2400 phone providers may be shut down by the FCC for failing to stop robocalls
docs.fcc.gov
docs.fcc.gov
Aha, the list was linked from the original URL, but dang unfortunately changed it to the plain text news release https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-408083A1.txt which doesn't link to the list. The original URL was https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-could-block-over-2400-provi..., which links to https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1235A1.pdf, which lists the providers that will be shut down. And I'm happy to see that my SIP provider isn't on it.
So perhaps inbound calls and inbound texts will be fine?
I would contact the provider and ask them their intentions, and if you are not satisfied leave while you still can.
However having said that, I'm not sure it will keep working if the original provider goes bust. If it's the same as in the UK, under the hood the implementation requires the original owner of the number range to do forwarding. So it's worth checking if the owner of the range of numbers containing your number - often a different company - is on the list
(Edited to add) Actually it looks like the US has a centralised implementation: https://10xpeople.com/blog/switching-carriers-and-retaining-...
(source: wikipedia and I worked in a small segment of the mobile network operator market for a short while)
I have some questions 1) are these telcos effectively pass-thru operators for actual spammers ? in other words, just a paper entity working with 1-2 customers ?
2) Do these VOIP providers act as resellers for the big telcos ? If yes, how does the telco contracting/onboarding fail so hard at screening for bad actors as potential customers (is there a law like KYC for them at all ?)
3) Finally, once onboarded don't the big telcos have some incentive to boot bad actors from their busy networks ?
They are created/supported by the robocallers.
ETA: Whew, my SIP provider isn't on the list.
For a long time the area was serviced by AT&T, who probably started with phone lines and then progressed over time to dial up and then more modern cable / broadband. They probably bundled in home phone service for many years.
When the local ISP built out all their gigabit fiber infrastructure they probably felt they had to offer some kind of phone service to compete, and went with VOIP since they weren't going to build out a whole telephone network infrastructure. I'd bet most people don't use it, but they need to offer it to be viable for certain older customers that don't want to give up their home phones.
I briefly set up a home phone on the provided VOIP, just for fun and nostalgia, but it was pretty annoying with sometimes getting disconnected and needing a manual power cycle to reconnect so I stopped using it.
I feel like there is a shadow cartel where all telcos agree to suck as much as possible so there's no real incentive to switch. Also aggregators love re-bills where you pay them for another provider's invoice but they can't do anything service-wise on it.
At my work (in charge of 140 Windows laptops/iPhones) the only way T-Mobile would give me a deal on 30 new iPhones was by selling me 50 new SIMs for lines I told them I absolutely didn't need. I'm turning those off now. Don't even get me started on Granite or Telepacific, each of which make Comcast and AT&T look like shining examples of greatness.
To me the whole system is archaic - i know gen z would never ever take a call from someone they don't know, or even call each other - it's simply not something you do - it would be like reading your spam mails.
And i'm coming to the same conclusion, answering random people is naive.
Practically we need something new though.
But I read about a situation which would probably open the doors a bit...
see https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/12/02/toronto-public-librar...
A girl got lost. She wanted to call her mom, but the girl had left her phone at home. So she went to the library to phone her mom. The librarian refused to let the girl make a call. [N.B. Yes, the librarian got in hot water for that move]
The girl eventually convinced a stranger to let the girl call her mom using the stranger's phone.
The mom, who was frantically trying to locate her daughter, took the call even though it was from an unknown number.
How many people would make an exception in that case of an unknown number calling?
>> How many people would make an exception in that case of an unknown number calling?
Duh! What a stupid question. Almost everyone in extreme distress due to losing their child would take anything, call, stranger knocking at the door, medium talking to the ether. Anything! :)
I get this is an Idiocracy-level type of question: "If you have one bucket that contains 2 gallons and another bucket that contains 7 gallons, how many buckets do you have?"
I know I didn't. Short-sighted reaction after getting inundated with mandarin-speaking spammers.
I don't know what the globally correct answer is. But "never pickup" seems too extreme (even if the person, calling on the unknown number, leaves a voicemail, if you can't reach them with a return call, what then?)
I can usually infer from the fact that I made an online order, sometimes they'll send me an SMS prior to sending but not always. Anyhow I did have my share of picking spam calls because of the necessity to ignore the "no unknowns" rule while expecting a package.
Overall I don't get that many calls yet that I'd have to configure the phone to reject ALL numbers not in the phone book. But call spam is definitely increasing, along with plain scam. I almost got my card stolen by a post office spoofing scam. And recently my bank cancelled my card and had to get a new one after someone from US tried to buy jewelry with it (I live in Romania) - probably leaked from one of the many online services I pay for. Now I switched to single-one-time-use cards from Revolut for all non-recurring payments, unfortunately it's too much of a hassle to do so for recurring ones. And with increasing security vulnerabilities my only protection is separate bank accounts and keeping only small amounts of money on the account linked to the debit card. No credit, only debit.
She could send an SMS.
A personalized Viking Raider takes your package on a saga to your chosen destination, looting and pillaging on the way while yelling battlecries and occasionally throwing an axe.
Extra charge if longboat is required.
Which is why people who pick up are great targets for whatever garbage is being peddled.
It's sad there really isn't much you can do about it. I tried do-not-call lists, answering and telling them to stop calling me, reporting them - all was apparently a waste of time.
And then block all calls from the same area code as your cell phone.
Unfortunately some businesses have started marking them as spam because they don't like not having the direct personal email of each user
Businesses block fake email generators because they’re overwhelmingly used by fraudsters/spammers/etc trying to abuse systems.
Anybody who’s ever run an internet service that allows open registration or has a free plan knows this the hard way.
On the flip side, it only took me a few days to fix my friend's business domain so they could send emails to Gmail users.
In Singapore, they've enacted SMS identifiers and you've got to register your company to send SMSes via shorthand.
Looks like we'll want to do the same to general phone numbers. If I knew my bank or a government office was calling me I'd happily answer.
But 99% of the time it's robo callers claiming to be the bank hahaha sigh.
I don't think it's a generation thing, I think it's that what we generally consider normal has changed, but that some people got left behind in the old normal.
I’m saying that if two people have each other in their contacts lists and are on friendly terms, it’s not rude to call them if you need to talk to them.
Maybe I misunderstood, though. Sounds like you were talking about cold calling someone you don’t know. I agree that’s rude if the person is not expecting random inbound calls or isn’t in a professional context were there’s an expectation of receiving a call, and has been for generations.
And, obviously, in a work/professional/commercial setting it's always OK to call if they've given you their number. It feels weird, but it's OK.
Delivery Drivers/taxis use their own phones to tell you if their arrival times will change.
Medical calls can come from personal phones.
Isn't that the definition of a "generational thing"?
Now I have to think every time, is this someone I have to text first? Or do they consider texting then calling redundant? Anyhow, I think both are important communication techniques, adults should be able to do remote direct verbal and async written.
After the FB leak, I got a maybe 6-8 spam calls over the next month, and that was it again. It’s maybe 1-2 per year, and they are easy to recognize because they call from different countries.
I thought it was maybe Germany having stricter regulations, but people on Reddits /r/de do complain about spam calls, so no idea.
Whenever I get a temporary number for the US I get spam SMS and calls.
Occasionally I check the caller list on my dsl box - probably low single figure spam calls per year.
On this front, the Bundesnetzagentur (https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Vportal/TK/Aerger/start....) does its job quite well, for decades at this point.
So the public phone system now supports it, but the problem is that not all providers support it yet, which fundamentally weakens the system. Of course, you can’t just add a new “protocol version” to an over-100 year old phone system with zero time to do a migration.*
But now that it’s been a few years, we are reaching a point where, at least for the US, the FCC wants to ban any provider who hasn’t added support.
*simplification
That's up to your carrier.
In general "hosted" services will hide the actual token from the end user, though they may offer either filtering features or the ability to tag calls in the Caller ID based on their signature.
Trunking services designed to feed in to a customer-controlled PBX will usually offer either the same sorts of filtering/tagging or complete passthrough of the token.
End to end authenticated calls is the ideal state, but I don't think we're fully there yet.
Rolling this out is like when the world first rolled out DKIM/SPF for email. You need to reach a critical mass of adoption before the data is useful.
The last "Microsoft" support call was years ago.
My work mobile number is listed on the company website. I need to answer unknown calls from anywhere in the world, although I only get them every two months or so.
I can easily look through my whole call history. This year I seem to have had about six spam calls, and for the first time I bothered to work out how to block a number on Android — three of the calls were from the same number within a few days of each other.
I'm curious how this works in the USA for people that need to answer work calls — does the receptionist at a large company find 9 out of 10 calls coming in are spam? In some countries there are specific ranges for different types of numbers (all UK mobile phone numbers begin with 7, all numbers beginning with 3 are businesses/etc) which allows the spammer some basic filtering, but that's not the case in the USA.
That's your answer right there. Finland is a small country with a very niche language of just about 5M people - it's too expensive to teach people Finnish good enough to convincingly scam off the elderly, not enough marks to return that investment, and you need a sizable population of poor and desperate/dumb people to act unknowingly as money mules.
In contrast, for English language scams, you got 340 million Americans, 68 million Brits and dozens if not hundreds of millions of people speaking primarily English in former colonies (India, Australia) that are potential marks. And to make it better for Indian scammers, people there are already used to Indian call center accents so their alarm bells don't go off immediately.
For German language scams, it's 84M in Germany, 9M in Austria and 4.4 million German speakers in Switzerland. For us, it's mostly scams based in Turkey, because there are a lot of Turks who learn German because they have relatives here or their parents had a stint in the 60s-90s.
Just read [1] that our local telecom authorities (NKOM) report good progress when it comes to preventing people from abusing Norwegian telephone numbers to spam/scam Norwegians.
[1]: https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/jQgEl0/nytt-digitalt-skjo...
French link: https://www.fftelecoms.org/nos-travaux-et-champs-dactions/ca...
I suspect folks in Gen Z are also less concerned with calls from medical/emergency/etc. services. That said, habits have certainly shifted. With very few exceptions, I'm not going to make a personal call out of the blue at this point.
They’re almost all AI calls now. The AI’s force a specific progression, are rude, and will argue with you. Some are programmed to claim to be human. It’s usually the same AI’s selling the same products connecting me to the same telemarketers. Some know my voice.
I can’t stand robocalls because nothing good comes from it either way. I don’t get to encourage new people. Their sales hurt by contacting the same people for stuff they’ve already been disqualified for. If I heard new offerings, I might buy or donate. For example, one was St. Jude’s reminder which I responded to on their web site.
Others are taking action. There’s regulatory penalties for repeated calls, calls outside a certain time, etc. You need to be on the do not call list to be sure. You can send the companies a cease and desist or a lawsuit in small claims under the TCPA. There’s law firms semi-automating that, too. If in the U.S., use that if they keep harassing you.
All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.
Any new media, any form of communications we invent, develops this cancer as it grows into mainstream awareness. The more people a new tool can reach, the more rewarding it becomes to marketers and salesmen, who all flock to it - and as they do, they accelerate the growth of the medium while also displacing and degrading the intended/legitimate usages of it. Soon enough, the medium turns into barren wasteland full of threats to users' sanity and wallets. Only once it goes so bad that people stop using the medium, and/or find a better alternative, do things get better - the cancer dies off as its nourishment supply, i.e. the audience, goes elsewhere. But the disease follows them there. And, if didn't inflict terminal damage to the old medium, chances are that old medium will experience a second spring[1], albeit in a much more diminished shape, becoming a niche hobby or internal technical tool[1].
Advertising is what destroyed AM/FM radio (remains a niche). It's what destroyed outdoor information displays (now existing only to show ads). It's what denies us beautiful vistas (all obstructed by billboards). It's what killed OTA TV, then cable TV[2]. It's what killed e-mail[3]. It's what killed the phone system, and it's what will kill any new thing we move to.
This problem will not go away until we start treating the actual disease - advertising. And by treating I mean the equivalent of radiation therapy[4]; anything else, anything narrowly targeted, leaves space for the disease to come back with extra force - the line between "outright scam" and "legitimate communication" is fuzzy, and salesmen and marketers are very creative at blurring it further.
And no, adding crypto (the legitimate kind) to the mix - authentication protocols, encrypted handshakes, whatnot - will not help, for the same reason your immune system isn't of much help against real cancer either. Sure, it'll get harder for a random Joe the Scammer to do their fly-by-night salesmanship, but advertisers in general can afford to implement all the schemes marking them as AAA tier 1 legitimate communication.
After all, if you look at the web, who's actually pushing most of the security stuff? Unsurprisingly, biggest players in adtech. Improving the medium's immune system is in their interest - they're still invisible to it, and getting rid of the most obnoxious scams secures their own ability to feed on all of us.
--
[0] - Well, kinda. It also includes bits of activities classified under "sales" and "marketing". I think the closest term encompassing them all might be "marketing communications", but "advertising" as understood by regular people covers most of it.
[1] - In rare cases, it may turn into a kind of "zombie mode", a blob of glowing radioactive mutated cancer, able to live out of background cosmic radiation, or such. I mean, how else can you describe the Fax system? You plug it in, wait a moment or three, and suddenly it starts spitting out ads!
[2] - The prime example why paying doesn't protect you from the disease. Once medium contracts advertising, the option to "pay instead of seeing ads" quickly turns into "pay and see ads anyway", and then "fuck you, pay more and see even more ads".
[3] - No, spam filter only catches the worst of it. "Legitimate" advertising still fills most of everyone's inboxes, which is a big reason why people flock to closed, gate-kept alternatives.
[4] - Or nuking it from orbit. Pick your own favorite exaggerated metaphor; it's the only way to be sure.
(ref: https://xkcd.com/1053/)
https://freecarrierlookup.com/
https://www.carrierlookup.com/
https://www.ipqualityscore.com/free-carrier-lookup
By looking up the carrier you can then find the right company to complain to via their reporting process, if they have one. And additionally you can file a report to the FTC and FCC that mentions them.
EDIT: The idea is that you complain to the company whose platform is sending you spam, the regulatory agencies at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/ and https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/, your own cell phone carrier by forwarding text spam to 7726, and that will result in actions that hopefully will address that one situation but also collectively reduce spam for everyone. Without identifying which platform sent you the spam, you cannot know which company to go complain to (they usually have a reporting tool on their website). And you can name them in your complaints to the FCC and FTC.
You can also forward spam text messages to 7726 in the US (goes to your cell phone carrier), which is very effective because the carriers have low tolerance for these issues and also train their own anti spam off this data.
My intent isn’t to reverse-spam the FCC though; the complaint form just only accepts one phone number at a time. Amusingly I’ve discovered that it’s possible to receive a higher volume of spam than the FCC’s rate limits allow reporting.
> It appears these companies have very poor anti abuse practices. When I contacted them for help they basically refused to reveal how my number was obtained
How would a service provider know how your customer obtained your number?
But you reporting that you're receiving unwanted calls/texts from one of their customers should of course still trigger some action on their side – if indeed that's the number that contacted you, per the above.
Yep, I get spam from "Onvoy, LLC" which is a Sinch company. I don't see either on this list and I've filed FCC complaints.
The only reason they are in the Robocall Mitigation database at all is because they briefly tried out a telephony provider years ago who required registering as part of their setup process.
They now use a vendor who handles robocall mitigation and registration in the database for them. Anecdotal, but it’s certainly possible that many companies on this list aren’t actually facilitating robocalls (though obviously, given the number of calls I get, many are).
Seems to me that each time the FCC overhauls their (actually the US citizens') airwaves, there's always more people that want a piece than there were the previous time. Plus some of the same old big players want more. In a big way.
The high-powered operators have the strong lobbying efforts but this is a strict government agency and broadcasters do not always get their way. So they have to go into negotiations with flexible business models to build on what they already have, or for new ventures.
The only thing the FCC has to bargain with is the airwaves themselves.
So both sides make compromises until agreement is reached.
When the FCC will not budge, the business model must change.
Then the licensee comes back with a revised business model, giving up some lucrative plans in exchange for the FCC to be flexible also. If the FCC settles with good will after only giving in a small amount to the operators' ambitions, everything seems about as fair as it can be and things go forward with only a "slight change" to accommodate the "new normal".
All the FCC ever compromises is the airwaves themselves, even if it's only a little bit. It never goes the other way. Little by little the usefulness of the airwaves to the citizens is chipped away at in favor of those who are more empowered than ever to use the airwaves against the citizens instead. And that's above and beyond the financial implications.
Not just the airwaves. When a recognized greedy operator (usually regulated) wants permission to blatantly rip off the ratepayers more than ever (very obvious in the fine print), any decent regulator catches it in the first draft and starts negotiating it away ASAP before the public finds out how bad it was really intended to be for them.
This bold-faced greed doesn't really slip past that many regulators, it's just too extreme to begin with.
So basically on behalf of the operators, the public representative waters down the proposal to something they think might have a chance for approval, without seeming too much like a complete public giveaway from the beginning.
And even then, when the idea is to get more money out of everybody all the time, and more often too, everybody understands that, plus it's one of the most common business models that doesn't take any acumen at all.
But that way there's always the significant fraction of the financially non-prosperous who could barely afford to participate already and would be devastated by any rate increase whatsoever.
Well that's who the compromises will made in the name of, so the cost increases for the protected group (for those relatively few poor citizens) can be held dramatically below maximum levels. It sure looks good on paper and can be pointed to as some real compromise.
As long as it is agreed that everyone else can be ripped of like never before, that will more than make up for it.
Only one side is negotiating in a way that can be taken to the bank no matter what.
I think at one time cell carriers were negotiating to rip off customers worse, and they couldn't get their way without letting "competitors" use their networks like never before.
Which gave rise to the reseller gold rush until that niche ended up being filled by a few major (usually decent legitimate) marketers getting most of the true competitive monthly consumer dollars. Resellers like Cricket or Metro without their own radio towers, giving customers a slightly better deal to use the same wireless networks owned by places like AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.
Some would say better than no regulation at all, but I think rule migration in this direction has allowed a well-crafted robocaller to get operational more often than a competitive new cellular reseller could ever do again.
And now there's hundreds if not thousands which have been added to the list right under everybody's nose for years.
Who knew?
This is a dangerous path to follow.
I have one from Verizon since they are my carrier. For free it does an amazing job blocking spam calls. If I was willing to pay (I’m not) it would tell me what kind of spam call it is.
Not worth the price.
I still don’t answer calls unless they’re in my address book or I’m expecting one. But I get very very few calls anyway thanks to the app.
And they are allowed to leave voicemails, which they never do. Real callers do if I get an unexpected genuine call.
Add in the features iOS has had in the last few releases to be able to see transcriptions of voicemails, now live as they’re being left, and most of the hassle is gone.
The spammers trained everyone to stop answering. I shouldn’t have to do any of this. But it’s better than it was a few years ago.
Text is the new spam hell for me.
Never saw that
I think iOS 17 (last September) was when they added live transcription as it was being left in the lock screen if you press the icon to see it.
Or maybe it was 18 this September.
If you meant the Pixel feature then there are probably lots of videos and posts covering it.
I thought you meant you could do that on your OG 3310 so I was curious.
https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en
> Call Assist answers the call and asks who's calling and why
We've allowed the entire telephone medium to get corrupted by scams. It has been ruined.
I wasn't aware Google didn't extend the service to other phones, I wonder why that is? It can't be a hardware specific feature.
It is.
Automatic screening is exclusive to Pixel devices:
https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en
But I doubt there is any Pixel-only hardware involved.
Is that what everybody else is seeing? That maybe Stir/Shaken is actually starting to work?
I guess it could just be that generational social change... where more people just don't take phone calls. So the ROI for spam calls has reduced...
If so that's not great. Because there's probably an infinite supply of people ready to waste their money trying get-rich-quick crap.
Jim Browning on YouTube does great work exposing this scum. There are huge call center operations in India and Pakistan, and the local authorities are useless if not complicit.
This will only get more popular and profitable once AI tools get more accessible. There's no need to have a physical location and hire humans if they can just launch a army of bots that have perfect accents and can follow a conversation without deviating from the script. The next generation of robocalls is just starting.
My father gets multiple spam calls every day. He lets them all go to voice mail, so nothing about his behavior encourages them to keep calling. Yet they keep coming.
I've had my cell number for about 15 years, and for another 10 years prior it was a land line, so 25 years in total. My father's cell number is only about 10 years old. So despite having a much older phone number, I get way less spam calls and texts than he does.
Part of that may be what lists we're on. Another reason may be that for the past 20 years, when ordering things online, 99% of the time I give a fake phone number. Companies claim they want it in case there is a problem delivering your order, but even before I started doing this, I never had a company call about an order they couldn't deliver. Once or twice they emailed me about an order they couldn't fulfill (out of stock, etc.), but I do give them a legit email. The 1% of the time I give a real phone number is when I'm dealing with a serious transaction, e.g. a bank or insurance or medical company.
I mean, he lets them go to voice mail. Pick up and set the phone down might use more time on their calls and get the line marked as worse target. But I still get several calls a week, so it's not perfect.
My pet theory is that scammers are harvesting voice samples from voicemail greeting for the purpose of training a voice impersonation AI.
I now use the default greeting.
My favorite spam call was someone wanting to make a cash offer on the Ohio State University building that my office is in.
Said some slick guy in a suit showed up on his farm property unannounced and made him an offer on it.
Owner was so annoyed that he smiled and told the guy to come back tomorrow and they'd talk it over.
Guy shows up the next (sunny) day with a colleague... both in suits... in summer... in the southeast US.
Owner proceeds to walk them 6km+ around the perimeter of the property while dangling the possibility he'd be willing to sell.
Then finally ends things with "But you know what it comes down to? My dog was born on this property, and she's pretty old now. I don't think it'd be kind to move her. So I appreciate your time, but don't think I'm interested in selling."
Was impressed at how much time and ingenuity retired folks have to fuck with people, just because they can.
For me, it got so bad (multiple calls per day) I've stopped answering anything that isn't in my contacts already.
Isn’t that what everyone does? Or is it just a millennial thing…
Get married. Start a business. Get sick. Buy a house. Have children. Make interesting friends. Travel extensively.
Once life gets interesting, you start missing important calls with that strategy.
If it's important, they can leave an relevant voicemail.
How would you know?
Even though I'm in an older generation and prefer voice over text I have adopted the habit of only picking up callers that I know I want to speak to.
Email spam is repetitive enough that the usual Thunderbird filters work. If a spam email has an unsubscribe link, I click on that and add the sender to the block list. If it doesn't have an unsubscribe link, I try to find out which service sent it and send them a notice of a CAN-SPAM law violation. The usual suspects (Mailchump, SpamGrid, etc.) do terminate accounts for that, to prevent being blocked themselves.
Huh, didn’t know that. I assumed that it was nothing more than baiting a response, verifying that the phone number is a hit.
[1] https://help.twilio.com/articles/223134027-Twilio-support-fo...
So as far as telling whether it’s a legit number, the spammers still win.
My iMessage is configured to send read receipts, so I quickly bounce the setting before opening the message to click the "Report Junk" link (maybe it's pointless). It would be nice to mark things as spam/junk without having to open them, perhaps I will just delete them since iMessage has been a malware vector in the past.
And that’s when you will discover that you’ve been wasting your time because when you delete them, you’ll get a dialog saying “…is not in your contacts” with the option to “delete and report junk”. You never needed to open the messages to begin with.
Citation needed.
All the vendors we use have STOP functionality baked in as it’s the correct way to ensure we can unsubscribe folk.
Even the FCC[1] seems to agree.
[1] - https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-24-24A1.pdf?bcs-...
I think the FCC finally shutting down just one or two blatant bad actors made a massive difference in robocalls. It just took them months (years?) to do it.
I also had an uptick in text spam (used to be very rare until maybe 9 months ago, then it became about 1-2 a day, now it's back down to just a few a week).
These calls occur year round.
I can’t block them because they are different numbers every time, so I have all unknown incoming calls set to go straight to voicemail.
I don’t even know what they are calling for. If I ever try to answer there is only silence on the line. But I haven’t even done that in months- hoping the calls would eventually stop. (They haven’t)
One infuriating thing is that there is some sort of “verified” checkmark in my call log for some numbers? Or maybe not verified, but “valid number?” Why are they even allowing non-verified calls through? It wouldn’t stop the problem, as 1/4 of my spam calls have the icon anyway. But it would help, surely.
I guess, it's a remote spam farm. The machine calls you, and when you answer, it calls a remote spammer who works from home, so it can take them a while to answer. I guess, it's a clean comfy job: they work from home even without profession or education, maybe even subscribed to several spam farms.
google's messages app is pretty good at corralling them into a spam folder but I do peep in there every now and then. I hope that whatever provider is allowing these gets disconnected.
I get no calls anymore, but I attribute it to pruning where my contact info is distributed and using the spam filters available on call/text.
My father got (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day, consistently, until I realized why he wasn’t answering his phone. He had used zero of the tools that the cell service provider and smartphone OS made available to him. Additionally, he likes talking to people, so he wouldn’t be “mean” to tell callers/testers to take him off their list.
I have a business line, and pretty much every call to it is spam.
The spoofed calls have picked up again. It looks like STIR/SHAKEN means squat.
I think they are all different and resell to eachother because they keep calling no matter how horribly I've trolled them day after day.
Most other scams never call back after my trolling.
I'm wondering if the Medicare calls are the "setup your own turnkey business" flavor of the day.
WCB notified each Company on March 29, 2024, that its certification was noncompliant with section 64.6305 because the Company had failed to submit an updated RMD certification and updated robocall mitigation plan by the February 26, 2024 deadline. WCB's notification informed each Company that it must submit an updated certification and updated robocall mitigation plan in the Robocall Mitigation Database by Monday, April 29, 2024. After this second deadline, the Companies still had not updated their RMD certifications and robocall mitigation plans with the required information; as a result, WCB referred each Company to the Bureau to initiate removal proceedings.
2,411 companies have been deficient since February. The FCC sent them a strongly worded letter in March, giving then a new deadline in April. Roughly seven months later, the FCC is finally starting enforcement procedures.
To me, they’re trying to avoid any and all accusations that they’re moving unfairly quickly or terminating access without appropriate consideration if people missed the notice or needed more time to respond.
I fear the FCC will start reversing this progress once the new guy takes the reins. Without further comment:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/media/brendan-carr-trump-fcc-...
I was pretty shocked that when I complained to my state regulator about Verizon completely ignoring an issue with my business lines, I quickly got a call from a VP at Verizon grovelling and asking me what he could do for me. I said I needed my issue fixed, and then made what I thought was a crazy unrelated request- I wanted FIOS run all the way down the street to my business, and I'd been told previously that Verizon had no plans to expand FIOS in my area. Well, they fixed my issue within an hour, and within two weeks, they rolled trucks, ran the fiber down the street, and we had FIOS service up and running. They were obviously good and afraid of the state regulator.
The best thing they could do is make it impossible to spoof numbers or at least be able to reject them. Even then, you should be able to block anyone calling from a number that you cannot call back.
For once in the modern(?) history of the Republican party, the incoming administration is hellbent on pursuing one of the party's core values: Small government. You bet public servants who want to keep enjoying the nectar will frantically try to make themselves look useful.
Bookmark this comment, and check on how you feel about everything in 4 years.
"Small government" is dumb for any highly developed country, and the people that want that are about to find out this harsh reality. The very wealthy and big corporations probably benefit - for a while - until things start happening like CEO's being assassinated in the street. Good thing stuff like that is not happening.
Meanwhile, between NY State and NY City, there are a total of almost 1 million government employees. I can tell where the inefficiency lies and it's not the fed headcount lol.
But who knows, maybe they'll finally cut social security and medicare that makes up 55% of the federal budget. We'll have rampant homelessness on every street from old people, just like the pre-1800s, but that's the vibe they are going for.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Healthcare system reform would go a long way to reducing those costs, if somehow we could muster the political will.
If the tax collected isn't enough to fund it, maybe we could eliminate the cap on that tax for starters.
Eliminating SS or cutting benefits is going to utterly screw millions of elderly.
DOGE is 100% fake. If it was real Musk would be appointed at the real thing, OMB, which is an actual agency. He's just going to put up reports saying they should fire individual people for being too woke (or trying to prosecute him for his habit of harassing young women at SpaceX) and nobody is going to read it.
But that one isn't real either because government spending is controlled by Congress. The executive branch has little power to reduce it.
Honestly, the bad actors are not in this list. Everybody in this list has implemented rate limits per the previous filing and are in compliance with other aspects of the FCC.
Once I reported some obviously fake collections calls; they kept calling me and saying that I needed to respond to a "pending matter" otherwise it would be "escalated." Bandwidth claimed this wasn't abuse and was a legitimate collections business.
To me they're just a nuisance, but the elderly and other vulnerable people have lost their entire retirement savings to these kinds of scams (https://www.propublica.org/article/whats-a-pig-butchering-sc...). It's not good that Bandwidth is abetting this.
I got the last of my friends and close family on SMS on WhatsApp and the "but why?" Immediately became "oh my god this is so much better, I can use it on my computer?!"
Whatsapp calls are exempted from Do Not Disturb which my phone is permanently in. I disable notifications from the Messaging app.
Literally never any spam calls or texts, ever. Life is good. Everything else PTSN/SIP, SMS, MMS, RCS, it's ALL lipstick on a really ugly pig.
Oh except shitty sites that think phone numbers are a good verification mechanism and block VOIP numbers. Meanwhile I could just go get an voice+data esim for next to nothing. Just stupid.
I probably get extra spam calls because my iphone keeps thinking that when i scroll through the missed call lists, the first or last position of my finger is a click and it calls that number. Sure i can hang up immediately but now the spammers know my number is valid.
Never had this issue on any of my previous non-iphones because it didn't mistake scrolling for a touch to call as much, and even if it did there was a confirmation message at least...
> Removal from the database means other providers will be prohibited from accepting call traffic from these providers.
(Submitted title was "FCC Could Block Over 2,400 Providers from Robocall Mitigation Database".)
As an English speaker, I'd interpret 2k4 as 2004, not 2400.
In Chinese that structure would mean 2400, though I don't know how widely understood the K would be.
Where are you from?
You also save on the comma in "2,400".
I was iffy about dropping the 's' from 'reqs' to get it to 79 (makes it sound like they've only violated one requirement, not multiple) but then I suppose the whole thing is that truncated/abbreviated by that point, it doesn't matter...
Then when fax machines came along sometimes dots would disappear or be unclear on a single transmission.
Either way, occasionally sometimes the page would also be scattered with random dots too because of degraded photosensitive operation, or audio-frequency noise on the telephone line at the time.
And it got even more uncertain when text that is not fixed-width got within mainstream reach :\
Whereas as an English speaker, I'd interpret 2k4 as 2400 because, well, that's just how it's always been in my orbits (cf resistor labelling, for example.)
> Unreal Tournament 2004, also known as UT2K4 and UT2004
I'm not sure if being removed from the Robocall Mitigation Database is tantamount to being shut down, but it sounds like it to me.
They’re like the Facebook/instagram of SMS, talk a big game but happily let all the stuff continue to happen.
AT&T and Verizon (dual sim)
It's really difficult to solve these problems through education alone.
Anybody know if there is some program where I can get compensated for this harassment? (I vaguely remember of hearing about some program)
My vague guess is that these many providers have existed primarily to facilitate robocalling - to force the FCC to play wack-a-mole to get rid of them and FCC is now acting on them en masse, which might be more effective. But people who know this stuff might pipe up on the question.
there aren’t 2,411 cell companies
But voice services existed before cell phones!
They were delivered over copper cables between phone exchanges and people's homes. Some people and especially businesses still have these 'landlines'.
I would imagine that most customers of the companies on this list use neither landlines nor cell phones to access their voice services. Instead they likely use some sort of IP-based voice protocol like SIP or IAX.
On another note, I want a phone that complete has no connection to the phone system, ie. no phone number, but has cell connectivity so that I can make data calls using whatsapp or similar. Can someone please make this?
The normal complaint about the EU's approach to regulation is that it's too vague and companies won't do business there in case they're found in breach of the vague laws.
In practice, at least on this subject, this just isn't a problem. I can't link to the directive that outlaws spam phone calls (it predates GDPR) but the telecoms clearly get told to stop facilitating them and yet I've never heard of a company that claims they were erroneously barred from the market.