promise to try to eliminate cold calls (to make it look like they are on your side), make a perfunctory amount of effort (the minimum to be able to say they are making an attempt), and still make the money they can from the other side.
Sort of in competition but happy not to rock the boat.
I am a cynic, and I believe the real reason that nothing is being done, is because telecom companies love robocallers (they make a lot of money, and don't get bothered too much for customer service -I saw the same thing with spam emailers and fraudsters. Hosting providers love them, because they buy a lot of product, and don't ask for much customer service).
I also think that politicians don't want to address it, because they use them, and people really don't like political robocalls, because they can be downright noxious.
I agree, and the fact that there are so many other things demanding my attention is crazy making.
If I had to guess, a few generations ago this was probably a complaint about the advent of telephones, even without robocallers and telemarketers. Now that spam has reduced the signal to noise ratio, it’s amusing to see this pop back up.
There is a tri-county area. The poor county that few people live, the working class county, the professional class county.
At one point I realized that myself and my 2 coworkers had the working class area code on a phone number list we created... and we were in the professional county doing business. I'm not sure if it was mental insecurity, but I felt ashamed that my entire team was from the working class area. The fact that we were all 'top of our class' didn't matter. Money didn't matter, we probably were making more than the client since we were profit centers.
I need a new phone number. Seriously, in my area its judgeworthy.
Although with generous government subsidies to the poor area, it seems less taboo since young people have moved downtown.
So much of business is based on perception and you don’t want to give clients any reason to doubt you.
I don't care about ideals. I care about reality.
"At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests."
Anyway, Britain and (as far as I know) Ireland also don't suffer from these robocalls.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
I don't have data to compare between the many countries, but anecdotally, Canadians suffer robocalls at a similar rate to US-ians.
Similarly, I understand it is free to send SMS in the states, you pay to receive them. Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
Robo calls make sense in the US in part because we used the phone more (remember historic), and in part because "everyone" spoke English and so you could ignore language and reach a lot more people.
> Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
The 2 scenarios seem to be:
1) SMS is included in the service. This makes sense. Original SMS were 0-cost to provide; they rode on existing control traffic.
2) Honest people pay per SMS. Spammers don't. As ever, this disproportionately effects honest poor people.
That has not been true in many years. Most people have unlimited everything. Cost conscious consumers do opt for plans with limits, but that's on data, not calls and/or SMS.
In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. So sending out a million text messages costs almost nothing, because the expensive part is borne by the receivers.
In the UK and EU, the person sending the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. This price is defined by a government regulator is owed by the sender's network to the owner of the cell tower.
So if some random person sends a text to me, and I'm using an O2 tower, that person has to pay O2 something like £0.20; meaning to send a million text messages would cost you £200k.
The result is that I do get spam messages, but they're always far more directed: normally organizations that I've actually interacted with in the past. Sending a message to a thousand previous customers is a lot more cost-effective (I presume) than sending a message to tens of millions of random phone numbers.
Ironically, the absolute easiest way to solve the US's spam call/text problem is actually market-based: make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver.
Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited for calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on data.
> The result is that I do get spam messages
Ah, but I'm in the US and I don't get any spam texts :). I do get some robocalls though. It's not an easy to solve problem.
> make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver
I think the complication here is that the source of the calls and texts are not other mobile phones. They're coming onto the network via SIP. The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used. I can send an email to make a text appear on my phone, and this is a feature I have used occasionally -- how do I bill for that?
Whether you pay per-SMS or whether you pay bulk for "unlimited" calls and texts, you're still paying for the path from the tower to your phone. Calling a cell phone in the US is the same price as calling a landline.
In the UK, it's possible to buy a phone that has no outgoing minutes or texts. This is useful because people can still call you. In fact, at some point there was a provider that would pay you a "cut" on every SMS or phone call you received. And calling a mobile phone -- whether you're calling from a landline or another mobile phone -- is more expensive than calling a landline.
Which is almost certainly one of the key problems with implementing such a system in the US: in the UK and Europe, mobile phone numbers look obviously different than landline numbers, so you know ahead of time that the call is going to cost you more. In the US, they look the same, so you'd never know how much you would get charged.
> The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used
If you call my mobile phone, my mobile operator will be paid for that call one way or another; I'm pretty sure neither they nor any of the companies in between your phone provider and mine are going to give it away for free out of the goodness of their hearts. Which means the charge-back mechanism is already in place; it's just not used in the US.
That's how weird this phenomenon is to a european. To me it was a solid "WTF?" moment. Since then I've wondered why I've never heard about US:ians tracking down these operations and destroying them.
Do you really see that happening? "America Bad" is the dominant theme online, including on HN. I see -way- more "gosh I don't understand why America sucks so bad, it's totally perfect over here in Europe" than I see Americans claiming that the US is automatically superior. I feel like in the US we're playing defense way more often, trying to explain misunderstandings and ignorance about how things work here.
To be clear, there are definitely things that work better in Europe. But there are things that the US does pretty well too. Nobody likes to hear that.
This is %100 a North American problem.
Unless this gets regulated Telcos will continue to enjoy their profits.
These days, it's just local shady companies. Think: "Expired Vacation" package timeshare pitches and lately callers asking if I have Medicare A and B.
The Medicare stuff, I assume is some kind of fraud, but the kind where they talk you into being a customer for some service so they can bilk the government for that service (which they may or may not deliver). Fraud, but a more insidious kind - not unlike the auto warranty sales calls (which I seem to no longer get either).
So mostly lead generation for shady domestic companies is what I seem to get. You can always tell, because when you ask the name of the company they hang up on you.
Same, close to zero if not zero (I might have received one late last year or early this year). I do also try to make a bloody nuisance of myself; I'm snoot sure if they have some internal denylist, but I try my hardest to get onto it.
I was led to believe that this is technically allowed so I've been using an app (buzzkill) to junk any text containing the name of a politician.
It's funny though - I live in IL as well, and don't get many political texts.
What I do get matches the ratio of political spam I get across all of my various email accounts: It's 90% one party, and 10% or less the other. A fair amount of it doesn't mention party affiliation, and tries to copy the color scheme and design of the other state party even on their websites (which is pretty brazen). FWIW: I'm not registered with any party at any level and have never signed up for any political newsletter AFAIK.
Devices support attestation level A display (green or grey check marks in your call logs designate this). If you haven't seen that check mark, then you probably haven't seen many A-level attested calls to your device. As far as device manufacturers go, they only care about A-level attestation, which makes sense as it has full traceback capability.
Decades ago we had dialup internet - a service entirely unrelated to the telephone system, built atop the existing telephone infrastructure. The US or EU or whoever could simply design a new service built atop that existing infrastructure.
Telecom companies could double as Certificate Authorities for the new system, providing and signing certificates used to authenticate both sides of a call and encrypt traffic between them. It doesn't even have to be limited to calls. They could also support text or even arbitrary data. It could be a revolutionary new platform for instant communication, separate from the internet and backed by major nations across the world. And the best part is the infrastructure is already built!
Or they could keep playing cat-and-mouse games with spammers for all of eternity.
WhatsApp is a private service facilitated over the internet. No government would (or should) trust Facebook with their communication infrastructure.
Simple solution, and I am surprised at how well it works.
Well, regulations are really, really tough for a couple of reasons. One is, it’s a bureaucratic, slow-moving process.
There's also this notion of regulatory capture. At the FCC, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests.
The regulatory capture of the FCC has been discussed for 20 years - just not by major news orgs (or telco industry press, or most tech press).
ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Atechdirt.com+robocalls+fcc+...
earlier ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Adslreports.com+%22karl%22+%...
What I think would be useful is to be able to block based on incoming carrier. During the last election season, most calls were coming from various VoIP services (Twilio, etc), none from normal retail cell carriers. If I could block an entire carrier who specializes in providing text/voice marketing services, problem solved? Legit business users of those services would hopefully migrate away to more ethical providers when their calls start failing to connect.
now I get almost zero spam calls and virtually every call which comes through is legitimate
The phone system is entirely broken. It comes down to economics- there's zero cost to make millions of calls, so your economic benefit formula is obvious- you can make millions of calls because one of them will pay you back mega-$$$. There is no accountability and no way to automatically filter out spam (as we do with email, although to be honest, spam filtering isn't great either). I don't know what to do other than to increase the cost to make phone calls in order to address the perverse incentives at work.
Edit: I’m curious about the downvotes. If you follow the links to the automated system that David built (a honeypot for robocallers) you see the top offenders are Medicare and end of life services. That jives with my own experience. So clearly they’re targeting the elderly and therefore the solution is - ask them to look for a little stir/shaken attestation checkmark before answering their phone?
I don't advertise my phone number, tho I'm sure you could find it if you really want to. If you've really only gotten 10 spams in the last decade, I question whether we are living on the same planet.
I feel the same way when I see a friend ignore a call. I am curious what the difference is. What filters do you have in place? As far as I know, here's what I have:
My number that I've been giving out freely for a decade > Law-abiding spammers check donotcall.gov > Google Voice checks it's known spammers list and forwards legit calls to my Verizon number (whatever that is, I never wrote it down) https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115089 > Verizon checks its known spammers list (free, I think default?) https://www.verizon.com/solutions-and-services/call-filter/ > My Samsung phones have always come stock with a spam filter baked into their Android image https://www.hiya.com/products-smart-call > I get the call
Someone in that pipeline is doing a fantastic job I guess.
I agree that lead-gen is also part of the problem, but fraud seems especially dire. The new fraud vector seems to be SMS initiated.
Robocalls aren't what makes people actually scared to answer their phone.
Depending on their specific situation, it's rather people like, oh, crazy exes, tax/bill collectors, police investigators ...
Also, in general, any time people are in a situation in which bad news might arrive at any moment.
Robocalls are nothing.
Mine don't, it's either from Pakistan or from 2 towns in my country which presumably are the places that provide a forwarding service to them. If I could block +92 and those two towns i currently would get no spam calls.
Also why shouldn't I just be able to block things with a wildcard rather than every individual number.