France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls | Hacker News Reader

France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

lemonde.fr

1,064 pointsaziaziazi510 comments

Great idea!

Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.

A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.

A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.

Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.

In Spain we have something called "Lista Robinson" (in Sweden exists something similar, called "NIX-registret") which are basically opt-in lists where you can enter your phone number, then once the new lists been distributed, the telemarketing companies cannot call you, if they're doing things properly. If they call anyway, you just mention you're on the list, they hang up, and remove your number from the list they have, eventually you stop getting calls.

I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too. Obviously hospitals, doctors, utility companies and similar don't cross-reference against these lists, as they have actual relationship with you already.

Both in Sweden and in Spain I used to receive a lot of spam calls, like multiple per week, and once enrolled on these lists, the calls are non-existent, the only telemarketing calls I get now are from the companies I already have relationships with, which happens maybe once a month.

If you suffer greatly by the constant spam calls, like I did once before, do take a look and see if there are similar opt-out lists in your country :) They may take a month or two before actually eliminating all calls, but they do work, apparently.

We have a similar list in America [1] and Canada [2]. Unfortunately, like any regulation, its efficacy is only as good as its enforcement, so my understanding is they're both routinely ignored. Particularly grim for the Canadian case -

> In January 2009, numerous media and consumer advocacy organizations reported that anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer and download a set of numbers from the list for a $50 fee. It took their reporter ten minutes to do so. It has been proposed that list may be being downloaded and used as a telemarketing list overseas, where there's little that can be done as the CRTC has no jurisdiction outside of Canada

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List

It was the case in France too, it was called Bloctel; you just had to register your phone number and telemarketing companies had a legal obligation to look it up and not call you.

So it worked for a time, legit companies stoped calling; however most people didn't knew about Bloctel as it was little advertised.

Meanwhile, spam calls turned into scam calls, and a real issue especially with the elderly.

So I think that banning all unsolicited calling kills two birds with one stone, spam becomes illegal and scams as a consequence becomes easier to spot as there are no more unsolicited calls.

Thanks for the information, I live in Sweden and get calls at least once a week, but it's annoying enough. I visited family in Brazil and was shocked about how people there seem to get unsolicited marketing calls every hour or so!! My mom was forced to change her number to stop them as she nearly got scammed of several thousand dollars - sometimes the scams are extremely convincing - in this case they knew she was at a certain bank agency and who she talked to, so clearly it had inside involvement. Also, now with AI-cloning voice services, it's almost impossible to tell if the person on the other side is really who you think it is. Answering calls from unknown numbers is an absolutely no-no. Even from known numbers, you've got to be careful.

Same in Norway. I have been on the list for decades, and I never receive any unwanted calls – except from my mother (j.k love you mum!)

I am not sure why it works so well here. I have vague recollections of news articles about it being ignored in the past. I guess they just struck down hard on those. Also, I imagine if you put yourself on that list you would be really grumpy if someone called to try to sell you something.

Nix-registret is awesome! I didn't realise just how good it is until I transferred ownership of my number to my company, which automatically took me off the list(companies can't be in nix) which almost immediately made me regret owning a phone.

There are tax benefits to having the company foot the phone bill, but it's not worth it, currently.

Most countries have these no call lists but they are fairly useless as there is no enforcement.

I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!

I need this. I've had bloody Freshworks calling me every single day for the past month, even though I ask them to remove me from their list every time. It doesn't matter if I ask nicely, whether I listen to their pitch or don't, whether I make threats, they still call.

I will never, ever, work with Freshworks, Freshdesk, Freshservice, or any of their other products as a direct result of this.

We have a "do not call" list in the us. It's effectively worthless.

Surprised that it was “Robinson” in Spain as well as Denmark, I had to look it up.

Apparently that name is used in germany, netherlands, Belgium and more. It stems from Robinson Crusoe, which of course makes sense, as he was disconnected from the world :)

Personal take: it has no real effect, as especially foreign spam/scam callers have no insight or interest in looking up the list. Any ban is welcome!

In Germany it is assumed illegal without prior consent or with calling machines [0]. However, practically you get a few of those calls per week. Also often from international numbers.

[0] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html

For all these countries that don’t get scam calls, it has nothing to do with your do not call list since these are criminals anyway. It has to do with the fact that Americans are Legion and have a lot of money.

Who wants these calls? It ends up that the people that don't know that these lists exist (my grandma) still receive these calls - so everyone who's likely to be baited in buying something they don't need for way too much money.

Also, it depends on the company keeping their word that they won't call you when you are on this list.

Nobody needs or wants these calls, they are always some company wanting to upsell you something you don't really need, they shouldn't be opt-out.

We had this for years in France. But this is bypassed.

Same in the Netherlands, but it's not enforced. Although, it could be so easily enforced, at least for dutch numbers.

i put my number on the list and it worked great for a bit until spam calls started calling from outside the country. At least now I know not to answer calls from outside the country. I see a ton of people moved over to actual calls via whatsapp though.

those lists exist everywhere. They don’t really work so well :)

in Netherlands you have 'bel me niet register' (dont call my registry) which makes it unlawful for legit telemarketing. but this is not about telemarketing only. there is many more spam. also the laws would only locally apply so international calls dont fall under it

I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.

The problem is not that the originator can be found. The current, existing, legacy, phone system already can find the exact originator.

The problem is that enforcement of breaking the regulation is so non-existent that the criminals just place millions of calls knowing, at most, they might get a minor slap on the wrist that can be budgeted for as a "cost of doing business".

Every single call carried across the phone network is billed, and every hop along the path knows who to bill for their part of carrying the call. The billing system is the method to trace back to the originators, and then apply a fine sufficiently large enough to no longer be a cost of doing business.

But the regulators seem to have no idea that the billing system provides the traceability to find the criminals and then go after them. Instead we get things like stir/shaken that are trying to patch "authenticity" on top of a network never designed with that in mind.

The problem is that it's a network. The hard part of networking isn't the technology - it's the other people. And short of a government regulation or a monopoly, they'll never all agree.

STIR/SHAKEN has an exception for calls passing through TDM trunks, which don't support it. This created a small industry for passing spam calls through TDM trunks. Such calls can trivially have their caller ID spoofed.

The only limitation is cold hard cash. The phone companies make big bucks from telemarketers by providing an endless list of new numbers and multiple lines. The whole racket wouldn't work without the companies' greenlight.

Historically, in a world of analogue phone lines, spoofed phone numbers were a legitimate feature: if my business has more than one phone line, each of those lines is going to have its own distinct number; but I'm going to want outgoing calls from any of those lines to appear to originate from the same number (the one that I put on my promotional material, invoices, etc.).

Much the same as e-mail, identity within the phone system was, historically, entirely built on trust (because only Ma Bell could make configuration changes, and they could verify that what their customer was asking them to do was legit). Those assumptions were carried through deregulation, and are very deeply entrenched in the technical design of the network. Changing them will hopefully become easier over the next few years as analogue service is turned off entirely (e.g., BT/OR in the UK are set to turn off all analogue phone service by the end of January 2027).

I've seen two reasons. 1) Backward compatibility--you would have to add an additional security layer, and some old legacy switching hardware (5% of the network?) wouldn't support this. 2) Phone companies profit from the calls, so they have no incentive to spend the money to upgrade and stop it.

It would work until you need to route an international call.

And there's a lot of telemarketing and scams happening across country lines.

I mean, they should still do it. It's just the first problem they'd face.

The best technical solution I've seen is a spam review fee that turns into a reward and charged to the next closest originating peer.

For example say you get a spam call. You notify your service provider and pay $10 to have them review the call recording to verify that its spam. An employee listens to the call and determines that it is, in fact, spam. You get a $100 reward for reporting spam and your service provider forwards the charge (+10%=$110) to the peer network where the spam call originated. They will in turn forward it to the next peer, or if the originator is a customer, charge and/or close the offending account.

If this system is mandatory then the problem will quickly sort itself out.

Not sure where you ran across that, but I'd made a similar suggestion a few days back on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129679>.

I'm not aware of similar proposals (specifically: chaining liability through the route of call transmission).

its unlikely going to be worth the costs involved for the telco to do this reviewing. perhaps AI systems and other filters could be used but ultimately its tons of time needed because audio takes time to play. a lot of cases will be clearcut instabans but for the ones that are not it requires all of them to be reviewed with _some_ depth and then some with much more.

its also prone to mistakes which is another process that needs to be managed etc.

from a consumer standpoint this sounds super good ofc tho.

i will post my phone nr everywhere :)

I wonder how much we even need international calls from unknown numbers.

In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.

In the EU its not uncommon to receive phone calls from other countries. Just the other day I received a large package and the driver called with an international number to make sure I would be home to receive it.

> In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally.

There are a ton of us who are from one country, but moved to another, maybe more in EU than other places (not sure), but I really wouldn't say it's uncommon or even out of the ordinary. And I think most of us in this situation, have received/made international calls at least once in our life.

I dont think unknown numbers should be allowed at all, esp for business. I think its a reasonable requirement that if a business wants to call someone they are willing to identify them self.

I hardly ever get international spam calls. Nowadays they seem to mostly come from domestic (Dutch) numbers in the range reserved for mobile phones. When answering the line is silent for two or three seconds (a lot of internet round-trips to somewhere in Asia, I imagine) before hearing call center background noises and a heavily accented English voice saying Hello and trying to pronounce my name. At which point I hang up, so I have no idea what comes after that. :-)

There's multiple scenarios where this has occurred to me:

1. when travelling, hotels or car rentals may need to call or update me with some information

2. friend/family member was abroad and had issues with its own phone

3. some service I was paying for had customer care in a different country

4. buying something from a seller abroad, especially in the nicher categories (like a custom made standing desk) required the seller to call me a bunch of times

Super common when looking for work in the EU tech scene.

Personally I think the trust model for phone calls has worn itself out. The network is too large, and the risk too great, for "guess this 10 digit number and you can call me any hour of the night" to be at all sustainable. In practice, if you aren't already in my contact list, my phone does not ring. (Otherwise it would be ringing all day long.) Telemarketers do seem to have realized that calling at night is unwise, for now. Relatives meanwhile...

I feel like if we were designing telephones as a brand new concept today, some sort of two-way handshake would be standard, right? Like a Friend Request on nearly any other network, before DMs can be sent. Phones were invented before we thought we had a practical need for such a flow, and the human-operated switching networks helped to somewhat discourage blatant abuse.

Can't remember right now if it's a EU or a Spain thing, but here they made mandatory to use real numbers on the Caller ID, so you can't use fake or hidden numbers for telemarketing. That way, of you're abusing, your line can easily be tracked, blocked or fined.

There has been some waves of spammer calls, more like "fake job offer calls" or things like that, coming from cell phone numbers, and there's still some telemarketing, but it is way way lower than, say, ten years ago. Orders of magnitude .

It happened in Italy too (and we also had the fake job offer calls.) Suddenly I got spam calls from France and Spain and not anymore from Italian mobile numbers.

Don't know if I'm missing something really important or it was genuinely hell on earth 10 years ago but in Spain I get shitspammed by scammers all the time. Android blocks most of them thankfully but some still slip through.

There doesn't need to be any kind of technical solution. If a telemarketer wants to sell something, they must declare the name of their company. The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.

>The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.

This kind of happens today, but I think the problem is too big. You'll need to employ thousands to process all the complaints and by the time you issue a fine, the company has closed and a new one has started.

And if they don't declare the name of the company? There are a lot of shady people out there. Plenty of them will happily call and give a fake name, or just something vague that sounds important, like, "This is Rachel from cardholder services".

So it turns out we really do need a technical solution, which is unforgeable and easily traceable access to the telephone network. Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.

Sounds like a great way for unscrupulous companies to attack their competitors.

First, I am 100% for this legislation, but, as has been mentioned numerous times, here, it needs to be enforced.

We probably also need to marry it with a technical solution, that ensures that unverified numbers cannot be used (no spoofing possible).

Maybe a national "blacklist" of bad numbers, with a "three strikes and you're out" kind of thing.

But, human nature, that nasty old spoiler, is likely to raise its ugly head. I suspect this would be a great place for corruption to take hold.

Same for online ads. Ads should take you to a landing page saying Google served it for ShadyGambling Inc, Enemystan/Enemypur and clicking further will take you to Play Store.

I don't want to sit thru the phone call just to get the company name to report, that can also be just their competitor name they want to sink.

Most EU countries implemented registration of every mobile number with personal details and national id number. Yet in the same countries there exist entire office buildings with tens of people receiving salaries for spam/scam/cold calling, and they are fully anonymous?!

What if the business says 'That wasn't me?'

I mean, everyone can call anyone and name any company already.

I think you may be overthinking it. In Sweden we already have a registry where we can opt out of telemarketing[1] (as well as ads in our physical mailboxes[2]). Generally this works well. Yes I still get a couple of "this is Microsoft calling" in Indian accent per year. Two spam calls per year isn't bad though. And this has worked for decades here, without special technical measures.

(Companies with which you already have a prior relation are allowed to call / mail you though, but this is always possible to opt out of.)

[1] https://www.nixtelefon.org/

[2] https://nixa.nixadresserat.se/

The whitelist managed by the government is not a bad idea.

I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).

I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.

Have you tried call screening? I know for sure apple phones can do this but I believe some android phones can too?

For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling” The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important.

It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period.

I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.

When I was getting a D&B number I missed their call I wasn't expecting because I wont answer unknowns and my phone blocks half the calls they think are spam anyway, then had to spend the better half of a week answering spam calls before finally getting what I needed.

> I wonder how they can handle it,

In Norway there is a list [1] run by the state registry service (Brønnøysundregitrene). Any individual can add their phone number to the list.

Anyone cold calling is required to check that list at least once a month and there are fines for calling someone on the list.

[1] https://www.brreg.no/om-oss/registrene-vare/om-reservasjonsr...

Just easy ability to report would be enough. Then the govt can get to the phone number owner and make any middle men also responsible (in "tell us who was your client or pay the fine" way)

Allow people to charge 25 cents to accept calls from unknown numbers.

I believe iOS has a feature to force unknown numbers to declare themselves before connecting, which is less good but still a thing.

General white-list is likely useless as number spoofing is still easy and prevalent in North America. Scammers would just set their number to a trusted one. You wouldn't have to see the list to assume that numbers from hospitals, doctors, utility companies, etc. would be included - unless they all had separate secret numbers to call out from. Likely this would be unreasonable - especially considering they still aren't able to end number spoofing.

You don't need to ban telemarketing, you just need to make void and nulls contracts made by phone.

Do so, and 99% of telemarketers no longer have the incentive to call anybody.

Walk me through an example here.

I'm a telemarketer who calls you up, sells you on something, and charges your card.

What changes in that scenario?

Yes though most of the calls I get are scams. And most of them come from abroad now because Spain also banned them. It is not a very effective measure

At least a strategy to ignore unknown international numbers has much less collateral damage if any.

All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers.

I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".

Lista Robinson works great in Spain though, enroll there and enjoy the silence :) May take a month or two to really kick in, and if you've already enrolled but it's not working, check that the details are 100% correct. Worked both for me, my wife and tons of friends, although it takes time before it works.

> A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.

Of course it would be abused, but a properly verified caller id system for all the big ones; the inland revenue, the major banks, would mitigate 9/10 scam calls I get each day.

But how do you enforce this? It seems like most of the US spam calls originate from India. Do you have to get cooperation from Indian authorities? Seems unlikely since it's helping their economy? Do you put the burden on the phone company? I guess the phone companies make money from the calls, so they don't care?

> Seems unlikely since it's helping their economy

All it helps is filling in the scammers' pockets without being taxed for it. Also, they do cooperate with Indian authorities:

* https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cbi-busts-gurugram-ca...

* https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/fbi-tip-lea...

> I think there needs to be a technical solution.

If the threat of an 999999 $£€ fine per call isn't enough.

I opted in to a block list and after a few months received much less calls, but still more than zero. I think that now that everyone is on the block list by default companies will have to be more careful and it will be easier to report any issue.

> and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.

They do this to themselves if they don't leave a voicemail or can't bother to send a text. 99.9% of the scammers and spammers never do, so it's a good filter.

Marketing ruins everything it touches, from the public square to the internet and from the phone network to radio. I don’t know what the alternative is, but I don’t need one to see this is shit.

These would all help: well funded public broadcasting (for TV & radio); strongly enforced regulations for public advertising (public square); encouragement of open source & open standards; real anti-trust enforcement.

Most of the above exists - the problem is political & regulatory capture constantly undermines and weakens a lot of it.

Marketers ruin every sales channel they can, it's their nature.

If only fucking Zoominfo would integrate with these whitelists.

Canada has a national do-not-call list and that hasn't stopped me from getting hit multiple times a week by startup sales reps.

I feel this could be solved by crowdsourcing, assuming the support from the major phone manufacturers and possibly governments.

- After a call from an unknown number concludes, the phone could offer an option to the user to mark it as "spam" (blocking the number in the history would have the same effect).

- The spam mark would then go into the central database. If a phone number was marked as "spam" too many times, it would no longer be able to ring the phone (maybe it gets diverted into the "spam folder", like e-mails).

Or am I being too naive here? What are the obstacles for something like this actually happening?

You cannot trust which number which is signalled to the end user.

Most spam calls I get is shown as legit numbers. If I call them back they will go to an innocent and unsuspecting user.

Google is already collecting this information and shows numbers as "probably spam". It is hard to enforce this harder even with collateral damage as you cannot trust the number which is signalled.

Legislation is in this case a good thing which might get the telcos to take this more seriously. This needs to be handled on an operator level. Nothing will happen without legislative incentives.

The world is run on SS7 which has a lot of problems which inertia and lacking incentives makes hard to overcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7

My google android phone already does this. I get basically no spam calls at all except very rarely. But I go to the spam tab in the phone app and I see there are dozens that got blocked

That would work well assuming scammers and stuff are actually blocked from spoofing phone numbers

there are some apps that do this, I used to use truecaller, but here in poland orange phone seems to have better data

I think most legitimate businesses have moved away from phone calls for exactly this reason. In lots of countries they use whatsapp

Here you are finally Kon5ole. I've been to reach you regarding a car accident that wasn't you fault, is that correct?

They've banned it here in the Netherlands since 1st July. Now, just nobody calls me at all

hospitals, doctors, and utility companies are the last ones i want to have direct contact to me :(

they can continue to send me junk mail and unsolicited texts which already gets filed correctly

friends and family only

I can imagine quite a few scenarios in which I prefer for those companies to be able to reach me.

At the other side of the spectrum (they are mostly annoying, I agree) how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?

As a consumer, I don’t want you to find me. I’ll find you when I need you.

There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.

If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.

List it in a register that people can search when they're actively looking for products like yours.

Why should shits be given? Find a better way to advertise than harassing people.

I’ve never gotten a cold call for a quality, useful product. It’s either scams or scam-adjacent.

Same thing with door-to-door salespeople. Seems like in the past the percentage of people selling useful stuff like cleaning products, Avon, or yard service was higher. Now it seems to be out of town companies selling solar scams, roof inspection, or some other multi-thousand dollar thing sold via high-pressure sales.

Do you personally buy everything from the telemarketers? If not, how do you find the products you want to buy?

As if we don't already have enough advertisement channels in our lives.

>how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?

You don't.

The book Traction has identified 19 different channels to promote your products, they are explained many places, one example : https://growthmethod.com/traction-channels/

This is a great move by France, but most of the rest of the world does not suffer from the telemarketing scam hell that Americans do.

I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy.

Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.

The US already has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to feel no financial or regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.

Maybe it's America's love of "market-based solutions" that prevents of from solving this problem the way everyone else has?

Rather then actually solve the problem via regulation, the US prefers to turn it into business opportunities to make the situation suck slightly less by letting the telcos sell subscriptions to moderately effective blocking programs and an creating an ecosystem of moderately effective apps.

> Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors

I live in the Netherlands, and I get several spoofed crypto-scam calls every day. I have also stopped picking up the phone for numbers I don't recognize. My own telephone number has been used to call others for a while, so I would get tons of "sorry I was busy, what did you call about?" return calls from random people when clearly I had not called them at all.

As far as I know, the only reason spoofing is even possible, is so that call centers in other countries can pretend to be calling from a local number, which.. why is that even a feature?

This feels very much like an example of "this should be run by the government" rather than letting this be run by companies.

> As far as I know, the only reason spoofing is even possible, is so that call centers in other countries can pretend to be calling from a local number, which.. why is that even a feature?

It is very common for each individual phone in a call center to have a direct inward dial number, but when they dial out they want the main support contact number to be displayed so you can get routed appropriately and not harass their tech support employee.

I'm curious, is that a landline or a mobile number?

Because I have two mobile numbers the country to the right of you and have gotten perhaps one marketing/scam call in the last decade. And those numbers have been used for 2FA for plenty of websites so surely must have leaked by now.

There is slow progress being made on this.

https://cyberscoop.com/fcc-robocall-action-operation-robocal...

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/fcc-proposes-new-numbering...

As an American myself, I get multiple spam calls every day. Combine that with the fact that I am part of the generation that doesn't really do phone calls, and easily 95% or more of the phone calls I get are scams. Recently, for the past year or so, its mostly been the personal loan scams, but it changes over time. I clear out my voice mail box about once a week and almost always have 20+ messages using that same script.

To note, this isn't just banning random scams: calls coming from a known entity, but abusing their existing relation to push marketing calls also fall under this law.

For instance your main bank calling you for "special offers", even as you've already explicitly told them you don't want any marketing calls, would be candidate to punishment under this rule.

I live in the U.S., have a U.S. phone number, and get maybe one spam call every six months. (Spam texts about once a month, with the exception of before elections, when it’s more.) I wonder what causes the difference. Do I have a newer phone number that isn’t on as many lists? Or is my carrier filtering calls before they get to my phone?

I briefly activated a second SIM on an MVNO that gave me a new number, and that one previously belonged to an old woman who got spam calls roughly every ten minutes. Clearly there is an issue here, but it doesn’t affect everyone equally.

I think its just luck of the draw. I find that the scam calls come in waves. I'll get several of the same scams, latest being spoofed calls from Google, every day for a week or two and then they'll stop completely for months. I haven't had any in a while now. Currently getting a ton of scam SMS.

How do you keep your phone out of data leaks?

In the words of an effeminate man from Life of Brian, Ooh you lucky bastard.

From what I can tell over time it seems to be random initial chance + random chance as your number gets shared with the 3rd parties you interact with. There are a few things one can do, like never pick up when it is a spam call, but at the end of the day there is still the element of chance to it.

I went a good 5+ years without spam calls/texts. Lately I've been getting the occasional scam recruitment text every 1-2 weeks for some reason. Hard to say why exactly, but hopefully it fades away and I get the peace again.

if you ever used your number to sign up for something online, then you'll likely eventually get tons of spam calls

Is it possible someone had your number before it was yours, and that they were a hot target for spam?

My US phone numbers over the years[1] have normally been very quiet, but I've had a couple that were quite spammy.

[1]: I've been switching providers/MVNOs every time I've found one with a better deal -- for decades. I never, ever port the old number, so I've had a good number of them.

The US has failed its people so badly here.

I heard a family member's spam call that used Trump's voice to personally ask for a donation. It made me wonder how many people might fall for that, especially people in cognitive decline. And the call was spoofed from their area code which is a dirty way to get people to answer.

It simply shouldn't be possible to spoof a call. Or spoof an IP packet origin.

The US hasn't failed anything, you're acting like politicians neglected to acted when they're doing exactly what telecom companies want: ensure they have no accountability.

Please don't forget neoliberalism is the actual economic policy of the US for the last 50ish years; with deregulation being a core tenant of neoliberalism.

My pet peeve is that a full class A attestation is still not a requirement in 2026. The US FCC won't do it. I have no hope from the current administration. However, perhaps France is in a unique position to implement this. The idea is that all calls that have a domestic caller ID will be required to have full class A attestation and all carriers will be required by law to block any calls that do not have such full attestation. Any carrier that attests phone numbers that it is not supposed to should get huge fines and criminal charges. This is my dream for what all Telecoms in the world should do, hopefully beginning with France. This requires broad support within the country and a firm deadline so companies don't shrug it off until the last moment and then demand an extension.

Me too. The problem is now I trust Meta with much of this instead of the FCC which is awkward for me. I use on Messenger and Whatsapp much more often for voice calls, and you know exactly who is calling.

> On the other hand, France's new law has raised concerns in Morocco, where Employment Minister Younes Sekkouri, said in March that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs were at risk in the country’s call centers. Sekkouri said the French market accounts for more than 80% of revenue in the sector.

Never build a business around hassling other people. It's always at risk that laws will suddenly change and destroy your livelihood; because good leadership will realize that the best approach to handling you is to exclude you from the negotiating table and abruptly cut you off.

This might come as a surprise to some people, but no one likes having their phone turned into a device that makes them listen to a commercial at random times throughout the day.

It sounds like they could just block calls from Morocco and cut off much of the problem.

Not practical. There are quite a lot of French-Moroccans and extended families living in both countries and traveling regularly. There are also more than a few support centres for French companies because the local workforce speaks French and is cheap. That’s a lot of legitimate phone calls.

That's not a good faith suggestion. (It's impractical and you know it.)

The problem is that French companies contract with telemarketing firms in France. Banning incoming calls from Morocco doesn't solve the telemarketing problem in any way. It's just a xenophobic / racist / whatever excuse to inconvenience people you don't like without making any attempt to solve the telemarketing problem.

"Just block calls between France and Marocco" is a very racist proposal

FYI there is at least 900k+ people in France either immigrant from Marocco or with an origin and a 100k+ people with french nationality or origin living in Marocco

Kudos to France. But the problem isn't telemarketing calls. It's the wholesale grab-fest of phone numbers from every.damn.nook.and.crany of the US soil. Hospitals, Car dealers, dentists, vets, brokerages, title offices... literally EVERY one of them is leaking YOUR information to everyone in the world.

within a week of closing a deal on my house i get a scam paper mail that almost looked legit asking me to pay $100 to get the title documents for my house. There aren't that many parties involved in the sale.. and its one of them (or all of them) broke the trust and bartered my information.

nearly all of them are uploading their contact list to meta and google.

THIS practice has to stop.

Great tip I saw once - whenever you have to register through a form, use First Name + the name of the company / service you are leaving your data to. Once you start receiving spammy emails / text messages calling you by your « name », you know who you have to thank for leaking your data

In US, deed is public (grantor name, grantee name, property id). That’s probably how the scammers knew that you are involved in a recently recorded deed, and offered to send you a copy if you pay them.

When my parents closed on a house, me, and all of my siblings, regularly and illegally got scam/spam calls for my parents' home. We are not on the deed. We are not involved in the transaction in any way.

Also, don't buy a car, either; that also generates a significant volume of incoming scams & fraud, although most of that is in the snail mail. (But "at least" there I am the person in the transaction … I guess?

But fraud is still fraud.

I think the problem is that you can’t create virtual, domain separated, phone numbers on demand

Norway has the same law. I get no spam calls like this from Norway.

What I do get is spam calls from abroad. Often with a spoofed Norwegian number. Why can't operators block this? I know call centers and various things need to "spoof" a number they own, and when I myself call from abroad my Norwegian number will come from outside Norway.

But why can't they attest the numbers somehow? Owner of +47 XXXXXXX is currently not abroad. So why allow someone from the other side of the world to call me pretending to come from that number? Why does the Norwegian operators allow that?

It is technically possible, here in Finland such blocking (i.e. all inbound international calls with Finnish caller ID, except for roaming) has been obligatory for a few years now (https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...).

Something similar is in place in Sweden. For landline numbers, it is of course easy. A number with, say, a Stockholm area code is not suddenly going to be in Nigeria. For mobiles it is trickier, because a Swedish mobile may very well be in Nigeria. Some additional database look-ups had to be added to the already rubegoldbergesque contraption that handles mobile phone calls.

It's even worse than that, I sometimes get calls from phone prefixes which do not even exist in the world.

They don't even check that the number can exist.

Essentially useless. My country also banned them and has a "do not call" registry, doesn't stop scammers from calling my phone non-stop.

Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally.

You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.

As someone else pointed out, it's not about the scammers. The scammers could however be hampered if the phone system was safer.

There's no reason why the phone system should allow my number to be spoofed, but that's what happens. There might be some companies that benefit from having all outgoing calls shows coming from some main number, but in that case a solution where a set of numbers are allowed to pretend so be some other number could be implemented. The majority of scams I've encountered and have heard about involves someone calling you from a random number, belonging to someone that's not involved, but who are just having their number misused. I assume this is to avoid getting blocked or looking legitimate if the target looks up the number.

At least it gives a legal framework for prosecution.

It's not about scam calls.

"It's useless to make laws, bad guys will ignore them".

But in this case, that's essentially what's happened. No one gets legitimate telemarketing calls anymore. They're all scam calls from some slave compound in Cambodia.

You're not wrong, but with anything digital it's as easy as moving outside the country.

With the EU being one and many at the same time, all you need is to set up shop in Bulgaria and good luck prosecuting me. I'm actually in Turkmenistan anyway. There's a reason why a lot of scam calls actually come from India.

Exactly, I think all these regulations in the Europe fail to understand the enforceability of these, any legitimate business won't be making unsolicited calls already. For instance, I weekly get unsolicited calls from a legit recruitment agency in the UK, never ever shared my data with them, they don't even email but directly call in absurd times. I requested removal of my data after months of ignored calls but they kept calling still, reported to ICO but no luck either.

I'm 30+ and was trying to buy some wine yesterday, and was IDed and i'm clearly well over 18 yet they had to take the bottle back as I didn't carry my ID with me. Essentially the same thing with pubs/bars etc, you're clearly over 18 but there is a weird power trip yet in some raves/clubs you still see under 18s being let in.

This law is especially targeted at legit businesses... It's already illegal for scammers to call.

And I don't think something being hard to enforce is reason enough to not do anything about it. If we truly care about something, we can always find a way.

In France the CNIL is pretty good at enforcing regulation IIRC. And for any small to medium company, the fine should be enough of a deterrent.

I don't think companies big enough to just shrug the fine away resort to much telemarketing here.

The previous system never blocked scams because scammers didn't bother to check if your phone number was in the block-list before calling you.

That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.

It's not about scams, it's about commercial telemarketing calls.

Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).

There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.

Someone is paying for the number, make them responsible.

And if that is a company that offers service of lending number for such calls, they deserve to suffer too

The correct solution is just giving people the option to charge people for phoning them.

Say minimum wage is 12euro/hour, and declining a call takes about a minute of your attention, so this is worth at least 20cent.

Instead of just "Answer" and "Hang-Up", there should be a gov't enforced "charge caller 20cent" option.

This would have no impact on 'real' calls, nobody would charge their Mother and if someone is tacky enough to charge their GP or mechanic they could just be billed for it, and it would hardly be worth someone's trouble to try to steal a phone to call themselves to collect 20c, but it would totally ruin the economics of these spam calls.

The same should exist for emails.

There a story, perhaps apochraphal, from 15 years ago of a man setting up a premium rate line and getting paid whenever telemarketers called him. I believe the phone service said anyone doing that would be fined because you need to inform potential callers it's a premium rate number

impressively convoluted. Spam calls are coming from all over the world using voip and prepaid sims. There aren't any accounts to "bill". Not to mention a whole new arena for fraud in spoofing regular numbers for micropayments

To end up on your phone, VOIP have to terminate somewhere in local phone network. These networks need to stop accepting calls from shady places, or every call like this that they cannot charge back to original (or intermediary network) becomes a loss to them. And telecom companies do not like losses...

In the last 2-3 years, my impression is that most french numbers receive daily unsolicited phone calls. In 2026 they even started sending scammy “missing delivery” text message with your real name printed on an attached MMS picture (on a parcel to deliver), making it even more real.

Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France

Yup, having a French number is unbearable without automatic blacklist apps. I definitely notice it when it breaks after an iOS update, is start getting multiple calls a day. For any french here with an iPhone: Begone works great and has community lists for spam numbers.

The SMS are getting out of hand too, they send you a pre-recorded MP3 in addition to the picture too. At least they don't have enough information to know I don't have a letterbox.

> Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France

Yeah, more and more French people are getting annoyed at it, esp. when companies always say "no worries no payment info leaked". I don't care, I can change my credit card but I can't change my personal informations.

And literally last week it's Bloctel that leaked! It's the government managed list of phone numbers that don't want to receive telemearketing calls, where anyone can add its own number to be excluded. Great idea on paper, goldmine of a data leak.

> goldmine of a data leak.

It's a number out of not so big pool of numbers. Spam caller can iterate every number in the country in a month

#FranceFuite

"God! I only asked her to be a hooker. It's not like I wanted her to work in telesales".

I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.

> It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'.

Assuming you can get access to their phone, only allowing calls from saved numbers would probably be the best solution, assuming she doesn't get random calls from hospitals and the like. If she's still using a landline though, that's a tough one to solve.

I can't just do that, she is an autonomous person, and quite willful also. Despite her age, she is not only as lucid as it gets - she still works (although from home) as an applied mathematician!

It's funny and sad to see polite people run into scammers. I witnessed to a young man being almost unable to keep saying "no" for the 20th time to an insistent seller on a beach.

When it happens to me, they're met with silence or "GTFO" after the 3rd question. I am impolite.

To me it's just sad. Scammers and pushy sellers aren't acting in good faith, but polite people seem to be unable to recognise this, or unwilling to change their modus operandi in spite of it. Like, if you know the person in front of you is a knobhead who wants nothing more than for you to part with your money in exchange for nothing, why are you even entertaining the idea of treating them with even a sliver of respect?

Add in the fact that the person on the other end isn't even a human (it's not a human spam calling you; at best it's an automated call which get dumped on a human when it connects), and the whole thing gets even more absurd.

Related: https://saracroche.org/

I was about to talk about it for my fellow citizens ; clearly an awesome app!

Fun fact, Bloctel, the service that was supposed to allow us to ask not to be harassed, leaked last week... https://www.universfreebox.com/article/596529/piratage-de-bl...

Alternative for the power-users: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker

This app has saved my mental health

This seems so much of a no-brainer to me due to scammy calls to elderly and pure time loss responding to calls it is interesting not much has been done about it in other countries. I guess the telemarketers have a good lobby.

That's great. Netherland banned them a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I still receive them. Sometimes a lot. A year or two ago, I received calls almost every week from a major TV/internet provider (Ziggo-Vodafone; total crooks). I told them not to call me again, I complained to the regulator, but as far as I can tell, nothing was ever done about it.

So banning it is great, but you still need to enforce that law.

In France it's multiple calls per day.

Especially on landlines mostly used by older people.

>Sometimes a lot. A year or two ago, I received calls almost every week

4-5 a day here.

Aren't there decent apps that maintain shared blacklists for spam numbers?

And what about those marketing people who approach you on the streets? Can we make that illegal too? And the people going from door to door?

How many door to door salesman do you encounter? Where do you live, if you can share?

I haven't seen one in decades, and even then it was usually some pamphlets or books to support a cause or the other.

On the phone (Italy), OTOH, I used to get daily scam call to buy "Amazon stocks" or change utility providers or install water filters. That seems to have massively faded out due to new regulations tho.

Ireland, small town, average reputation housing estate: 1-2 per week. Primarily charities, ISPs and energy companies

Jehovah's Witnesses, across Europe, still even nowadays. Some other minor religious sects targeting elderly, usually offering care or attention followed by vicious takeover of real estate.

Only because you have not been profiled as lone and vulnerable, doesn't mean the practice doesn't exist:)

Probably a bit more than one per year. Mostly painters telling me I need to repaint.

Norway.

What other kind of infantilizing laws do you purpose? Perhaps they should also make it illegal for people to interact with you if you find unpleasant? Ban small talk at checkouts?

Ban "give a tip", "donate to charity", and "buy insurance" in checkout and payment screens, yes please.

Sounds good. I see no reason why not treat all that with same distaste as say sexual harassment.

Yes please!

In my country door to door sales are illegal.

Until this law is ever applied, I warmly recommend my fellow french to install the «saracroche» app to filter out unsollicited calls.

It’s free, open source, all my family uses it for about 2 months now and it just works.

Btw, if it’s creator read this : thanks A LOT ! :)

https://saracroche.org/fr/

Was a recent convert. It's so much better than the competing apps, it's almost funny. It whips Google's antispam for example. And it's free software.

Though to be fair it is helped by the fact that businesses have mandatory phone prefixes to use when doing telemarketing in France.

+1 Great app, had no spam calls going through since installing it.

In Brazil no one uses common phone lines anymore because, in part, of the telemarketers and scams calls. Most people I know enable “silence unknown callers” and use almost exclusively Whatsapp for communication.

The government tried to control this with an official (no call list) that is usually ignored by companies who use third parties and disposable mobile numbers to do their dirty work.

Telcos have the power to control that but they are usually an internal mess and this is low in their priority list as they consider the voice calls a lost battleground.

ANATEL says we will have authenticated numbers by 2028. After that, it's a matter of pressuring the government to punish the people doing the undesired calls.

The second implementation (AFAIK, we are in the 3rd now) of that no-call list was quite successful in pressuring companies. It can be done.

A perspective as I live in France:

- There was already an easy statewide system to opt-out of telemarketing calls

- Having always been on that system, I still got many scam calls that sound like telemarketing

So it's great to have a ban rather than an opt-out, but this will not solve the issue of scam calls

Bloctel ineffectiveness (the previous opt-out system) was cited as one of the reasons for moving to a ban.

I was on this system too and used to get scam calls too (they would come in waves, like 3-4 calls in a week, nothing for a month, then another 3-4 calls). I stopped receiving calls from reputable companies (that probably abode by Bloctel's list) when I signed up though.

As long as message broadcasting remains cheap (in any form; phone, email, text, etc) it will go on. All modern media has evolved technically (and financially) to benefit the producer (the talker). All at the expense of the consumer (listener). Make outgoing bandwidth cost per instance and you’ll see a reduction/optimization of the production. When signal is free to produce, you end up with a lot of noise.

In my personal experience basically all spam calls in France come from a fixed set of number prefixes. [0]

So phone companies could just offer to block those prefixes - it would be a trivial solution to the problem. But it's not an option [1], so either they make good money from those calls, or there's some other hurdle or legal issue.

Either way the new law could (in addition to making it illegal for companies to make spam calls) also simply have mandated that network operators block the known ones. Too bad.

[0] https://lemagdelaconso.ouest-france.fr/dossier-2418-demarcha...

[1] https://communaute.orange.fr/t5/mon-telephone-par-internet-e...

No, that's a bad idea. There's no hurdle or legal issue, and money isn't behind it either. Those "prefixes" (area codes) are all the same segments of this or that national numbering plan that are also allocated by legitimate businesses both for placing legitimate outbound calls to their customers and for numbers that connect e.g. switchboards/IVRs to serve customers who are calling in.

If a specific region (or more likely: operators within it) are responsible for the vast majority of abusive traffic, then absolutely they should bear the consequences of this. Yes, there's collateral damage, but those negatively affected by being unable to make legitimate calls should be a prime lobby for effective egress control from their respective operators and regulators.

Pain exists for a reason. It's negative feedback.

Current law forces them to use known phone number ranges and to my surprise they respect it. I'm using an app that blocks those ranges, I receive about 3 unsolicited calls per day they're all blocked. We even have a phone provider that can block them for you.

I fear the ban will just make them use random numbers we can't block

Unless you can block illegal unsolicited scam/marketing calls, the medium of phone calls is dead to me.

If it had 25% unsolicited calls, it would be a bad way to communicate, and in the US it's more like 95%. You could cut the majority of spam calls and I'd still associate phone calls as mostly a waste of time.

The service that was managing this before (Bloctel) was just hacked https://frenchbreaches.com/alertes/bloctel-mshxaq0ysyd27ca7f...

I think this is an economic problem to solve, not a legal one.

The telephone, like postal mail, email, http and a myriad of other protocols suffers from a lack of transaction costs. Why is there so much junk postal mail? Because the post office has discounted rates for such mail.

Likewise, back when there were "long distance" tolls (nevermind the 10 cent SMS), there was less telemarketing because it was more expensive to operate call centers in each domain. I'm old enough to remember the sound of a phone ringing as evoking a happy "who could it be?" instead of "what scam is bothering me now?"

Granted, nobody is going to rewrite all the old protocols to bolt on a payment clearinghouse. And legislation is weak against a large pool of relatively minor miscreants since it requires expensive prosecutorial time to enforce, either directly in criminal law or indirectly by regulating major gateways' compliance activities.

To reduce unsolicited commercial contacts, people need to learn to accept expensive communication patterns. Currently we all already pay with the shadow work of curating contact lists, missing important calls because ringer off, deleting and marking as spam junk texts, etc. This shadow work could be reduced by accepting that a communique costs $X, with the knowledge that all the $X spent by others contacting oneself will offset one's own outbound costs.

Meanwhile, the US cut out a special exception to the do-no-call list for political text spam, leading to me personally for about a year getting about 10-15 text messages a day from Democratic scam PACs that have to be "unsubscribed" from individually, from each of hundreds or thousands of phone numbers. So an exception, and the exploitation of a loophole. They'll never stop punishing me for having donated to Bernie a decade ago.

Even worse, the PACs known to be scams where 98% of their proceeds just go to known, named party insiders. Even if I were a Democrat, they'd just have been preying on me and playing me for a fool.

-----

> After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network's FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.

https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-08-02/spam-texts...

https://pacspam.org/vendors

I had a bit of a funny situation happen where putting myself on the do not call list stopped calls from more reputable sources but also caused an even bigger increase in sketchy calls. I switched to using a free service tied to my phone company that makes callers enter a number before being forwarded. Turns out nearly 100% of these remaining calls were automated and got dropped. Turns out sometimes you need two fences to make good neighbors.

The only effective way to police this is to make the telco accountable and have a reporting system. Someone is terminating the calls and getting paid for doing it.

Automatic filtering on modern iOS has been a game changer here. Assume Android has something similar, but I can't speak highly enough of that one feature

If only it didn’t show the missed call pip for filtered calls.

You would think that of all the "great achievements" our current administration likes to boast about, they would put some serious TEETH into SPAM and telemarketing calls - - like prison time, and rabid enforcement. Everyone I know does not answer any live calls unless it's someone on their known "list", everything else is texting only. I discovered that when I respond to all unknown calls with "please text me", the spammers system won't take it and comes back with "error, invalid number" . . . then I know it's a scammer / spammer, and I block it. But blocking them is useless because the next time they use that fake number to try to call you it comes up blocked by you, so now they know they have a live connected number, and that encourages them to hammer away at you.

I heard they get paid by how many numbers they dial out -- NOT by making a connection to a live human being.

The fact that the Gov't cannot effectively block all these calls shows how insecure our phone system really is.

Also

1785994091 | France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week | https://apnews.com/article/france-unsolicited-telemarketing-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192829

1786426630 | France Bans Unsolicited Telemarketing Calls | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/11/world/europe/france-ban-u... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253772

A welcoming move.

I am from India and I use Truecaller premium to filter calls. It has become a big head-ache, making us to miss important calls

The main problem and challenge with all these regulations is enforcement. How are they actually going to enforce them?

The U.S. already has very strict rules against unsolicited calls, yet I still get around 20 spam calls a day saying things like "press 2 to be connected" or offering some "$64K loan."

At the same time, I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.

The same is true for text messages. In 2023, the U.S. introduced stricter regulations, and companies like Twilio responded with very strict anti-spam rules. The rules are now so restrictive that we are forced to stopped using Twilio for text important notification to our my own team.

Yet I still receive dozens of spam text messages every week.

So the question is whether the regulations can actually be enforced against the people who are already ignoring them.

> I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.

Yet you receive 20 spam calls a day through a known company, namely your phone provider. The way to solve this is to forcibly draft the providers into this; for example: any time you receive a spam call, you can dial a special *# number after hanging up. This message will have the effect of crediting $5 on your next phone bill, and allows the provider to recoup that loss from the originating provider, etc, all the way to the caller itself. The first company in the chain not cooperating in this scheme is out $5 per spam call through their network.

Of course, something like this needs the usual protection against abuse, but that's equally manageable.

Have an LLM listen in on all the calls and automatically flag unsolicited calls?

Note that in France, telemarketing calls are already required to use specific number prefixes. This is already very useful: you can immediately tell whether a call is from a telemarketer just by looking at the number prefix.

> Note that in France, telemarketing calls are already required to use specific number prefixes. This is already very useful: you can immediately tell whether a call is from a telemarketer just by looking at the number prefix.

This is useful only for the few who care enough to operate legally. I activated a white list mode that prevents any call from a number that isn't in my current phone book because there's a constant flood of calls from regular mobile numbers (prefixed 06), most likely from spoofing. The phone network is unbearable in France without a white list mode.

We already had a system in France which is phased out. The difference is that that previous system was opt-in, and now it i the duty of the telemarketers to get authorization.

The problem is that many of the calls come from abroad (and most will move there), so there is no easy way to enforce this requirement. It is only if someone files a complaint ... and the authorities track the number abroad ... and match it to a French provider ... that it will work.

Anyway it is better than nothing.

I stopped to reply to calls that I do not have in my contacts. If it is important someone will leave a message or send an SMS/WhatsApp

As a young telecom engineer working in "Intelligent Networks" in the late 90's in the UK, I learnt that UK phones had a code that could be dialed during a call, so that the line could not hang up anymore.

That was geared against telemarketers or abusers, so that the callee could fetch a police officer that would acknowledge the fraudulent call.

Today all this data exists in databases. It would be so easy to check call logs from telemarketers to check if they ever called someone on a do-not-call list.

I hope they can make it work

We have a ban on telemarketing calls regarding insurance in Switzerland. But we still get them.

So what happens is that insurance agents (which are required to be licensed) don't call them selves. Instead they use 3rd party call centers outside the country which make the calls. They "warmup" the clients to get a meeting in which the agent then in a visit can make the sale.

For law enforcement to punish these people and revoke their licenses they would need to do costly sting operation which they can only do so much.

This sounds like the basis of a scam involving a company called Clark that I had the displeasure of dealing with in the past. From what I understand, they had/have an operation running in Spain, the purpose of which is to get people signed up for insurance-based pillar 3a products. I don't know what has happened with this subsequently.

It’s crazy the amount of phone operator companies sell our data and numbers to those people. I really wish it would stop because scammers can also use it. So frustrating.

A major problem is that the phone number space is densely populated. That is, of all possible numbers, a large fraction are actually assigned.

This makes the act of randomly or sequentially dialing numbers tractable, as many of those attempts will reach an actual connection. This is known as wardialing <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardialing>.

In the United States (plus Canada and much of the Caribbean) , standard numbers are ten digits (three for area code, three for exchange, four for service number), which allows for 10 billion distinct numbers. Of these there are significant reserved blocks, but the total is still close to that. The total population is about 350 million, which means that there's roughly a 1:30 chance of a given dialed number connecting to an active account.

Actual utilisation and namespace exhaustion are harder to suss out, though numbers are currently constrained, with several area codes being fully exhausted by 2028, and the full system lasting to about 2061. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbering_Resource_Utilization...>.

I see two ways around this.

1: Expand the namespace. By having vastly more potential identifiers than subscribers, wardialing succeeds far less often. The two principle problems with this idea are that a) once a given number is known it's vulnerable and b) the resulting numbers are far less memorizable.

2: Implement a caller-callee relationship. Effectively, a caller would have to authenticate to the callee when making a call, and only approved callers would be passed through. This is effectively the role an old-school receptionist would serve at a business, permitting only select calls through to a principal employee. Because of limitations with the existing phone network, the caller's number alone is a poor identifier. Some other challenge would be required.

One option I've considered, which should be implementable with a VOIP service, would be to have individual "extensions" assigned to specific callers. A caller would dial the primary number, then be asked to enter an "extension", which would be restricted to the caller's originating number (so that different callers each have a unique assigned extension). The extension space would also have to be relatively large (to avoid random/sequential search), probably 10-100x the number of approved contacts at a minimum.[1]

Previously-unknown callers might go through a preliminary vetting and be dropped to a voicemail box or (preferably) be requested to text their message, preferably in a brief, text-only format, say 40--80 characters or so, enough to identify the caller but not to drop a massive spam load.

________________________________

Notes:

1. If a typical person has 100-1,000 contacts, the "extension" space would be roughly 1,000 to 100,000 values, perhaps 3--5 digits.

Here's what has worked for me (in the US), after feeling helpless for so long: Call Screening.

I had no idea this existed on iOS (there may be an equivalent on Android), and I was very skeptical about it, but it has turned spam calls into a non-issue for me.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/screen-and-block-call...

There are features available for most phone types / plans, with varying levels of effectiveness.

For old-school landline phones, look for "Smart Call Block" or a similar feature. These direct all unknown numbers to voicemail, with numbers in your contacts or allow list ringing directly. The feature is phone-specific, so you'll need a device which supports this capability. Unknown calls don't ring but are screened. Call block can be enabled or disabled if you're expecting a call from an unknown number.

For smartphones, various options:

- Numerous third-party call-blocking apps, such as NoMoRobo, Spamblocker, Saracroche, Sereniphone, and more.

- OS-level Unknown-caller blocking. iOS offers a full version of this, see: <https://support.apple.com/en-mide/111106>. Android, produced by the world's largest advertising agency, unsurprisingly doesn't have quite a satisfactory setting, though there are some approximations: <https://www.android.com/intl/en_uk/articles/stop-spam-calls-...>.

- Carrier-level call filtering. "Call Filter" on Verizon, "ScamShield" on T-Mobile, "ActiveArmor" on AT&T. Many Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) don't offer network-level spam call blocking. (This is companies such as Mint Mobile, Cricket, Boost, H20 Wireleess, Helium Mobile, etc., see: <https://bestmvno.com/mvnos/>.) Carrier-level filtering may work through an app, at the network level directly, or both. App support may be dependent on your specific device and OS.

VOIP services should in theory afford the highest level of capabilities, though this depends on what your provider enables for you. Rather to my surprise, Xfinity/Comcast actually has one of the better network-level spam-blocking systems by description, "Voice Spam Blocker". This is a three-tiered risk-based system with complete rejection, direct-to-voicemail, and CAPTCHA challenge. (Presumably there's also a whitelist option.) See: <https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/change-spam-blocker...>.

I turned this on a few days ago. Looking good so far (UK)

At least most of the Spanish one can be banned by blocklisting a whole company. which is what I did following a guide I found, and have reduced my Spam calls from 2 per day, to 3 per year.

However, the only way to solve this I believe is that you could once you get an unsolicited call to press a combination like ##01, and automatically this is passed to an agency that deals to punish whoever is behind the call in real time. At least if they call from a national number.

I reckon that the best way to stop spam calls (and messages) is to start charging for them again. No more flat rates. The scheme that I have in mind is to charge a small amount to the caller and give it to the recipient. I reckon that the balance between groups of friends or family would be zero. Companies surely could pay this money but spammers won't be able to explore a whole list of numbers to try to fish a victim.

Using the web is basically impossible without an ad blocker, and having a phone is basically impossible without a call blocker.

Spam has taken over every form of communication, but luckily there are easy ways to stop it.

I use AdGuard as ad blocker, blocks ads as a browser extension and ads on websites and apps as a mobile app. For telemarketers I use Should I Answer, it works GREAT. Never ever receive a single call from a telemarketer, they all get blocked automatically.

In America we have amazing, reliable communication systems (postal, sms, email, telephone) that are rendered horribly degraded in terms of their actual usability because we allow them to be clogged with filth.

When you buy a car in the US, there's an entire industry of psuedo-scammers that scrapes the new vehicle registration data and will send you letters soliciting you to buy a "warranty" with horrible terms and pricing, which are intentionally crafted to look like they come from the dealership, manufacturer, or a more reputable insurance company. This is just one example, the only silver lining is that junk mail has existed for long enough that even most senior citizens understand that they need to be skeptical of anything they receive.

SMS and Email is a constant adversarial game where you will be inundated with scams, advertising, political solicitations, and all other manner of noise as you try to combat it with spam filters, blocklists, hidemyemail, burner addresses all the while hoping you don't miss an important communication from someone you actually care about.

As for phones, scam calls and telemarketing has gotten so bad that most people will not answer a call from an unknown number unless they're expecting to hear from someone (e.g. doctor, mechanic). But lots of older people still hold onto the unfortunately outdated cultural norm that you always pick up the phone when it rings, and that's one of the most common attack vectors for scamming the elderly.

I think it's critical that people understand that it does NOT have to be like this. The US has a business regulatory regime that biases towards letting an entity get away with pretty much anything, and alternatives exist even among capitalist countries.

"Cold calls annoy me" is one angle, and from that perspective, sure.

But "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is another angle. Because giant corporations may not need to make cold calls. It's the small bootstrapped startup that does.

Hopefully lawmakers will include provisions for small businesses making well-researched calls. Because otherwise, this is just one more way of pulling up the ladder.

Yeah this is something which got on my radar as a potential way to get web development clients, like just call companies with kind of bad websites and see if they need new ones?

This gotta be an outdated way to get business, but regardless of whether this would work on a small scale (havent tried yet) would this be considered spam aswell?

Actually, people that installed the open-source Saracroche app don't really have this problem anymore.

Credits for this incredible independent app, available on third-party stores. Even better, the dev has added OpenStreetMap information about legit enterprises calling you.

https://saracroche.org

(of course its better to forbid them)

So many of the calls I get (in the US) have no mention of a company name and if you ask they hang up immediately AND they come from fake numbers so blocking or reporting is meaningless. Is the situation in France different? I don't think this would really do much for the situation in the US sadly unless we got reliable non spoofable caller ID.

I suspect the data may be misleading. Unsolicited sales calls from genuine businesses are not the same as spam/scam calls

i don't want either, unless you're calling about a legitimate transaction i initiated, don't ever call me unsolicited

Spam is generally defined as "unwanted and/or unsolicited communication". Which I'm pretty sure an unsolicited sales call, from a genuine business, still is.

not the same as scam, but how is it not spam?

The pictures are identical.

They are to me.

Never going to fix the inherent problem og spam calls though.

Even if all would follow the ban (witch they wont as i get frequent calls and am on a legally dont call list) thee is the inherent problem of foreign spammers also often masquerading as local numbers.

If noe positive thing the twlecompanies would het it å bit easier filtrering and the amount would be less.

In the US, effectively 100% of the calls are criminals and scammers.

I really don't understand. Isn't the government listening to all the phone calls? Wasn't that the disclosure like 2 decades ago.

The very first time someone tries that dumb Yahoo security scam, the number should be automatically disconnected. I really don't get it

What benefits would the government (not the people) get from shutting down scammers? Scammers still pay taxes, and companies like Amazon that benefit from revenue obtained by scammers are major donors.

Telemarketers here have been banned in various ways for i don't know... ten times? in the last ten years.

As long as service providers are not held accountable for, and they let the scammers spoof the caller ID, the problem will not be solved

__then you start investigating, and see where these call centers come from and who they are tied with..__

How is this possible?

We have been chided over and over and over again on HN by the fine citizens of the E.U. that unsolicited telemarketing calls are purely an American problem, are completely unheard of in Europe, and that this never happens in "civilized" nations with "a functioning legal system."

I think Italy did something similar a couple of years ago.

You would need to put your number in a special register to opt-out of these calls.

I don't know if this ever worked or not, but giving your number to government feels odd to me so I never signed up. It's a lot more simple to just outright block unknown callers.

Sweden has such a system*, and a couple of related laws, since the early 2000s. In my personal experience it works very well here, and I've never heard friends or acquaintances complain either about getting unsolicited calls despite having signed up on the list. An identical system would of course not perform equally in any other country, depending on local "telephone culture" and general moralities.

* https://nixtelefon.org/

As nice as this would be, as an American (notably not a Frenchman), I find that 90% or more of the unsolicited calls I get are scammers, not telemarketing, so I don't know how much something like this would do. The US also has donotcall.gov, which no telemarketer bothers with.

French video explaining how one particular telemarketing scam works in France:

https://youtu.be/1HoU17dIEos?is=8giBMS_TRJEvmzM3

I'm really curious to see what impact the new law will have on this scourge.

Spam calls killed telephony. The greed of phone companies allowed it to happen. They could have addressed the problem with technical measures, such as displaying the verified name of the caller—whether a person or a company. Showing only a phone number is not good enough.

I stopped getting spam calls in Russia after operators started blocking unsigned (unmarked?) calls. (all outgoing call from business and sole proprietors are required to be signed since September 2025).

Not sure if this will hold for too long, because there is always a way, but still.

Let's hope other countries follow suit. Next, let's go after the email spammers! YES!

It's interesting that we all hate anonymous or spoofed calls over the phone but when it comes to the internet this is apparently the highest form of free protected speech. Why is this OK on one network but not another?

Not sure what you mean. The equivalent on the internet is probably spam and scam emails and they're also typically blocked by your email provider.

'unsolicited', means every contract or click will include accepting calls.

Canada tried this years ago and it has barely made a dent. What we really need is a secure telephone system but our regulators refuse to consider doing so

Living in France, right now the only kind of spam calls I am getting are prerecorded voice loops.

I admit they are done pretty well, it took 2-3 different calls (accross months) for me to notice I wasn't talking to a real person !

Let's bring this across the pond. I've taken to speaking different languages and just trying to confuse them. If you're going to call me fifty times a day, you're going to get messed with.

Has anyone tried https://www.donotcall.gov/? curious, if folks have other lpts. These calls when they happen are relentless.

some of the third-party apps can show if a number is potentially a spam or a business. it's handy when your phone number is listed in the business directory to avoid those annoying calls.

Are calls originating in France a major source of these unsolicited calls? According to the article, a lot of the calls are coming from Morocco, outside of their jurisdiction.

I'm in North America and most of the calls I get are using local numbers, often spoofed from (I suspect) South and South East Asia. Good luck enforcing Canadian or American law in literal slave camps on the China-Myanmar border.

Morocco is just where lots of french-speaking call centers are located. The industry generates a non-negligible part of Morocco's GDP and most of the clientele is from France. So yeah, Morocco may be right to be concerned by an eventual shrinking of the market.

The call centers themselves are in Morocco but the calls never come from +212.

If a legitimate French business contracts with a Moroccon call center, they will then of course follow French law since the French business is liable.

As for international scam calls, not sure what the situation is in France and what measures they have in place, but one relatively easy way is to block international callers from spoofing a local caller ID, which decimated these calls in Finland a couple of years ago: https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...

So, this is specifically for telemarketing call, not scam call. In the context of telemarketing, it doesn't matter that the company call center is outsourced in other country. The company who contracted them are in France, trying to sell their business in France, they are responsible. So if you get a telemarketing call from RandoCallCenterCo S.A trying to sell you on BusinessABC Ltd., they have been contracted by said company to do so and BusinessABC Ltd. will be on the hook.

All calls at least appear with a Caller ID from France (+33). Are they really from france or just spoofing them is anyone's guess (not really, former French colonies in the Magrheb like Morocco make good money running call centers for French numbers).

My anecdotal experience is yes, most spam calls come from french numbers.

Is there a technical reason why phone numbers would be easier to spoof in North America than other places?

Anecdotally I’ve not heard as much about it being a problem in other places such as the UK.

In the UK, a lot of the calls were coming from India and vsrious countries in Africa. I think India has cleaned up its act, but it's prevalent elsewhere. The callers pretend to be UK-based but there sre a number of giveaways.

As soon as I realise it's a spam call, I just put myself on mute and let the spammer blabber himself/herself. They get frustrated and never call me again.

The problem is Phone numbers. No Band-Aids will fix them.

There have actually been a number of band aids which have been fixing it. A few years ago I used to receive multiple malicious text messages and phone calls a day, then the Aus government cracked down on verification requirements for senders and I get zero.

I still get constant unsolicited sales calls but these are technically legal.

Explain, please.

Phones could be set to "allow incoming calls from contacts only" by default.

Then a spammer has to persuade you to add them to contacts before they spam you

take a c-level position at a company and your cell phone (you work phone as well, but your personal non-work affiliated cell phone) will ring multiple times a day with sales people (recruiting firms, software companies, cleaning companies, consultants, financing or financial products etc.) because some asshole uploaded their address book so they could play some game or use some stupid app…

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192829

I don't know about france, but in Italy the phone network is pretty much dead except for spam calls. No one uses it anymore.

The only way to enforce this is letters of marque. Anyone holding such a letter can track down telemarketers and punish them.

Surprised it’s not banned there yet. It’s banned in Czechia, so I was expecting it to be the same across the whole EU.

The USA did the same thing decades ago with the TCPA. It's not enforced, but it was still technically done.

I never knew that this is not illegal everywhere. In Austria, this has been illegal for as long as I can think.

Useless. They tried already in Italy. Results? Unsolicited iphone calls from other EU country codes.

if the fines are only leveled at the actual people making these calls, its a useless law - like anyone is going to see a centime from a call center located in morocco. its only if the carriers have some liability that this will have any effect.

Georgie W bush passed this for the USA but instead of enforcing it he did the Iraq war

Just ban all out of country calls, and I think the phone network would be fixed.

Italy already did that, guess how it's working

Probably won’t work at all, the calls don’t even come inside the country

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just block inbound calls from India?

Indians do not speak French.

How was this not "banned" 50 years ago..

75k per call. CAC is about to go through the roof

CAC?

Good to hear they are catching up.

Hasn't been already the case for a while now?

(and I am french)

The law just entered into effect today.

Regulation is necessary but it won't be sufficient. In India they have the do not call registry but despite that I get twenty odd spam calls a day whenever my number is active.

Personally I've benefited 100x more by using Truecaller but with time the app has been enshittified with weird features. That and my migration to iOS which has questionable support for Truecaller has made me the target of spammers again.

Furthermore many telemarketers are now using Whatsapp bypassing such regulations.

This law is entirely meant for retirees with landlines (the only constituency that matters anyway in our gerontocracy.)

In a sense, it's good to have someone try to tackle an actual problem (I know it's a pain to have to pick up the phone several times a day because of telemarketer. Especially when you're retired and have nothing to do all day than calling friends and discuss how you're going to spend the money from millennials salaries, share buybacks by the employers of millennials, and rents from the kids of millenials who'll never get a house, a job, or a retirement ever.)

I suppose we'll have to wait a few decade for a government with a majority to pick up other small topics (climate change, debt wall, increasing inequalities, geopolitics, demographics, water shortages, draughts, food tension, and, oh, the general despair of the generation born after 2000.)

But, okay, fine, in the meantime, getting rid of unsolicited phone calls is still _something_.

It's a shame the law will not actually, hum, you knows, stop the unsolicited phone calls (they come from abroad and the callers could not care less), and so the retirees with a landline will not see a difference, and will do the natural thing, and vote for Trumpists even more than they expected to anyway.

At least we don't get political ads on the phone...

The US should do the same!

Scams are bad. But cold-calling selling a genuine B2B product is a beautiful right-of-passage for anyone doing sales.

Teaches you grit, rejection, tonality, relationship-building, and the elation of closing a sale all-in-one.

It's also one of the few outbound marketing channels that isn't yet swallowed up by Meta/Google, and can be done by any scrappy teenager.

Unpopular opinion here, I'm sure.

I wonder how this will affect their economy and unemployment rate?

Interesting someone voted this down when literally I was asking how it will affect unemployment rates, not suggesting I am a fan of robocalls and telemarketing. Guess I was not being clear enough that was not a rhetorical question or some sort of pleading for unsolicited calls. Note, not posting to complain about the vote down but to be more clear.

I just don't answer calls if I don't recognise the number, and especially if it's from an "unknown caller". If someone has my number, they can text me. If they know who I am and who they are reaching then they probably have my email address as well.

This shit needs to stop.

Another distraction, probably useless in practice, and in typical French government fashion they carved out a number of exceptions including to sell you subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, because...

Enfin!!

Love it!

Why haven't politicians stopped this before? It has taken advantage of the elderly for decades yet the fucking, lowlife politicians has done NOTHING!

Or: How to transfer less money from old to young people.

(I am jesting. Fuck telemarketing.)

Same announcement every year for the past 10 years and same shit.

In my experience, GDPR works wonders here. After saying I do not wish my personal information to be processed and revoke any consents a few times I do not receive these calls anymore.

Where is ‘here’? France?

It works for those who want to be sorta legal. Usually I ask to talk to their GDPR officer first thing. Call ends.

But not everyone wants to be sorta legal.

Article is not clear. Does this law blocks B2B calls? If so then it can cause damage to the business.

A business can call another business it there’s an existing relationship. This means you can introduce an upgrade, a new product line, or something unrelated to their current contract - but the contract needs to be there first.

Other than that, the business needs the call receipient to opt in. They can dop this on a webform, a physical form, or by initiating the contact and, say, leaving a message for the vendor asking to be called back. It means the business needs to concetrate on avenues other than cold calling for getting themselves in front of a prospect.

If you do a B2B call to someone's personal device, you should be arrested, straight to jail.

"After a joint call by 11 consumer groups" - going to guess its B2C given "consumer groups".

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