UN says scam call centers are epidemic and expanding globally
theregister.com
theregister.com
There are tools though: Google is generally good at identifying most spam, there's also Truecaller (filled with ads and a privacy nightmare). You also have avenues for sending complaints (most providers have do-not-disturb complaint forms right within their apps, and there's a system called Chakshu which the government has introduced). But it'll be a very long time till domestic scam calls get reined in, and unless there is significant internal and international pressure, outgoing scam calls to other nations will still keep going on.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/china/china-actor-thailand-sc...
The answer for these scam centers and for ransomware is to declare any nation that harbors them as state sponsors of terror.
And not some poor country where government are hardly in control and some guy has some vpn server running in a closet somewhere.
> If nations do not attempt to rein in these terrorist gangs, yes, they should be held accountable.
I recognize this...
The core issue with pig butchering is that the harm process is distributed across platforms, so there’s no single view of the problem at a platform level.
This hasn’t stopped efforts to improve knowledge and coordination, but the next barrier to action is in geographical location, and out right kidnap of people to man the fake accounts.
But now, to make matters worse, there’s LLMs which can simply fake humans at scale.
I think the most important issue is one of trust, which is one the scammers are trying to exploit. Do you trust Google saying "this might be a scam" over a person on your phone assuring you that there is some urgent need to do something? The answer depends obviously on how you view technology, generally older people tend to place less trust in technology and more trust in humans. That is why these scams work, they play on an inherent trust bias.
I don't see that Google or Apple really can't do that much more, as the issue really is a social one.
At that point, App makers would get access to the call and could do a variety of things with it.
So for instance, you might have a vulnerable grandparent you want to protect, so you install an aggressive AI screener app to handle these things.
Or, you might just send a log of calls to a loved one.
Or, you might send a transcript of that call to a loved one, or an AI, or both for protection.
Basically, Google and Apple saying "Potential Scam" says to me that they can know when a call is risky. They need to do more with that and open up an ecosystem of defensive software.
Start with getting the phone companies to not lie about the real phone number. Then implement blocklists at the borders and catch the criminals inside your own borders. Start some interpol like treaties so cooperatieve countries can help each other, then treat the noncooperators as probable criminals. And do this for IP routing too while you're at it.
This would also cripple a lot of business in advertising, but not a big loss, if someone really wants to talk to you, they can pay the price.
What am I missing? Why would this not work? What side effects on other industries could there be?
I suspect that something like hashcash or adding some small fee (like $1, that is returned to the spender if the recipient doesn't reply "STOP") would pretty much shut down these spam calls.
Please do not suggest these terrible solutions that make SMS/calls an unreliable transport, when it is just a sybil problem.
So before I call the number (say the phone number is 9), my phone app will log into a central server and say "My number is 7, and I'm trying to call 9". The phone 9 will check the server and see that "Oh I'm getting a call from 7" and then ask the server, "Is 7 trying to call me?", and will get a confirmation.
There'll be different warnings if 7 currently doesn't have data connection, or got a new phone and hasn't logged on for a while, or 7 doesn't even have an account on the server. If 7 has recently pinged the server and then tries to call 9 without notifying the server, the server can say "I can't see any sign from 7 that he's trying to call you." then 9's phone can warn her. There'll be different warnings for different situations.
And we can use certificates and do tricks like not needing an account for each phone number, but send a message "Yes this number from Microsoft tech support is actually trying to reach you.", signed with Microsoft's certificate. But then the scammers will get a certificate for "Micro5oft", etc.
Looking forward to a reply moaning about centralized authorities monitoring people's calls. Although as I write this I realize telcos can do this already. Perhaps it can be a P2P solution...