Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

How do you keep your phone out of data leaks?

Not sure! Used the same one for well over 10 years.

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

I do and I have for the last decade. If anything, the spam calls have decreased over time.

lucky

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.

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.

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

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.

Whether it's the government or powerful companies that the government fails to limit, it is still an instance of the US failing its citizens.

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