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DeepSeaTortoise 7 hours ago [-]
The solution is accessible law, not better anti-fraud tooling. Introduce a spam / fraud button, using it requires your pin and costs $10, but obliges your telecom provider to record the call (preferably including a few minutes before you hit the button), email you a signed recording and if found to be spam deposit $100 onto your account. Your provider may then hand the fee +10% for himself to whatever network the call in question entered his own network from. The last cooperative network in the chain gets stuck with the fee, forcing them to either reclaim the money from the malicious customer, the next network in the chain (in court) or pony up the money themselves.
Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.
dredmorbius 6 hours ago [-]
That's pretty much the proposal I've made for some years.[1]
California has introduced bonding to telemarketing firms specifically. I feel that should apply at the carrier level, where networks carry a guaranteed bond, pay regular premiums on it, and are dinged for unwanted calls, with the proceeds being split among the called party and any third-party network(s) traversed by the calls. Downstream networks could seek compensation from ANY upstream network carrying the traffic regardless of whether or not they originated it.
This would both create a penalty for providing, or transiting, unsolicited calls, AND create an incentive for carriers / network providers themselves to pursue unsolicited traffic from their peers.
Do you really want the network to be so locked down you can't get access to it?
bckr 7 hours ago [-]
I think we have to do something this extreme. We have to give the system a total makeover. Somehow we also have to keep it from being fully centralized and have the big brother problem on the other side. Unfortunately these two goals are difficult to get through at the same time, with the system that we have.
giancarlostoro 5 hours ago [-]
If major states like California and New York pass it, and spam basically dies in those states, it wouldn't surprise me if it spreads across the country.
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
Assuming the nature of the spam and how it makes money.
ssalka 6 hours ago [-]
Cue the crypto bros touting their decentralized spam-detection blockchain
orbital-decay 5 hours ago [-]
Infeasible. Fraud or spam is usually pretty hard to confirm from one recording without additional context. Many scammers have plausible deniability or are just checking whether the number is active. Moreover, this solution would involve secret non-consensual recording; what if it's not a scam?
dredmorbius 48 minutes ago [-]
I'd make one significant change to the proposal in the comment.
The delivery penalty applies to any unsolicited email, as determined by the recipient.
If also tagged as scam, those are further forwarded to law enforcement (state, national) for investigation.
Many US states are one-party regarding recording. Even in two-party states (CA, OR, WA, MT, IL, PA, MA, CT, NH, MD, DE, FL), disclosed recording and continuing a call will generally be construed as consent. If that's not the case, proposed state or national legislation could carve out exceptions as needed, and there'll likely need to be some legislation required anyway, so that's part of the process.
But shifting the fee element from fraud (one class of unsolicited call/text abuse) to undesired contact makes sorting when the fee applies far more evident, and eliminates a class of other objections (e.g., due process) from consideration.
inigyou 19 minutes ago [-]
I sign up for a newsletter from Google, then I report it as unsolicited. Boom, I just made Google pay me $10.
ryandrake 3 hours ago [-]
Plus, who is ‘confirming’ the spam? The same entity (or group: carriers) that is keeping the $10 and paying the $100 out? That just means the result will always be ‘not spam.’
dredmorbius 14 minutes ago [-]
This is why fees should be structured such that all carriers are on the hook, but upstream carriers inherit the obligation, possibly with an increased liability per hop, implying that downstream carriers can utilise enforcement as a profit rather than cost centre.
Scenario:
- Spamford places an unsolicited call to subscriber Alice initiating from MalTelCo, transiting carrier hops BunnTel1 and BunnTel2, to Alice's telco carrier, EndTelCo.
- Carriers MalTelCo, BunnTel1, BunnTel2,[1] and EndTelCo have all placed surety bonds, held by BondCo, to practice telephony operations within the jurisdiction (regional/national). The carriers are the Principals, BondCo is the Surety, and receiving subscribers (or telcos, see below) are the Obligees.[2]
- Unbonded carriers may have their traffic refused by peers. Peering to an unbonded carrier places the bond obligation on the receiving carrier.
- Alice flags the call as spam. A per-call surety of $100 is paid to Alice, and charged to EndTelCo against its BondCo contract. As an additional option the call may be flagged as fraud through the phone system, in which case it is automatically referred to LEO by EndTelCo. Obligation of surety is independent of any fraud finding and is based SOLELY on the unsolicited nature of the call.
- EndTelCo has the option of 1) eating the charge or 2) filing a claim against its peer, BunnTel2, the 2nd hop in the chain, which EndTelCo does.
- BunnTel1 similarly files a claim on BunnTel2.
- BunnTel2 files a claim on MalTelCo.
- MalTelCo now eats the claim (it's paid out by BondCo). MalTelCo may seek further compensation from Spamford, but that's Out Of Scope of the bonding / surety schema, and would be covered by MalTelCo's own terms of use.
- BondCo assesses risks and adjusts its surety rates correspondingly based on observed behaviours (and financial risks) of EndTelCo, BunnTel1, BunnTel2, and MalTelCo. If risks are excessive and no surety can be issued, MalTelCo is unbonded, and hence, decertified. Peers may now refuse traffic without penalty.
Note that no one carrier needs to know anything more about a call's routing than its own network boundary. If EndTelCo has no idea that BunnTel2 and MalTelCo were involved, it doesn't matter, because BunnTel1 is on the hook for passing on the call. Spoofing or falsifying records doesn't save you.
There are some questions over how this might be implemented, though generally:
- If Spamford and Alice are both subscribers to EndTelCo, then EndTelCo eats the surety, which is paid to Alice. There's no upstream. Moral: Telcos, don't spam your own customers.
- One thought is that the surety is split among telcos and the subscriber. Rather than just facing a potential cost, transiting and reciving-end-point carriers could see revenue by tracking and prosecuting unsolicited calls. This could include calls received by monitoring numbers set up strictly to assess unsolicited call activity directed to the network. This would mean that calls transiting multiple carriers would be subject to compounded surety claims ... and ... I think I'm OK with that.
- There would all but certainly be classes of calls which would be exempted from claims. Those should be very limited, preferably to government and specifically qualified emergency services only. No political exemptions, no non-profit / NGO exemptions.
- How often claims are settled and risks re-assessed is open for discussion. Daily might be too often, weekly or monthly seems most likely. Longer than that gives too much free-run for malevolent actors to operate.
First, they tell me the company they are from (almost certainly a fake one -- could be easy to verify). Then they try to convince me that two years ago I have created an account on their website, they gave me some free money that was managed by an AI, and now I have a ton of money, and they need to send it to me (a completely bullshit story). Then they tell me that in order to get that money, I need to install a software, that I know happens to be a remote control software (no legitimate financial institution would ever do that).
There is no way to make this plausibly deniable. Especially the part about the need to install the remote control software... which is the entire point of the operation.
flatline 3 hours ago [-]
Unscrupulous operators will just run up huge liabilities and close up shop by the time they can be identified and dragged into court, meanwhile having started another similar operation under a different name. That's basically already what's happening, and the speed differential between the technology and the law will be forever in their favor.
pavel_lishin 3 hours ago [-]
The idea is that telecoms would be on the hook for these folks' behavior; they'd be incentivized to scrutinize them more thoroughly.
verall 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of scams unfortunately operate right on the line of legality like the car warranty morons
cj 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, but that's okay because you don't need 100% of spam calls to be recognized as spam for the incentive to do its job. The system still sounds like it could still work even if a large percent of calls weren't flagged.
orbital-decay 5 hours ago [-]
This works both ways, if the detection rate is low then nobody would press a "lose $10" button.
edoceo 5 hours ago [-]
How are they listening to a few minutes before the button? A "temporary" recording of the first 2 minutes of every call? I feel like there would be some privacy concerns.
namibj 4 hours ago [-]
It'd suffice for them to sign the transmitted information (audio and required timing metadata for the packet stream) and make you do the temporary recording on your side, transmitting it back to the provider once you hit the button, to let them handle the backup/safekeeping aspects for you.
dmitrygr 5 hours ago [-]
Simpler yet: require every call to come with a physical source address, huge (and enforced) jail times for faking it. Let the internet and the pissed callees crowdsource the rest
hutattedonmyarm 3 hours ago [-]
This would be an enormous invasion of privacy. Other countries have a lot less issues with spam calls without these measures
inigyou 18 minutes ago [-]
Other countries have this rule, actually. At least most of Europe records your passport and address.
amazingamazing 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand how this works. Suppose someone calls you about some political poll and you hit the button, would it count or not? What about a cold email (there was another such thread about cold emails being praised, i said fundamentally is spam but was downvoted lol).
pessimizer 6 hours ago [-]
I spent a little time unsuccessfully looking for a reference, but in some ancient Greek and early Roman governments, newly elected officials who were in charge of money were required to personally indemnify (become responsible for the professional liabilities of) their predecessor.
If your predecessor committed fraud, you were 100% personally responsible for it. You would then gather the evidence and sue your predecessor for your losses.
Luc 4 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a great way to attract scammers and dissuade honest people, so if it's ever been tried it must have failed spectacularly (I also searched for variations of this idea but didn't turn up anything).
bluGill 4 hours ago [-]
It probably worked for Romans because the taxes you were allowed to collect was so much more than you had to send back to Rome that you could get rich 'honestly'. That and you had options to prove the fraud that meant the other was unlikely to try.
giancarlostoro 5 hours ago [-]
How does your predecessor today have those funds? The problem is politicians get to "play" with wealth beyond their own reaches (typically).
orev 7 hours ago [-]
One of the biggest concerns I have with phone scams is that the people most vulnerable are the elderly, and they don’t have the knowledge on how to block these calls (if a technical solution is the only option).
And further to that, the elderly are also the ones who cannot block unknown numbers, because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from (they may have a pool of numbers but it’s not reasonable to add all of them to contacts). Blocking all unknowns would block these important health related calls as well.
thewebguyd 6 hours ago [-]
> because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from
This is a huge issue with scam/security awareness education. Too many legitimate orgs use the exact behaviors we tell people to avoid. Same thing with email, can't tell someone to never click links in emails when services keep relying on magic links, third-party notification domains, etc. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC do nothing because scammers will just typosquat.
In the phone number example, most of those numbers too are unlisted outbound numbers, you couldn't even google them to verify.
Half the battle is getting legitimate organizations to stop acting like scammers in the first place so that shady behavior becomes an obvious red flag again.
bugcheck7b 5 hours ago [-]
Just this week I got an email from Amex to be on the lookout for scams, and the email itself had a "login" button right in the top.
olyjohn 5 hours ago [-]
And if you think spam calls on your cell phone are bad... oh boy, land lines get about 10x the calls. My theory is that because it's mostly older people who have land lines on top of the fact that spam laws are tighter for cell phones. There aren't enough land line users to complain, so not a big enough voice to make a public outcry. Cell phone users have no idea the problems that land lines have.
I know this because I had to spend 6 months taking care of my dad while he was dying. We had so many medical people calling us and making appointments, and doing tests, etc etc. And on top of it about 10-15 spam calls a day and it's impossible to differentiate via caller ID. This was all while I was also working full time from home. It's a real hellscape, and these phone scammers are really having a negative effect on people's lives. It made my life miserable at one of the hardest times of my life, and I have nothing but contempt for these fuckers, and no empathy left for the people making the phone calls either. They're all scumbags and deserve time in prison.
dredmorbius 7 hours ago [-]
AARP's magazine and bulletin[1] are pretty much filled with scam-awareness articles every issue. It's an absolutely major concern.
It being a major concern doesn't mean there's any solution around said concerns. Give me 100 old peoples phone numbers and I bet I could convince 10 of them that I am AARP trying to make them safe and eventually get money out of them.
otterpro 8 hours ago [-]
I no longer can answer my phone. I get at least 20-40 spam/scam calls per day, and many are legitimate companies calling for loans and refinancing offers, which started after I got a home loan. I cannot seem to stop them from calling, and even though my phone number is listed in National Do Not Call Registry for many years, it hasn't worked at all. The only relief is that on my iPhone, I was able to block all calls not found in my contacts (ie whitelist phone numbers only).
Now, my only worry is that I might get a call from someone who I need to talk to, but is blocked and I won't even know it. For example, what if I get an emergency call from police/fire/hospital and I won't even know it. I also tried using "Screen unknown caller" feature, but then, no one likes them and sometimes they think it is AI bot and they usually just hang up (which is great for spam caller but not for legitimate caller)
My only solution that I could think of is to have a dedicated phone line just for friends/family/work, and a second line for banking/shopping/utilities/everything else.
xethos 5 hours ago [-]
> My only solution that I could think of is to have a dedicated phone line just for friends/family/work, and a second line for banking/shopping/utilities/everything else.
This fails the moment one of your "clean line" contacts downloads a sketchy app that sells all their contacts, and sells an updated list as your appear in their recent calls list - meaning it's not a one-time thing, it's for a few weeks after every time you call them.
Leif24 4 hours ago [-]
It works if you only allow incoming calls from your contacts (e.g. whitelisted numbers) on friends/family/work line. If that number leaks, who cares? The random numbers will be blocked anyway. Probably would want to set it up so the 'public' line is silenced - just periodically check the VM box for anything important.
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
It seems possible, but maybe not affordable, for scammers to buy information about you and then spoof numbers of places that could/should theoretically call you. If you couple this with the potential victims on the other end being elderly you've greatly increased the risks of the attack being successful.
ozim 6 hours ago [-]
I get the comfort that "normal person" would send an SMS "it was me Greg, call me back" if you don't pick up and most of my family is on whatsapp anyway.
Scammers or spammers will never send an SMS with clarification that they wanted to call you.
pavel_lishin 5 hours ago [-]
But a normal person could be calling from a doctor's office, a hospital, or your child's school - and not an actual cellphone, and they may not want to text you (or not be allowed to text you) from their personal cellphone, either.
As a parent, the "block all numbers!" approach has always seemed incredibly naive to me.
swat535 3 hours ago [-]
Those will usually leave a voice mail if it's important. Then you can call the place back and discuss it. If they don't bother to leave a voice mail, then it's not urgent / important.
SoftTalker 6 hours ago [-]
Same as GP. I silence unknown callers, and unknown text messages. They can leave a voicemail, and I might check it at some point. I check unknown texts a little more often, but they don't interrupt me with an alert which is the important thing.
No police/fire/hospital emergency outcome is going to hinge upon someone else answering a phone call or text messsage.
kevin_thibedeau 4 hours ago [-]
The fix is a Google Voice number that you replace every few years. Keep your permanent number guarded for critical services only.
giancarlostoro 5 hours ago [-]
> I also tried using "Screen unknown caller" feature, but then, no one likes them and sometimes they think it is AI bot and they usually just hang up (which is great for spam caller but not for legitimate caller)
When its someone legit I find that they actually go through the effort. I've had USPS explain who they were to my phone and I was able to answer them as a result.
gbourne1 5 hours ago [-]
I too set it up so all unknown calls go to VM. I figure if legit they will leave a message. If two calls and no message I block the unknown number.
Marsymars 5 hours ago [-]
Roughly 100% of my spam calls come from spoofed numbers and don't repeat, so I never bother blocking anything.
Hikikomori 6 hours ago [-]
Live in Europe, last time I got a spam call 4-5 years ago it was my ISP asking of I wanted to add tv to my internet. Told them not to call me again and they didn't.
victorbjorklund 6 hours ago [-]
I live in Europe and I get scam calls and sales calls. Yes, legit companies spam call less in Europe due to regulation but scammers committing crimes don’t care about privacy laws etc it’s their least problems
inigyou 16 minutes ago [-]
From European numbers? Someone had to scan their passport to get that number. The police can check.
Hikikomori 6 hours ago [-]
Dont get those either, maybe just an outlier but GF don't get them either.
hutattedonmyarm 3 hours ago [-]
I get them maybe 3-4 times a year. So, not _never_ but not a big problem either
victorbjorklund 5 hours ago [-]
You are lucky. I been on a financial scam list for the last 18 years. They call maybe twice per year. Almost interesting to see over time what scams are trendy.
1 hours ago [-]
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
I live in Europe and I get spam calls from the US :(
bckr 6 hours ago [-]
Right but what keeps the second line clean? You’re going to get spam there too.
coldpie 2 hours ago [-]
> The only relief is that on my iPhone, I was able to block all calls not found in my contacts (ie whitelist phone numbers only).
It is insane that Android still does not have this option. It has to be some kind of software patent horseshit preventing them from adding the feature.
mannanj 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
timoth3y 32 minutes ago [-]
This is actually an easily solvable problem. In fact, most of the world has already solved it by not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors similar to the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.
The US has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to have no financial are regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Rather then actually solve the problem, the US prefers to turn it into a business opportunity with the telcos selling subscriptions to blocking software and an entire ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
inigyou 21 minutes ago [-]
This must be why every country is locking down the phone network. KYC or you don't get connected. You get a spam call? Good, caller ID is authenticated so it's easy for the police to find out who called you.
bickfordb 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe this is a pipe dream, but wouldn't it be better to retire the legacy phone voice and messaging system altogether.
If 99.9% of us have internet phones, why aren't we using PKI, decentralized protocols, crowd sourced reputation to communicate instead of POTS phone numbers, SMS/iChat and relying on the carriers to police spam.
tacocataco 2 hours ago [-]
Redundancy in case of natural disasters.
ogou 2 hours ago [-]
My Google Voice number got 37 calls from the same region in the past 2 days. All day, about every 50 minutes, rotating different 404 based numbers. It happens about twice a year from this area code (404). I know exactly where it is from. I had to park in Atlanta once and it required me to create an account on an app for that parking lot to pay. Of course I used my Google number. That service must have transferred or sold my number. Now my account gets bombed by them on a regular basis.
sdenton4 6 hours ago [-]
I got an obviously-AI voice agent spam call yesterday. Had a bit of fun getting it to answer trivia questions (when was the treaty of westphalia ratified? answer in a rhyming couplet) as a precondition to handing over the keys to my bank accounts.
nojs 6 hours ago [-]
Perhaps the future of captcha is anti-captcha. What agent can resist responding with a rhyming couplet or inverting a binary tree?
ozim 6 hours ago [-]
Downside is they most likely are using stolen tokens, not paying themselves so it cost them next to nothing.
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
Regardless, this forces them to steal more tokens. Any token wasted not getting money reduces the efficiency of the scam. The end goal would be increasing the token expenditure above the amount they scam from people.
f1ay 5 hours ago [-]
dontscamgrandma.com is probably apropos to share here for the elderly / vulnerable affected by scam proliferation. It's a trainer that roleplays people through getting the confidence to hang up and call their loved ones back.
Full disclosure I'm the founder, and I've got a couple dogs in this fight
dredmorbius 6 hours ago [-]
An ask: I'm trying to find out where substantive discussion by carriers AND other parties on mitigating phone spam (voice or text) is occurring. I'd very much appreciate replies here, email (see my profile), or hop on this Fediverse thread: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/116984051310517623>
Broadband Breakfast does seem to be one of those entities. ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) is another, though as a telco alliance I consider it highly suss.
(Submitter.)
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
Is this a USA problem, or world-wide? If other countries don't have such a problem, why not?
alightsoul 1 hours ago [-]
Because the US market is very lucrative. In other countries they aren't calls, they're WhatsApp messages just asking for money. Sometimes they somehow hack into people's WhatsApp accounts and then ask their friends for money.
inigyou 15 minutes ago [-]
Pervasive KYC.
bluGill 4 hours ago [-]
Worldwide. It doesn't affect everyone equally though so some in each county are not having a problem while others are swamped with garbage.
nicbou 1 hours ago [-]
I get spam calls in Germany, but it's maybe two dozen a year in random bursts.
stalfosknight 8 hours ago [-]
T-Mobile’s Scam Shield works really well for me. But you have to get the premium tier.
ipython 7 hours ago [-]
Funny, the same telecoms that whine about how hard this traffic is to stop... are also selling a "premium" service to customers- who then manually tag unwanted calls so that the telecom can sell that data back to other customers...
dredmorbius 6 hours ago [-]
Unsurprisingly: telcos sell outbound dialing capabilities to business customers.
For spam mitigations to work, the cost of selling that business must exceed its revenue.
Some, and I won't mention AT&T by name, are very curiously opposed to any regulations touching this.
dhosek 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t seem to be charged for Scam Shield on my account. I’ve had one unknown number call and not leave a message over the last month, which is a far cry from the 20–40 spam calls per day some people report.
dredmorbius 6 hours ago [-]
There are a number of options. My view is that carrier-based filtering (rather than on-device filters) are where effort must be focused. Much as we learned with email: if you're routing traffic for many people, mass-contact attempts and patterns become quickly visible. Individuals see only a minuscule fraction of traffic, networks see overall patterns.
The other element is that carriers can act at the network level, noting how much abusive traffic arrives from given peers, and taking direct action against those peers. That could involve rejecting traffic outright, subjecting it to stronger challenges, and/or diverting it to investigative / law-enforcement bodies (I'd suggest both national and state entities) for both tracking and enforcement. Power-law relations mean that at any given time, a small number of networks will account for the overwhelming majority of spam, though which networks will likely change over time.
The key problem with this is getting the carriers to act, which ... will probably involve a few carrots and sticks. I'll address those in another comment, except to mention bonding: <https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/telreg>.[1]
Individual action will not solve this problem, but there are steps you can take.
Most major US carriers now offer some form of robocall blocking. "Scam Shield" from T-Mobile, "ActiveArmor" from AT&T, "Call Filter" from Verizon.
MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) may or may not offer scam / robocall blocking themselves (though IMO they should, and should be required to). Some will identify spam calls, but those are still passed through to your handset.
Beyond this, there are on-device apps which can be used, some are carrier-based (e.g., "Call Filter Plus", from Verizon, similar tools exist for Verizon and AT&T), some are third-party. These of necessity share your voice/text activity with third parties, which is its own concern and consideration.
Full Android, iOS, and several full-featured Android alternatives (GrapheneOS, /e/OS, LineageOS, etc.) offer unknown caller rejection. Numbers not in your contact list are directed to voicemail. At present, few spam calls will leave voicemail, though some do, and as AI expands in capabilities, applications, and adoption this will all but certainly increase. I'd strongly encourage use of this.
Feature phones / dumbphones ... have far less capability. Most cannot even reject unknown numbers, which ... seems a ripe target for legislation and/or regulation. Phone frameworks such as AOSP / KaiOS seem to afford little capability for even creating a call-blocking app. This and other dumb devices (e.g., traditional landlines) are a strong argument for carrier/network level mitigations.
It classifies calls into three categories: high, medium, and low risk.
It adjudicates calls based on risk.
High-risk calls are terminated entirely.
Medium-risk calls are directed to voicemail.
Low-risk calls are subjected to an audio CAPTCHA (enter a two digit value to ring through), otherwise are directed to voicemail.
(It's not clear whether or not a whitelisted number will escape any treatment, perhaps subject to conditions such as originating from the appropriate/approved network for that call.)
I haven't used that system, but in advising people still moving off landlines, or looking at VOIP solutions, it's making Comcast an attractive option.
(I don't know what other VOIP providers, say, Twillo or Asterisk, offer, but suspect at least some have similar if not more-capable systems.)
________________________________
Notes:
1. California requires a $100,000 bond by all telemarketers in the state. The state has a small fraction of the incidence of robocalls of the worst US states. Several others have some bond. My view is that bonding should apply at the carrier level and be surrenderable to both contacted individuals and downstream peering networks, to provide both a strong financial penalty to abusers, and an incentive to downstream networks to pursue abusive calls.
olyjohn 5 hours ago [-]
Fuck everything about this. It's like your drug dealer running AA meetings.
stalfosknight 3 hours ago [-]
It is indeed rather fucked but I’d rather spend $4 a month to have scam calls be a rarity than the alternative…
alex1138 3 hours ago [-]
I get messages (and often don't answer my phone; my ringer is off) in which it's obviously this automated thing but they immediately dock it down to "press 1 if..."
'Kay. So you call people and just clearly have a tone the second you hear a voice which could well be someone's answering machine
(Of course most of it would be automated, I guess)
Special place in hell for these people
cindyllm 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
LocalH 6 hours ago [-]
Commerce should never have been made possible to happen on the internet. The moment it became possible to send and receive money through the internet, the end times began.
josh-wrale 2 hours ago [-]
Allow list for phone numbers. All else goes to VM. Job done.
shadowtree 5 hours ago [-]
Hi - we're doing tree removal in your area. Call us back at 1-800-SCAM
Cheap messaging is as annoying now as calling. Ruining the phone experience overall. Soon Apple will have to do something.
Razengan 3 hours ago [-]
Why are phones still so fucking far behind in the dark ages??
Instant messaging solved all this shit 700 years ago!
Let each number act as an "account" on the phone network/company, just like IM accounts, each with its list of contacts, and blocked numbers.
Shove incoming calls into "Strangers" with low-annoyance notifications (ringtones) by default unless they're from a "verified" company etc.
Oh and yeah as others said, a "Report Abuse" button.
etchalon 8 hours ago [-]
I genuinely don't understand why this is so hard to tackle.
Phone numbers are a scare resource and the telecommunications networks heavily regulated with numerous central points of control.
This bullshit is scaling because the companies which gate and sell that access have no obligations, legal or otherwise, to deny scammers access to their resources.
mook 7 hours ago [-]
I was under the impression that SHAKEN / STIR was supposed to do that by authenticating the phone numbers displayed against the telco that made the call. But as the other comment says, your telco earns money from scam calls and they don't want that to stop.
inigyou 13 minutes ago [-]
SHAKEN/STIR has a loophole for calls passing through legacy trunks that don't support it. So now certain carriers made a business model off of routing your scam calls through those trunks so they won't have to be verified.
dredmorbius 6 hours ago [-]
Identification is insufficient without accountability.
SHAKEN/STIR identifies whether or not a given number is originating from a specific network, but without knowing whether that's an approved network, rejecting unapproved-origin calls, or tracking how much unapproved traffic a given network is emitting and penalising it for this, the information isn't actionable.
"Measure it harder" doesn't solve problems. The information must direct meaningful action.
ipython 8 hours ago [-]
One word: incentives. You're absolutely right- and telecom networks get us on both sides. They collect fees from the scammers, then fees from customers to block the scammers. Can't get any better than that.
ozim 5 hours ago [-]
so penalties for telcos have to be higher than they earn from scam calls.
2-5% of scams succeed but penalty should be there accounting for 95-98% that did not succeed.
IANAL but I know failed attempt at robbery or murder is also prosecuted, failed attempts at scam are not, because people just hang up and move on. Then the reality is society doesn’t have enough resources to deal with "scam attempts" - well we have to focus on murder attempts an plain robbery
inigyou 13 minutes ago [-]
I don't think we want telcos to block scam calls themselves. We want them to be forced to give the subscriber's actual address to the police.
mannanj 7 hours ago [-]
I think making noise is cheaper than reducing it.
And I think this is also a problem at the habit/behavior level for people. Most people don't want to know how to set proper boundaries with people and technology and articulate what they want. Once you do that at least you can articulate what you want to come in at you or not.
Without that you get stuck with a weird one-size-fits-all policy which definitely doesn't fit for me at least.
Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.
California has introduced bonding to telemarketing firms specifically. I feel that should apply at the carrier level, where networks carry a guaranteed bond, pay regular premiums on it, and are dinged for unwanted calls, with the proceeds being split among the called party and any third-party network(s) traversed by the calls. Downstream networks could seek compensation from ANY upstream network carrying the traffic regardless of whether or not they originated it.
This would both create a penalty for providing, or transiting, unsolicited calls, AND create an incentive for carriers / network providers themselves to pursue unsolicited traffic from their peers.
<https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/telreg>
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Notes:
1. See for example <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/111099306069523624>
The delivery penalty applies to any unsolicited email, as determined by the recipient.
If also tagged as scam, those are further forwarded to law enforcement (state, national) for investigation.
Many US states are one-party regarding recording. Even in two-party states (CA, OR, WA, MT, IL, PA, MA, CT, NH, MD, DE, FL), disclosed recording and continuing a call will generally be construed as consent. If that's not the case, proposed state or national legislation could carve out exceptions as needed, and there'll likely need to be some legislation required anyway, so that's part of the process.
But shifting the fee element from fraud (one class of unsolicited call/text abuse) to undesired contact makes sorting when the fee applies far more evident, and eliminates a class of other objections (e.g., due process) from consideration.
Scenario:
- Spamford places an unsolicited call to subscriber Alice initiating from MalTelCo, transiting carrier hops BunnTel1 and BunnTel2, to Alice's telco carrier, EndTelCo.
- Carriers MalTelCo, BunnTel1, BunnTel2,[1] and EndTelCo have all placed surety bonds, held by BondCo, to practice telephony operations within the jurisdiction (regional/national). The carriers are the Principals, BondCo is the Surety, and receiving subscribers (or telcos, see below) are the Obligees.[2]
- Unbonded carriers may have their traffic refused by peers. Peering to an unbonded carrier places the bond obligation on the receiving carrier.
- Alice flags the call as spam. A per-call surety of $100 is paid to Alice, and charged to EndTelCo against its BondCo contract. As an additional option the call may be flagged as fraud through the phone system, in which case it is automatically referred to LEO by EndTelCo. Obligation of surety is independent of any fraud finding and is based SOLELY on the unsolicited nature of the call.
- EndTelCo has the option of 1) eating the charge or 2) filing a claim against its peer, BunnTel2, the 2nd hop in the chain, which EndTelCo does.
- BunnTel1 similarly files a claim on BunnTel2.
- BunnTel2 files a claim on MalTelCo.
- MalTelCo now eats the claim (it's paid out by BondCo). MalTelCo may seek further compensation from Spamford, but that's Out Of Scope of the bonding / surety schema, and would be covered by MalTelCo's own terms of use.
- BondCo assesses risks and adjusts its surety rates correspondingly based on observed behaviours (and financial risks) of EndTelCo, BunnTel1, BunnTel2, and MalTelCo. If risks are excessive and no surety can be issued, MalTelCo is unbonded, and hence, decertified. Peers may now refuse traffic without penalty.
Note that no one carrier needs to know anything more about a call's routing than its own network boundary. If EndTelCo has no idea that BunnTel2 and MalTelCo were involved, it doesn't matter, because BunnTel1 is on the hook for passing on the call. Spoofing or falsifying records doesn't save you.
There are some questions over how this might be implemented, though generally:
- If Spamford and Alice are both subscribers to EndTelCo, then EndTelCo eats the surety, which is paid to Alice. There's no upstream. Moral: Telcos, don't spam your own customers.
- One thought is that the surety is split among telcos and the subscriber. Rather than just facing a potential cost, transiting and reciving-end-point carriers could see revenue by tracking and prosecuting unsolicited calls. This could include calls received by monitoring numbers set up strictly to assess unsolicited call activity directed to the network. This would mean that calls transiting multiple carriers would be subject to compounded surety claims ... and ... I think I'm OK with that.
- There would all but certainly be classes of calls which would be exempted from claims. Those should be very limited, preferably to government and specifically qualified emergency services only. No political exemptions, no non-profit / NGO exemptions.
- How often claims are settled and risks re-assessed is open for discussion. Daily might be too often, weekly or monthly seems most likely. Longer than that gives too much free-run for malevolent actors to operate.
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Notes:
1. "BunnTel", because bunnies hop.
2. For an overview of surety bonds, see <https://www.suretybondsdirect.com/educate/what-is-surety-bon...>.
The scammers who call me are perfectly obvious.
First, they tell me the company they are from (almost certainly a fake one -- could be easy to verify). Then they try to convince me that two years ago I have created an account on their website, they gave me some free money that was managed by an AI, and now I have a ton of money, and they need to send it to me (a completely bullshit story). Then they tell me that in order to get that money, I need to install a software, that I know happens to be a remote control software (no legitimate financial institution would ever do that).
There is no way to make this plausibly deniable. Especially the part about the need to install the remote control software... which is the entire point of the operation.
If your predecessor committed fraud, you were 100% personally responsible for it. You would then gather the evidence and sue your predecessor for your losses.
And further to that, the elderly are also the ones who cannot block unknown numbers, because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from (they may have a pool of numbers but it’s not reasonable to add all of them to contacts). Blocking all unknowns would block these important health related calls as well.
This is a huge issue with scam/security awareness education. Too many legitimate orgs use the exact behaviors we tell people to avoid. Same thing with email, can't tell someone to never click links in emails when services keep relying on magic links, third-party notification domains, etc. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC do nothing because scammers will just typosquat.
In the phone number example, most of those numbers too are unlisted outbound numbers, you couldn't even google them to verify.
Half the battle is getting legitimate organizations to stop acting like scammers in the first place so that shady behavior becomes an obvious red flag again.
I know this because I had to spend 6 months taking care of my dad while he was dying. We had so many medical people calling us and making appointments, and doing tests, etc etc. And on top of it about 10-15 spam calls a day and it's impossible to differentiate via caller ID. This was all while I was also working full time from home. It's a real hellscape, and these phone scammers are really having a negative effect on people's lives. It made my life miserable at one of the hardest times of my life, and I have nothing but contempt for these fuckers, and no empathy left for the people making the phone calls either. They're all scumbags and deserve time in prison.
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Notes:
1. Incidentally, the first and second largest-circulation magazines in the US now: <https://www.magazineline.com/blog/most-popular-magazines-in-...>.
Now, my only worry is that I might get a call from someone who I need to talk to, but is blocked and I won't even know it. For example, what if I get an emergency call from police/fire/hospital and I won't even know it. I also tried using "Screen unknown caller" feature, but then, no one likes them and sometimes they think it is AI bot and they usually just hang up (which is great for spam caller but not for legitimate caller)
My only solution that I could think of is to have a dedicated phone line just for friends/family/work, and a second line for banking/shopping/utilities/everything else.
This fails the moment one of your "clean line" contacts downloads a sketchy app that sells all their contacts, and sells an updated list as your appear in their recent calls list - meaning it's not a one-time thing, it's for a few weeks after every time you call them.
Scammers or spammers will never send an SMS with clarification that they wanted to call you.
As a parent, the "block all numbers!" approach has always seemed incredibly naive to me.
No police/fire/hospital emergency outcome is going to hinge upon someone else answering a phone call or text messsage.
When its someone legit I find that they actually go through the effort. I've had USPS explain who they were to my phone and I was able to answer them as a result.
It is insane that Android still does not have this option. It has to be some kind of software patent horseshit preventing them from adding the feature.
The US has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to have no financial are regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Rather then actually solve the problem, the US prefers to turn it into a business opportunity with the telcos selling subscriptions to blocking software and an entire ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
If 99.9% of us have internet phones, why aren't we using PKI, decentralized protocols, crowd sourced reputation to communicate instead of POTS phone numbers, SMS/iChat and relying on the carriers to police spam.
Full disclosure I'm the founder, and I've got a couple dogs in this fight
Broadband Breakfast does seem to be one of those entities. ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) is another, though as a telco alliance I consider it highly suss.
(Submitter.)
For spam mitigations to work, the cost of selling that business must exceed its revenue.
Some, and I won't mention AT&T by name, are very curiously opposed to any regulations touching this.
The other element is that carriers can act at the network level, noting how much abusive traffic arrives from given peers, and taking direct action against those peers. That could involve rejecting traffic outright, subjecting it to stronger challenges, and/or diverting it to investigative / law-enforcement bodies (I'd suggest both national and state entities) for both tracking and enforcement. Power-law relations mean that at any given time, a small number of networks will account for the overwhelming majority of spam, though which networks will likely change over time.
The key problem with this is getting the carriers to act, which ... will probably involve a few carrots and sticks. I'll address those in another comment, except to mention bonding: <https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/telreg>.[1]
Individual action will not solve this problem, but there are steps you can take.
Most major US carriers now offer some form of robocall blocking. "Scam Shield" from T-Mobile, "ActiveArmor" from AT&T, "Call Filter" from Verizon.
MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) may or may not offer scam / robocall blocking themselves (though IMO they should, and should be required to). Some will identify spam calls, but those are still passed through to your handset.
Beyond this, there are on-device apps which can be used, some are carrier-based (e.g., "Call Filter Plus", from Verizon, similar tools exist for Verizon and AT&T), some are third-party. These of necessity share your voice/text activity with third parties, which is its own concern and consideration.
Full Android, iOS, and several full-featured Android alternatives (GrapheneOS, /e/OS, LineageOS, etc.) offer unknown caller rejection. Numbers not in your contact list are directed to voicemail. At present, few spam calls will leave voicemail, though some do, and as AI expands in capabilities, applications, and adoption this will all but certainly increase. I'd strongly encourage use of this.
Feature phones / dumbphones ... have far less capability. Most cannot even reject unknown numbers, which ... seems a ripe target for legislation and/or regulation. Phone frameworks such as AOSP / KaiOS seem to afford little capability for even creating a call-blocking app. This and other dumb devices (e.g., traditional landlines) are a strong argument for carrier/network level mitigations.
The company everyone loves to hate, Comcast/Xfinity, actually has one of the most sophisticated voice/text spam blocking systems, and one I'd like to see mandated to all carriers: <https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/spam-blocker-overvi...>
It's risk based.
It classifies calls into three categories: high, medium, and low risk.
It adjudicates calls based on risk.
High-risk calls are terminated entirely.
Medium-risk calls are directed to voicemail.
Low-risk calls are subjected to an audio CAPTCHA (enter a two digit value to ring through), otherwise are directed to voicemail.
(It's not clear whether or not a whitelisted number will escape any treatment, perhaps subject to conditions such as originating from the appropriate/approved network for that call.)
I haven't used that system, but in advising people still moving off landlines, or looking at VOIP solutions, it's making Comcast an attractive option.
(I don't know what other VOIP providers, say, Twillo or Asterisk, offer, but suspect at least some have similar if not more-capable systems.)
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Notes:
1. California requires a $100,000 bond by all telemarketers in the state. The state has a small fraction of the incidence of robocalls of the worst US states. Several others have some bond. My view is that bonding should apply at the carrier level and be surrenderable to both contacted individuals and downstream peering networks, to provide both a strong financial penalty to abusers, and an incentive to downstream networks to pursue abusive calls.
'Kay. So you call people and just clearly have a tone the second you hear a voice which could well be someone's answering machine
(Of course most of it would be automated, I guess)
Special place in hell for these people
Cheap messaging is as annoying now as calling. Ruining the phone experience overall. Soon Apple will have to do something.
Instant messaging solved all this shit 700 years ago!
Let each number act as an "account" on the phone network/company, just like IM accounts, each with its list of contacts, and blocked numbers.
Shove incoming calls into "Strangers" with low-annoyance notifications (ringtones) by default unless they're from a "verified" company etc.
Oh and yeah as others said, a "Report Abuse" button.
Phone numbers are a scare resource and the telecommunications networks heavily regulated with numerous central points of control.
This bullshit is scaling because the companies which gate and sell that access have no obligations, legal or otherwise, to deny scammers access to their resources.
SHAKEN/STIR identifies whether or not a given number is originating from a specific network, but without knowing whether that's an approved network, rejecting unapproved-origin calls, or tracking how much unapproved traffic a given network is emitting and penalising it for this, the information isn't actionable.
"Measure it harder" doesn't solve problems. The information must direct meaningful action.
2-5% of scams succeed but penalty should be there accounting for 95-98% that did not succeed.
IANAL but I know failed attempt at robbery or murder is also prosecuted, failed attempts at scam are not, because people just hang up and move on. Then the reality is society doesn’t have enough resources to deal with "scam attempts" - well we have to focus on murder attempts an plain robbery
And I think this is also a problem at the habit/behavior level for people. Most people don't want to know how to set proper boundaries with people and technology and articulate what they want. Once you do that at least you can articulate what you want to come in at you or not.
Without that you get stuck with a weird one-size-fits-all policy which definitely doesn't fit for me at least.