FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
docs.fcc.gov
docs.fcc.gov
In practice of course, my phone is 100% permanently in "do not disturb" mode and does not ring at all unless I've added you to my contact list. Which means the scammer, already pretending to live in small town rural USA (where they most certainly are not) has to correctly guess the number of one of my relatives before my pocket actually rings. It also means I'm unreachable for anything actually important that isn't in my contact list. That's an annoying price.
I'm not sure what the correct end solution is, but the current solution seems to be very broken.
Then, one day, an app developer thought: Wouldn't it be cool if there was an app that would interrupt what the user was doing, play a sound, vibrate the device, and put up a full-screen dialog, that this all could be activated remotely by any other device by simply typing in a short numeric code, and that if the recipient pushed a button, the remote attacker could send audio data and activate the recipient's microphone? Most app stores would classify this as malware, yet here we are today with devices that all have built-in apps that do exactly this, and only because of how normalized the legacy idea of a "phone call" is.
Considering Facebook ([0] and [1] to name a few) is still available, I think that's a pretty high bar to clear.
It seems like this sort of idea is extremely common, considering how many websites love preventing me from viewing their content by slapping multiple modals asking me to sign up for a newsletter and/or to get my permission to be tracked using cookies.
It also shows up in native apps, in the form of some prompt asking the user if they are enjoying the app. NO! I do not enjoy being funneled into an App Store review or any similar bullshit. If I like using the app, I'll use it. If I don't, I won't. Stop asking me!
I build websites for a living and I'm constantly battling requests to infect our sites with these god-awful modals. It's like sitting down at a restaurant, being handed a menu, only to have the menu taken away seconds later and being asked if you'll return in the future. Not only is it rude, it's the wrong time to ask the question. Let me read the damn article or whatever, and when I'm done, if there's a newsletter form, MAYBE I'll sign up. Let me eat my meal, and if I enjoy it I'll think about returning.
When you're actively using your smartphone, phone calls show up as notifications, not full-screen dialogs (which trips up my non-technical relatives, since they don't know how to answer a call through the notification). Given that, it's not that different from what we had on computers with instant message applications like ICQ. In a world without the concept of phone calls, they would be a natural evolution from these instant messengers (and, as I'm sure you remember, ICQ used a short numeric code as the user identity).
They had an anecdote about one company they consulted at which illustrated how normalized interrupting engineers had become. The engineers were putting their phones on "do not disturb" (DND) to stop all the interruptions so they could get their work done, and management sent around a memo saying that the engineers needed to stop putting their phones on DND because that caused the calls to forward to the secretary, and all the calls were making it hard for the secretary to get any work done.
I did ask if I could just send all calls not in my contact list to get screened, and that idea seemed to "blow their mind," though.
They used to play back a 10 to 20 second "polite" message that just annoyed everybody.
But I'm not sure what that has to do with the Do Not Call database.
I'd probably add that the area code + exchange calls from an area code that you don't actually live in are spam as well though don't see those as much as I once did.
> upcoming iOS 26 has a new screening feature
This sounds perfect to me. Not only do I not have to talk to spammers, I don't even need to listen to their messages.
But legit people, they just hang up. That's also a worse situation than not answering because in that case they'd have left a message. (this is hit or miss. Sometimes they leave a message. But 0 times have they actually responded to the screening)
So every screening popup I got had amusing text like "Is it going to beep? Hello?"
When it becomes commonplace, I expect the real problem with it will be that spam callers will recognize it and just starting giving false information to it to try to trick the party into accepting the call.
I think one of two high-level approaches:
We could be ultra-strict about who is allowed to call whom, and have penalties and enforcement similar to how we police credit card fraud.
Or, we could do away with phone numbers and instead come up with a scheme where you show a QR-like code to allow someone to call you; and then you can revoke that permission if/when it is abused.
---
Finally, I think the crux of the problem is that in the US we tolerate far too much of this kind of behavior. (Unsolicited contact for the purpose of sales.) Without a corresponding publicity campaign, there's far too much cultural tolerance of allowing anyone to contact anyone at any time for any reason to accept the kind of change needed to truly contain SPAM.
Keep in mind this was the era before CallerID so you never knew what number was calling you in advance. You answered every call on blind faith. And strangely enough most calls were worth taking, because all calls cost money.
Spam happens when it costs the spammer nothing.
I think this works for many situations:
1. Between amicable friends and businesses/clients, nothing changes.
2. If there was a normal relationship, but one side starts unfairly seizing call-deposits... Well, maybe it's time to no longer have them as a vendor/customer/friend.
3. Spammers either eat the additional cost, or they have to work harder to make sure they only call people who are unlikely to retaliate.
_____
There's still a problem where someone asks to be called (the number needn't actually be theirs) as a way to trick the caller into losing money... But even then, I think it represents an improvement over what we've got now.
That's basically the purpose toll free area codes used to serve; and there's no reason that same sort of solution (with some adjustments for the modern era) couldn't continue to be used under a deposit based system. Just add some universal prefix, some unused country code for instance, that can be dialed for a "no deposit" call; and then give control to the recipient whether they want to accept such calls.
Or, well, since most modern dialing is done by submitting the whole number at once rather than digit-by-digit; it could even be a suffix. If your number is +12125551212, maybe something like +12125551212*0 could indicate a "no deposit" call. I mean, the whole suffix space could even be turned into something akin to a password so instead of just opening up accepting "no deposit" calls from the entire world, you might only accept them from specific whitelisted suffixes; and if someone leaks one and you start getting spam calls on it, you can just turn off that suffix. There might need to be some provider-enforced fail2ban to prevent wardialing those suffixes, but it doesn't sound like it'd be too difficult.
Calling me is now the equivalent to wanting to send me a telegram. The phone system is broken, we all know it's broken, and yet you want my phone number? Send me an email, it's just as fast and has better tools for managing scumbags. Unknown callers are silenced and go to voicemail. Wife is in an auto accident? State troopers know how voicemail works. Kid is in trouble? It can wait 30 seconds while I wait for the VM to come through (and, haha, trick question: we don't have kids).
OTOH, I grew up in the era of landlines and payphones, and well before answering machines (old school VM). People still got in accidents, kids still got sick at school and needed to come home, doctors still called, and we all got along just fine. Because EMTs still took people to the hospital, the school nurse still took care of your kid, and the doctor either called back or sent a letter, and the world move on despite not being able to instantly reach people 24x7. I realize I sound like one of those "we didn't have $SAFETY_FEATURE, and we lived", when in reality not all of us did. But we aren't talking about lawn darts, for the most part I think we did get along just fine. (Auto accidents and breakdowns are something made better by cell phones, but in the day lots of folks had CB radios. ::shrug::)
Both times my wife was in a car accident, and once that my son was, in the past few years, an unknown phone call was not necessary as either their phone or their car immediately alerted me.
The text message should explain the nature of the call and which number to call in reply.
> The text message should explain the nature of the call and which number to call in reply.
You lost me here. If I get an unsolicited text message claiming to be a doctor who needs to speak to me urgently about a loved one's medical emergency, I'm not calling back via any number other than the hospital's front desk or switchboard. Invoking an emergency and asking you to call an unverified phone number is scamming 101.
That’s basically how most SMS scams work.
Again, I ask if somehow SMS is inherently worse for phone calls for scams.
I go even further, unless there is a good reason for someone to have the ability disturb me, they're not whitelisted. I have no phones that ring unless it's for a specific and temporary purpose.
A ringing phone is an anachronism, it's incredible to me that people let anyone bother them in this way these days. Its an invasion of ones personal space.
Or do you rely on others letting their phones ring when you call them back while not providing them the same courtesy?
I just don't think anyone wants to fix it. Why can't apple let us send "spam risk" to voicemail?
Like adding extensions, possibly with passwords to your phone line.
It would be good to give an extension or password to friends, or one for each business, which can be automated to input with a pause after answering, and it gets through (or further) if possible.
we should have phone rules just like mail rules.
You can. At least with iOS 26 you can, I don't know if it's new or not. You can have known spam numbers silenced, sent right to voicemail, and then the voicemail is immediately put into a spam folder.
> leak this 10 digit code
I mean numbers are as terrible as social security numbers. For both of them you can take your number, add one, and get another valid number.
I'm also not sure what the correct solution is but I'm sure there's some pretty smart people out there that have some really good ideas and understand the issue with a lot of complexity (aka: I won't believe anyone who starts with "It's so simple, you just...")
While there are certainly technical challenges and various trade-offs, those are not the main reason we're still getting buried in spam calls. My understanding is that smart people have already come up with good solutions which can be implemented at relatively low cost and which would be substantially effective - but the solutions have not been universally deployed because:
1. They generally require coordinated action between governments, standards bodies, regulators and disparate companies at different levels of the telecom ecosystem. These parties have divergent processes, goals and opinions on who should bear the costs and/or responsibilities for implementation, enforcement, etc.
2. The major U.S. telecom companies make money by transiting calls they know (or should know) are very likely spam. They don't want to give up that revenue so they find ways to not fully adopt, delay or weaken various proposals. These can include the motivated leveraging of legitimate technical issues or concerns to complicate, defer and otherwise hinder the processes in which they are involved as significant stakeholders. Many mobile phone operators now also earn revenue selling spam call blocking as a separate feature or part of more expensive plans. If the problem was substantially fixed they would lose that revenue.
3. There are various political stakeholders, industries and companies (not the off-shore, bottom-feeding spammer/scammers) which have a vested interest in keeping unsolicited calls legal. These include some of the more legit-ish forms of domestic telemarketers such as recruiters, fund-raisers, political campaigns, pollsters, market survey companies, etc. These companies have industry associations which hire lobbyists and make political donations to ensure their particular use is exempt from any regulations and that their cost of doing business doesn't go up to comply with the new system. Carving out all these exceptions and exemptions significantly complicates and/or weakens most technical solutions.
This is why I believe there is currently zero hope of any significant improvement despite the FCC issuing positive sounding announcements exactly like this one every 6 to 18 months for the last ten years. These FCC announcements rarely mention the workarounds, exemptions, appeals processes, delayed or unfunded enforcement which industry insiders already know will allow spam calls to continue with no substantial change. These announcements are merely the FCC fulfilling their political role of appearing to regulate and taking steps to mitigate the problem. Now the FCC managers who are measured on "do something about spam calls" can check that box on their KPIs. However all the various parties in the ecosystem have already taken steps to ensure whatever the FCC is announcing won't really work well or can be worked around relatively easily. For example, I'm sure most of the people behind the companies supposedly banned in this announcement (or their large offshore spammer/scammer customers) have already made other arrangements to continue operating uninterrupted. I hate that it's this way but the reality is, until the three fundamental blockers listed above change, this is all just "Regulatory Theater" much like the TSA's "Security Theater" performances.
I didn’t realize how bad it got until my father stopped answering calls. It turned out he was getting (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day from spammers and vendors he had no relationship with.
I used the iOS filter, the AT&T filter, and turned on the shortcut so the phone doesn’t ring unless the caller is in his contacts.
The problem is that it already changed his behavior. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore, even if it is a person he recognizes. The Pavlovian response to his ringtone is still very negative.
I’m sure there is a non-trivial percentage of the US who already viscerally hates receiving phone calls.
I didn’t realize how bad my alert/notification sounds fatigue got until I realized that a coworker’s (in an open office layout) phone was the same brand as the office fridge (so his notifications made me get up to check if the fridge was left ajar) and his home doorbell was the same sound as the office doorbell.
My parents had their number for ~30 years. I never get spam calls or texts. They get one once a week or so (this is in Germany, we get a lot fewer of these calls).
Stupidly, AFAICT, none of the phone services bother to auto-delete silent voice messages so I have to manually delete them, each one taking ~6 seconds ("call from One Two Three Five Five Five Six Seven Eight Night at three twenty seven pee em, on friday june twenty sixth ..........." delete. Repeat
(1) he was self-employed, so his business contact info (also his personal info) became public record
(2) he NEVER opted out of anything (eg “type STOP to opt-out”), never told callers to take him off their marketing list, and he was VERY sloppy with handing out his primary contact info on websites (maybe shopping or sweepstakes).
I have taken to speaking like a robot, repeating two sentences in a loop ("You have reached technical support, please describe your issue." -> "I am sorry, I cannot deviate from the technical support script. You have reached technical support...") until the spammers come to the realization they cannot manipulate me into giving an affirmative response that they can interpret as consent to move our phone service, subscribe to service offerings, etc.
They have made phone service effectively worthless, just as they have made all other forms of communication effectively worthless.
Edit: Just remembered something else I do: I do not answer the phone with "Hello" or anything like that. The vast majority of calls that we receive are originated by an autodialer that is listening for a typical greeting so it knows in what language its payload should be delivered. Instead, I answer with only the name of the business and nothing else. If I hear silence, I repeat the name of the business. After a short time, the autodialer gives up and terminates the call.
The IRS and FBI are apparently constantly after me.
They do love to leave empty voice mails for me quite often and that is annoying.
In that case voice mail is required.
If we just made it impossible for phone calls to reach US destinations if they originate from a short list of foreign countries, would that actually do anything to address this issue?
There's no free source of this information anywhere. The only affordable option is telcodata.us
Also great tool, thank you
There are other sites like this. And then you can use the carrier info, go to that platform‘s website, and submit an abuse complaint through their form. But all they will do is possibly block that one spammer from contacting your phone number while continuing to allow the spammer to operate. And of course they have other spammers as customers.
Better option is to skip their abuse form and send complaints to your state’s AG, to the FTC website, and FCC website. They’ll ask for a lot of info but I think it helps them identify the problematic companies.
You can also forward spam texts to 7726 (“SPAM”) in the US, and your carrier will use that info to take action.
Really sad how these rules do nothing to stop them
Is that what European countries do? Is that why there are no robocalls there?
Mainly I know that calling from a voip number was really expensive when I tried to set something up for a family member going on vacation to Europe. That probably cuts back on a lot of spam calls.
The assistant integration is great for this reason too. I occasionally get calls come through that are likely SPAM but I've learned to let the assistant answer for me. If it's a spammer, then I waste just a small amount of their time.
It's especially helpful that Google's Assistant has gotten good enough, AND that people making legit but unsolicited calls (like doctor's offices), that people calling don't hang up right away and actually answer the assistant. So I can see what they say and then answer when it's a legit call.
The ratio of SPAM calls to legit calls from unrecognized numbers is still higher for SPAM. But, the frequency is low enough (maybe a few a week), and dealing with them is so easy, that the distraction/annoyance factor is very low to the point that I'm not personally bothered by it anymore.
I've tried to get my grandma to switch to a Pixel phone for her main phone number at home, just for SPAM blocking, but she won't. I don't know how she stands getting multiple calls per hour, it's crazy to put up with when we are there.
Efforts like STIR/SHAKEN exist, but they’re little more than a band-aid—and not a particularly effective one—because the underlying network was never designed with resilience or trust in mind.
I know some people push back on this view, often pointing to edge cases where PSTN’s ubiquity still provides value. But as trust in the system erodes, so does its relevance. And if the majority of people already avoid answering calls from numbers they don’t recognize, its practical utility is clearly diminished.
If you can’t explain the benefit then you can’t tear it down. The PSTN guarantees that all telco operators interoperate. Without it you get what happened with instant messaging. AKA walled gardens. You take for granted the ability to call an iPhone with an Android.
The FCC is responsible for maintaining trust, which they have done here. They can incentivize telco providers to curb the spam activity. You don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Comparing PSTN to instant messaging walled gardens is interesting, but I’d argue the real parallel is email: a federated, open standard that also suffers from spam and abuse, yet still manages to limp along thanks to heavy filtering and layered trust systems. The PSTN never evolved those trust layers; instead, it relied on scarcity (call cost, geographic constraints) to keep abuse in check. Once those costs collapsed, the trust model collapsed with them.
As for the FCC, sure, they can try to incentivize carriers. But the fact that we need constant regulatory intervention just to keep basic trust afloat suggests the system is no longer structurally sound. Band-aids like STIR/SHAKEN prove the point: we’re bolting authentication onto a protocol that never envisioned it. That might extend its life a little, but it doesn’t make the foundation any less fragile.
So the question isn’t whether the PSTN once had value (it did, massively), but whether preserving it now delivers more value than the cost of propping it up. If a good chunk of people already treat unknown calls as spam until proven otherwise, then the social contract around the PSTN has already been broken.
I think you're absolutely right to draw that parallel. But, today's email landscape isn't much of a federated open standard. It's a web of trust and distrust, filters, and deliverability issues. It's real work to maintain an email server and attain high deliverability with other email services. So much so that most don't even do it anymore. Most email is just delivered by a few large providers.
Really, email is suffering from a lot of the same issues that PSTN also suffers from. But email providers just decided to "solve" the problem themselves, mostly by taking a heavy hand at blocking things and deciding they don't really care if you're not a big provider.
The key difference for me is that the PSTN moves at a snail’s pace, maybe because of regulatory entanglements, maybe because of interoperability constraints. The result is that problems which have been rampant for decades — spoofing, spam, robocalls — remain trivial to exploit. Email has plenty of its own problems here, but at least you get more signals to work with (headers, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, filtering, etc.) than just a string of 10–12 digits with no real context.
That’s why I’m less inclined to “cherish” a system whose shortcomings shift so much burden onto the end user’s well-being, all in the name of interoperability. If interoperability means putting up with abuse at this scale, then that interoperability isn’t worth much — and that’s where my frustration comes from.
For most people it is a distinction without a difference because they know about as much what to do with a DMARC policy as they do an SS7 frame.
DKIM/SPF/DMARC as bandaids just as much as STIR/SHAKEN are, they just need to get a kick in the ass to implement them -- on both fronts. I get tons of official and sensitive email still from domains that fail DMARC.
Now compare that to the PSTN: what does 555-123-4567 really tell you? Not much. It’s just a string of digits with no inherent context. And unlike email, I can’t even choose to outright refuse delivery of a call at the network level.
At that point, we’re repeating the same values clash — you see regulation as a workable fix, I see it as evidence of fragility. I don’t think continuing this line is going to get us any further.
It tells you exactly as much as the "from" field does in your email.
> you have more tools to work with in email.
Only if you're an engineer implementing a mail server configuration. But if you're implementing a telco you also have more tools to work with than a caller ID.
End users use DMARC/SPF the same way end users use STIR/SHAKEN... they don't. None of them are user-servicable values. And service providers use DMARC/SPF the same way end users use STIR/SHAKEN... they implement those controls for their users in the form of a managed service.
Email gives end users multiple signals and filters to work with. PSTN doesn't, and that's why I disagree with your equivalence.
You can take advantage of it because you're an expert. Just because email vomits out more information that are useful for experts doesn't mean it is better as a real world system for normal people who use it.
If the only way to preserve interoperability is to accept decades of unresolved abuse and perpetual patchwork fixes, then that’s not a trade-off I find compelling. At that point we’re not debating facts, we’re debating tolerance levels — and mine is lower. I think that’s a good place to leave it.
IP addresses and phone numbers are indistinguishable in the context of spam. If you successfully argue that the PSTN cannot be operated at a net benefit to society because of spam volume the same argument must also be a valid call to shut down the Internet.
And if the FCC were fully capable of solving this problem, I don’t think we’d still be here after decades of the same issues. That longevity itself is part of my argument: it’s not that people haven’t tried, it’s that the structural limitations resist a clean fix.
Also, IP addresses aren’t a great analogy. They’re not a sole indicator of origination — we have layers of metadata, routing, and reputation systems around them. I’d accept that comparison more readily if phone numbers were spoof-proof. But they aren’t, and that’s yet another area where the FCC hasn’t managed to close the gap.
Yes, such reports exist and they are easy to find when you look for them. My point is that you are not balancing these reports with the benefits of the PSTN or considering that people who happily use the PSTN aren't vocal about it. I think you are attributing way too much weight to the information you can find, especially when you are looking for it. You then draw an extreme conclusion that the PSTN is not worth maintaining and support it with this flawed analysis of behavioral change.
You might be right but the way you have substantiated your argument isn't compelling.
You’re welcome to use a different standard, but dismissing mine as "not compelling" without engaging the actual framing isn’t critique. It’s rhetorical displacement. If you’re not addressing the criteria I laid out, you’re not engaging the argument.
Speculation cuts both ways. If you want to challenge the standard itself, do so directly. Otherwise, implying imbalance or extremity without entering the terrain is performative, not substantive.
This is more like “Chesterton’s radio with a broken antenna,” a thing broken in an obvious way that we just haven’t gotten around to fixing or replacing.
Btw, if you haven't already, you can sign up for the FCC's Do Not Call list[0]. While obviously this isn't going to solve everything, it does make it illegal for legitimate companies to call you. Absent this incident, it did appear to have a significant effect in reducing spam calls when I signed up years ago. Also, here's some info about junk mail[1]. It costs about $6 and lasts 10 years.
In the beginning, they seemed to take their job seriously, but I doubt that has been the case for many years.
Right after SHAKEN/STIR was passed, I got zero spoofed calls. I did get a few robocalls, but they weren't spoofed.
For a month or so. So that shows the problem can be solved, legislatively.
Then, they started coming back, and now, almost every call I get, is spoofed. This includes some legit ones.
Also, legit callers should keep in mind that the autodialer companies they employ, might also moonlight as spammers, so they get blacklisted. I have had quite a number of legit calls get listed as spam.
Cynically, I feel as if politicians are unwilling to get tough on these, because they (or their proxies) use them. That seems to be both sides of the aisle.
Of course they do, and they voted themselves an exception. Same reason some small business in Redmond, WA isn't allowed to put out a sandwich board sign, but 10 months before every election every g*ddamned piece of dirt in Redmond has a political sign stuck into it.
So instead these scam call centers switched to the legacy SS7, that's how you are getting all these fraudulent calls. SS7 is not IP based and incompatible with SHAKEN/STIR
And it'll be 400 years from now before any US telecom thinks about discontinuing SS7.
> Also, legit callers should keep in mind
As well as "If you leave a message there's a decent chance I'm going to call you back in 30 seconds, I don't want to start a game of phone tag."
If I don't know your number AND I'm not expecting a call, I 100% will not answer it. If you're legit, sorry, you are the exception, not the typical case. Don't blame me, blame the spammers.
The modern world is absolutely infuriating, filled with self-inflicted problems.
> Right after SHAKEN/STIR was passed
> moonlight as spammers
I am in a similar situation. One of my not-yet-implemented projects is to route my phone through a VOIP app that automatically blocks any number from my phone's area code (or even the whole state) where the caller is not in my contact list.
Also hate the scam "work from home for $125,000 per year" texts. They really prey on the desperate.
Absolute scum of the earth.
It's easy to say it's idiots who fall for this stuff when we're young enough to have grown up in this world or started using new technology at an early age. We will be the ones targeted someday and it will be a medium that didn't become available to us until later in life just like what the seniors are experiencing now.
It’s not just “easy”, it’s an ideological imperative to ensure that the vulnerable have “personal responsibility” to avoid predation, while predators bear no responsibility for their own actions. Many tech business models depend on exploitation — it’s not just phone scammers.
Or rather, to justify what the strong were already doing and didn't have to ask anybody's permission to do, and that nobody else ever had a say about that mattered.
Apple makes a lot of dumb user-hostile decisions but this one is particularly egregious and has caught me off guard.
Mainland China lets people opt out of phone calls that come from outside of the Mainland...it's a feature one can turn off on an on their mobile plan.
Calls from outside the Mainland always cause a warning to pop up on the receiving user's phone that says something like "this call is coming from outside of the mainland, be careful of being scammed".
I can imagine there are many reasons the US doesn't fix this..one of which probably that much of US customer service is outsourced to people outside the US!
This. Gotta have your round robin of foreign call centers be able to spoof the main customer service line numbers for whoever they're contracted to represent.
Personally I think that should all be done in software these days, not something supported at the teleco level but what do I know.
There are applications to block international calls but that only helps if the number is not spoofed. People that have SS7 lines into the telco system can spoof as just about any number. I wanted to kill those circuits but my employer at the time said, "they are paying their bills, arent they?". This was in the 90's. I guess the laws are every so slowly starting to catch up.
This is loud to me, mostly because the last time I got non-TCPA compliant texts trying to solicit business, the VOIP provider refused to give the company's actual name or contact info.
I completely agree.
It should be illegal for Telco to allow SS7 spoofing for numbers that customer does not show they own.
Initial SIP setup shows number not to be a number they own, drop the SIP dial and be done with it.
Also, all US based phone numbers should have US based person tied to it. If they misbehave, drop them and blacklist them.
All this is solvable if we don't let phone providers get away with "Welp, the checks cleared, this is not our problem."
Country codes stopped being indicative of location the moment we removed the wires from our telephones.
Because spam call centers pay much more to access phone networks than you do, therefore telcos care about them, and not you. Plus you NEED a phone and they know that.
Which is why this is likely to end up getting rolled back. Surely most of these providers are dominated by spam. But equally surely all of them carry some legitimate traffic (or else this particular trigger would have been pulled already).
There will be friendly fire from this policy decision, almost certainly.
In the US? Most normie people I know barely even know anyone that's visited overseas anywhere other than Canada and Mexico, much less stay connected to family living abroad. Tons of people don't even regularly talk to people outside of state they live in.
Don't get me wrong it's not entirely uncommon and can be common in immigrant communities but outside of that unless you've got wealthy globe-trotting family you probably don't have anyone to talk to overseas. Its something far from "pretty much everyone".
Yeah, and they use Whatsapp, Telegram, or Facetime, or Messenger to connect.
Also, pragmatically, basically everywhere outside of China and Russia is subject to US "prosecution".
I agree. In fact, 1200 SS7 circuits is nothing. If these people are not locked up they will just get another circuit using another fake identity. It's like blocking 1200 ASN's and saying one made a dent in spam.
Most international telecom operations aren't facilitating scam call centers, and of the ones who are I suspect very few are so eager to turn a blind eye that they will continue to do so when staring down the barrel of actual consequences.
I don't understand why this doesn't happen EVERY DAY until the problem is resolved.
And before someone cite US code: it's virtually impossible for foreigners to seek justice in this context. Not only do these criminals lack the money, education, and access to legal representation to do so, but the DoJ has better things to do than spend their time looking into the veracity of an international claim of this kind.
I have no idea the reason.
Conceptually, someone US-based should have to cryptographically sign, with their license to continue participating at stake, an assertion that the source phone number is real. People should be free to configure their devices or phone accounts (A) what countries to accept calls from and (B) whether to accept unverified calls whose numbers are presumably spoofed.
Note: i'm aware that SHAKEN/STIR or whatever exists and shares some of that idea, I'm just looking forward to full adoption of something so that I can make those choices described above.
Combine this next with ability to report numbers who spam (with the Apple/Google duopoly it should be trivially easy to put a "report spam" button in the call UI) and sanction providers (first financially and eventually with revocation of their credential to sign calls).
Maybe 30 years ago it would have been seen as too draconian to prevent someone from being able to call others anonymously but the Internet exists and provides ample avenues for those cliche use cases like "whistleblower needs to talk to journalists" so I'm 100% happy to have 'burdensome regulation' here if it stops scammers from ruining the phone as a usable channel for urgent information like "Your car is ready to pick up from the shop" or "Hi, you're the emergency contact for ____ and they are headed to the hospital."
But phone numbers aren't real. They aren't any more real than an IP address. It's arbitrary. This is how VOIP systems work. You just assign a number from your block.
Ideally anyone who owns numbers would stop letting literally anybody do anything with their numbers (the way they do today) because they don't want to lose the numbers or to get banned from operating a PSTN-connected system.
The outcome I'm going for is that if you're a spammer you can't find any US phone number owners who will let you use their numbers so you can only send "unsigned" calls that are obviously spam, or sign calls as originating from irresponsible countries, which are easily filtered out by those of us who don't have any friends in the Phillipines or whatever (I get a lot of "DMV" threat texts from +63)
Why? Probably because the PSTN as normal consumers can access it, is pretty non-anonymous. The best case for anonymity is a burner, but you have to buy those burners somewhere that probably has CCTV, or order them online with a paper trail, so it's pretty risky for someone who needs assurances of anonymity.
No whistleblowers are using SS7 trunks to place anonymous calls.
I’ve tried several robocall blockers, but they tend to cause connectivity issues.
If anyone else has this problem, what are you using to prevent robocalls?
I just send anyone not in my contacts to voicemail (using the iOS setting) and delete all the robocall voicemails about once per month.
If it’s important they’ll text me or leave a voicemail with a callback number.
There are most certainly other factors at play.
My wife recently switched from a Samsung to a new iPhone which prompted my observation (not a pixel phone of course but still it got worse for her). All anecdata.
My SO has an iPhone and she gets at least 3-4 spam calls a day. I get probably 1 a week that gets through the filter, which you can screen with a bot anyway.
My girlfriend on the other hand gets several a day with a Samsung on A&TT. And it's worse for her because she is a real estate agent and can't afford not to take calls.
The amount is configurable and the feature can be turned off.
You as the receiver keep 70% of the fee.
Think of how quickly spam would go away.
It could easily set up thousands of people as unknowing patsies to commit mass terrorist acts, just by giving the AI a small amount of crypto to use in "paying people for gig work" to do tasks. It could start people off with busywork like ferrying harmless packages back and forth, and the ones who proved reliable, eventually would get a much less harmless package to be delivered somewhere sensitive.
That could all be orchestrated by human terrorists of course, but it's so much more effective if they could do it in 100 cities at once without almost any (knowing) human labor, and without any detectable foreign involvement.
Wait, who covers the cost in the US?
In Japan (the only other system I’m familiar with), it works differently: the caller is charged for the recipient’s end, while the receiver pays nothing. For example, calling a mobile phone from a landline costs more to account for the mobile portion. I remember years ago using a prepaid phone card from a payphone to call a mobile number—the balance drained incredibly fast. This is one reason why younger generations in Japan rarely rely on PSTN for routine calls, since it can quickly become expensive.
doc with list of the removed company names.
Spam calls in the UK for example, are rare. All of the spam calls I get are from my US desk number.
It used to be as bad as others describe here, if not worse. A few years ago my 92 yo mother disconnected her land line because she was getting 20 calls a day. The spammers had figured out the number range of her retirement village, and hammered it mercilessly.
But other day I was reflecting on how oddly silent it has become on the phone spam front. This article made me wonder - just how long had it been since I received a spam call or SMS. So I looked at the phones block list. It seems the answer is 4 months of spammless bliss on my phone.
The ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority - the government body that polices this sort of thing) have been hammering on about this for years, apparently without success. I had given up on them. Yet now in 2025, they had a total victory, they've annihilated all phone spam, and I didn't notice for months. No media release, no trumpeting from the roof tops. They just quietly and effectively did their job.
I salute you sirs and madams. Good work. Not just good - excellent work. In fact brilliant. Your efforts make me proud to be an Australian.
How?
But if I was to speculate ... The ACMA effectively killed email spam originating from Australian businesses years (decades?) ago. The government passed legislation allowing ACMA to impose big fines on companies that sent spam, they then set set up a web form you could upload spam emails to, and a couple of years later there was no email spam ... from Australia. It didn't reduce email spam much, as most spam originated outside of Australia. The other possible choke point was email Inbox suppliers like Google and Hotmail, but they are also located outside of Australia, beyond the ACMA's reach. Still, it did mean when I set up an email / web server for a local club, if I black listed most of the world's IP addresses outside of Australia, it killed all email spam.
The question in my mind was: if they could do it for email, why couldn't they do it for phones after years of trying? They had stopped Australian business from sending phone spam of course, so it all came from internationals just as with email. But this time they did have jurisdiction over the equivalent of the "inbox providers" - the Australia telco's. Most of the overseas spam did come from Australia phone numbers. If it didn't people would just ignore it.
I can only guess those telco's fought the good fight to be allowed to send and charge for spam successfully for a long time. I don't know why they were successful in that fight for as long as they were, but the timing does look suggestive. The USA equivalent of the Republicans run the place federally during most of that time. Now, partly due to example set by Trump, they lost in a landslide to our equivalent of Democrats. These "Democrats" won three years ago too, but now they look to moving as if they have a mandate to do whatever they want.
While this mob speaks in woke tones, there looks to be an iron will fist behind their "kind" words. They are getting the ACMA(?) to enforce age verification scheme internet access for example, something I think is worse than a waste of time. But they are hard and determined taskmasters, so they may make it stick.
It is highly configurable with every feature I've ever wanted but could never find for call filtering in the the app store. I've essentially set mine so that if the calling number is not in my contacts, or is not a number I've called in the last 90 days, the phone never runs and the call is sent to voice mail. But it supports lots of other mechanisms to filter with like regex, or how many times the number has called within a given timeframe.
I've told them politely that this is the wrong number, they keep calling. I've asked them to take my number off their list and they happily agree to, but they keep calling. I've threatened to contact the FCC is they keep calling yet....they keep calling. I've tried to block their number multiple times, but they just keep fucking calling from different numbers.
I honestly don't get the logic of these places. "Hey this guy has told us 20 times in all manner of ways to stop calling him....but I think he might buy an extended warranty on the 21st call!!"
Can someone explain to me what the logic of these places is? It just seems like an absolute brain-dead strategy.
The downside is sometimes real people call (like a contractor your landlord hired), hear silence, and don't say anything themselves because they're waiting for a "hello?". Whereas ignoring the call would let them actually leave a voicemail which would be useful. As I learned recently: sometimes real people don't call back a 2nd time.
You break that support persons numbers and they may add you. At worst they will call again and you cost them more money.
[0] https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/insights/compliance/your-p...
The costs of maintaining this legacy solution only seem to be getting higher by the day.
Is there any law that says that I can't just get one of those for use as my personal number and then give that # out as my contact info?
The government could fix this but they won't. They are more busy creating new ways to spy on good citizens.
Umm, no it isn’t. This is 2025. The technology to fix this is not complicated, but the people who can implement it simply don’t want to.
If Verizon/ATT/T Mo got fined $25 every time a robo call went through they’d find a way to stop it really fast. Create KYC verification systems and use metadata to route non-verified calls to a spam voicemail folder, problem solved.
It wouldn’t solve everything, but considering how many scammers rely on real-time urgency in their calls, shifting phone communication toward asynchronous messages could actually help. It would undercut that pressure tactic, and it would also make record-keeping much easier.
Legitimacy aside, the only people who still call me without prior arrangement tend to be those who assume they’re entitled to my time and attention on demand. The phone has always been a disruptive form of communication—even if every single call were legitimate (which is far from reality)—because it disregards the boundaries of the recipient’s time.
That’s why I stopped giving anyone real-time PSTN access. For me, it’s voicemail-only now, and honestly, it’s the best decision I’ve made for cutting down on annoyances.