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...
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.