[HN Gopher] Report to Congress: Robocalls and Transmission of Mi...
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Report to Congress: Robocalls and Transmission of Misleading Caller
ID
Author : infodocket
Score : 102 points
Date : 2021-12-29 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fcc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fcc.gov)
| hinkley wrote:
| I saw a Shitty Life Tips the other day claiming that if you
| mentioned Tienanmen Square to the Chinese robocallers that
| they'll end up on a list.
|
| I only know enough about Mandarin to distinguish it from all the
| other East Asian languages. Maybe I should have my coworker teach
| me "fuck off and stop calling me," but what I really want is a
| Mark as Spam button on my phone instead of just block caller.
| hangonhn wrote:
| That's definitely a bad life tip. The square itself is still
| call "Tiananmen". Even if the Chinese government censor any
| mention of the massacre, simply mentioning the name of the
| location won't trigger it because it's like saying "Capital
| Mall" -- it's a place people go. For that to remotely work, you
| would have to actually say "Tiananmen Square Massacre" but I
| doubt most people would be able to say it in Mandarin. (In
| Chinese it's called the June 4th incident so Tiananmen isn't
| even mentioned).
|
| I'm now actually more curious about the meme itself. I wonder
| if the actual motive is to get non-Chinese people to be more
| curious about the event. If so, it would actually be a meme or
| a mental virus. Fascinating to say the least.
| hinkley wrote:
| Streisand effect is a real thing.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| There is copypasta of banned expressions that you can use.
| cogburnd02 wrote:
| this is one fugly text file:
|
| https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-378593A1.txt
| thomas wrote:
| Yes, most government data is awful but it's usually at least
| workable. That's why sites like sec.report and
| https://fccid.report exist. https://www.ecfr.gov is actually
| good though.
| dfdub10 wrote:
| How has nobody mentioned Ajit Pai overturning net neutrality
| which to me is exactly when the robo calls stopped flossing in.
| With Net Neutrality in place callers had to get your permission
| to call. And shocker, you remove oversight and allow free acces
| to run scams how is anyone surprised robocalls have become a huge
| issue.
| ncphil wrote:
| For landlines we had a Do Not Call Registry, but nothing like
| that was ever implemented for mobile as far as I know. For me,
| false or misleading CallerIDs are the most immediate problem.
| If we required commercial entities to clearly identify
| themselves in their CallerID (the way many states require
| commercial vehicles to display their business name and contact
| info) then we'd have a fair shot of cutting down phone spam
| through "technical means". T-Mobile does a fairly good job of
| identifying mobile phone and text spam, and gives you a block
| button for the ones it doesn't catch: but it's a stopgap.
| Almost all the "landline" (VOIP) calls coming into my house
| already go to voicemail thanks to around a dozen call
| treatments I've got in place: but delayed notice of an
| important call from the proverbial clueless bank or doctor's
| office with a blank CallerID is a constant risk.
| jffry wrote:
| > With Net Neutrality in place callers had to get your
| permission to call
|
| That's not at all what Net Neutrality is, and its removal as
| policy wouldn't directly enable more of these spam calls from
| happening
| willis936 wrote:
| Interesting take, however your observation is opposite of
| reality. Can you explain why the number of robocalls have
| exploded soon after Ajit Pai's policies went into place?
| thesis wrote:
| Illegal (fraud) robocalls need to stop.
|
| With that being said, I'm tired of the carriers / phone creators
| deciding when I want to answer my phone.
|
| An example of what I'm talking about:
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251165362
|
| My bank was trying to get a hold of me due to them turning off
| autopay, and I wasn't answering their calls because it doesn't
| show a phone number or anything. Just "Spam Likely"
|
| IMO I'd rather see all calls coming to my phone, and send them to
| VM if I want. Devices nowadays even have the capability to block
| calls from outside your contact list if you want.
|
| These decisions should be up to me! Not some blackhole where
| algorithms decide if I should receive the call or not.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you feel the same about email? When I look
| in my gmail spam bucket it's insane how much stuff I never see
| (thankfully!).
| gbear605 wrote:
| It's interesting - my gmail spambox is mostly accurate, but I
| get actual important emails there a few times a month. I've
| received real emails from my bank there before! I've received
| emails from Google services there before!!
|
| On the other hand, I frequently get obvious spam emails in my
| inbox, including from one address that I weekly received a
| spam email. It was a very obvious email ("increase the size
| of your member with this one quick trick"), and each time I
| would mark it as spam, but Gmail never realized that that
| address was spam. I eventually just had to create my own
| filter.
|
| I'm not sure what's up with it, but they need to rethink
| their approach.
| thesis wrote:
| No, I don't feel the same way about Junk email. I can go
| through it at my leisure and there's history there. Carriers
| potentially blocking calls is just some black box deciding
| what's "safe" for me.
|
| There are issues with mail servers being blacklisted and they
| can't send emails to me. But there's actual visibility to
| that. You can look up mail server IP's and get to the root
| issue of why you're blacklisted.
|
| Honestly I'd rather the government focus on the endless junk
| mail I receive to my home than anything. I spend more time
| sorting that rather than hitting decline on my phone.
| orev wrote:
| The email that makes it into your Junk folder are just the
| "probably spam" ones. Email providers are outright blocking
| "definitely spam" messages, where the decision is being
| made by a black box. There's no history you can check for
| those, and the decisions are made in a much more
| complicated way than just checking an IP blocklist.
| ridaj wrote:
| I think it's likely that some banks will start building better
| communication features inside their apps because of this. IMO
| the telecom companies in the US lack not just the incentives
| but the skill to fix the spam problem, so people are just
| becoming blind to phone calls and texts, with phones abetting
| that blindness with spam filtering features.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I'll never do banking on a device that I consider to be
| compromised from first activation. You're one exploit away
| from having your account drained.
| ridaj wrote:
| Well in that case I guess you're not banking on the phone
| even if they solve the spam call problem...
| salawat wrote:
| You (you "You" and royal "You") need to recognize that
| industry/developers have been making these kinds of decisions
| for decades, but in the last two decades that I've been paying
| attention, matters have grossly accelerated to the point that
| some tech platforms are basically entirely driven by industry
| desires, and not users.
|
| In fact, I'm getting to the point I may start deprecating
| "Users" in my lexicon, and replacing it with "victims" upon
| whom technical implementations are "inflicted".
|
| Because I can't honestly say that industry has been looking out
| for anyone but industry in a looooong time.
| beckingz wrote:
| Daily Active Victims is a good metric.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Turn off spam call detection, if possible. Let all calls not
| from contacts go to voicemail. Turn on voicemail transcription
| (unless you're concerned about the privacy implications). Spam
| calls rarely leave voicemails. Everyone else has been trained
| to leave a VM if there's an actual business or personal need to
| do so.
|
| This is a very old problem. In the days of landlines, we
| screened our calls with the answering machine for this very
| reason.
| vmception wrote:
| For the past two years Ive been needing to clear my ios
| voicemails every few months because they are full of bounced
| calls that left a voicemail
|
| There is also a deleted messages section, automatically made
| for some bounced callers, that needs to be cleared
|
| Non solution offered here
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Also younger siblings. "Tell them I'm not home!"
| function_seven wrote:
| > _Spam calls rarely leave voicemails._
|
| This is quickly becoming not the case! I get several spam
| voicemails every week now. They're intentionally hitting my
| voicemail by placing a "dummy" call to my phone, then another
| call a second later (forcing it to my VM due to the first
| call being in the middle of setup). The first call is
| disconnected before I have a chance to answer it. It's only
| there to force the next call to voicemail.
|
| The voicemails all follow a similar pattern. Here's one:
|
| _Hi this is Josh calling. We spoke some time ago about solar
| for your home but the timing was bad so I wanted to reach
| back out because we have a brand new program that 's only for
| a limited time..._
|
| and it goes on from there. I've never once spoken to "Josh"
| about solar for my home.
|
| These are call placement patterns that should be trivial to
| detect on the carrier's end.
| vmception wrote:
| I get the ones where the robot breathes in and out, at the
| beginning of sentences, and sighs to sound more human
| endymi0n wrote:
| I'm always wondering why Americans allow their lawmakers to get
| away with this.
|
| In order to stop robocalls, you just need to do three things:
|
| * Flat out ban them and make it illegal to route them at
| network handover points
|
| * Make caller ID mandatory with a reachable number to call back
| to
|
| * Create an authority caring for those robocall reports
|
| Then, put heavy fines on violations and go enforce the heck out
| of it. That's exactly what the EU did pretty much in the
| infancy of this technology.
|
| I can't recall ever getting a robocall here in Germany.
|
| That being said, my bet is this being a tragedy of the commons,
| as the only two parties in the system seem to heavily rely on
| the tool for fundraising -- oh and they probably also make
| millions for some selected members of congress... -\\_(tsu)_/-
| gwd wrote:
| > I can't recall ever getting a robocall here in Germany.
|
| The simpler reason you haven't gotten a robocall on your cell
| phone^W^W"handy" is that the _caller pays_ a non-negligible
| amount of money to call you (at some point it was around
| PS0.25). This makes the sort of mass spam calling that 's
| happening in the US uneconomical. In the US, the _receiver_
| pays the cost of the tower-to-mobile connection; meaning it
| 's fractions of a cent to call anyone, even on their cell
| phone.
|
| Making the US more like Europe in that regard would
| instantaneously get rid of a massive amount of spam calls,
| without the need for any more complicated regulation.
| bluGill wrote:
| It would also get rid of a massive amount of useful calls.
| Germany doesn't get robo calls, but that is at the
| expensive of not being able to use their phones as a phone
| when they want to.
|
| Back when cell minutes were expensive what Germany has made
| sense. Today nearly everyone in the US has unlimited voice
| minutes (in and out) and nobody worries about how long they
| talk to each other.
| vanusa wrote:
| _I 'm always wondering why Americans allow their lawmakers to
| get away with this._
|
| Generations of brainwashing in support of the divine right of
| "free enterprise" has something to do with it, I suspect.
| ectopod wrote:
| A large proportion of the spam that makes it into my gmail
| inbox is from American politicians and I'm not even American.
| They are indeed part of the problem.
| msoad wrote:
| The US government failed attempts to stop robocalls is my
| favorite example of how ineffective and corrupt the system is. We
| all know that in a healthy system it is an easy problem to solve.
| All the lobbyist and corporate interest is goin in the way. It's
| ironic because the government officials know how directly the
| general population feel the pain of this one and sometimes really
| want to do the unordinary and focus on interest of The People but
| can't get it done!
| vlovich123 wrote:
| This argument is interesting to me because why wouldn't the
| same apply to email spam?
| howdydoo wrote:
| Phone service is an oligopoly. Spectrum is sold by the
| government and it is EXPENSIVE. No new companies can join the
| market, and customers have nowhere to go. So prices are high
| and companies do the bare minimum.
|
| Email is more of a fair marketplace. In theory, you can even
| roll your own on a $5/mo VPS. Switching costs are low. You
| can forward messages anywhere. So email providers cannot
| charge exorbitant rates or require 12-month contracts, and
| they must provide better service to retain customers.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You're thinking about cellular service. Most of the phone
| spam I'm aware of is coming from VoIP connections and the
| reason there's so much of it is it's extremely cheap.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I think you have this backwards. E-mail is actually a good
| example of _why_ you shouldn 't open up communications
| systems too much. Because they're more or less free to
| send, people who want to send advertisements send loads of
| them. This makes e-mail entirely unusable unless you are
| very proactive in restricting who can send mail to you.
| Technical limitations like SPF, DKIM, and so on only
| prevent the worst abuses. What does really work has been IP
| blacklisting and reputation systems that more or less make
| rolling your e-mail very difficult.
|
| Yes, you _can_ roll your own e-mail; but you 're taking on
| the challenge of both getting spam out of your incoming
| mail as well as getting your outgoing mail to be
| deliverable to everyone else. As a homelab[0] training
| exercise, it's fun; but businesses that need reliable mail
| just outsource it all to Google or Microsoft. The end
| result is that e-mail users more or less reinvented the
| restrictive systems that phone service _used_ to have
| before the FCC opened POTS up to everyone that wanted to
| call an entire state about the their car 's extended
| warranty.
|
| When you mention spectrum limitations, that's for providing
| _mobile_ phone service; which is only tangentially related
| to the actual phone call routing these days. Just getting a
| dialable number or placing a call is hilariously cheap and
| plenty of services of varying quality will let you do this
| in bulk. Providing access to that number over wireless
| spectrum is the expensive part; but you don 't need
| spectrum to spam people.
|
| [0] Don't try to take the word "homelab" literally and run
| your mail server on your residential ISP. It won't work.
| tdeck wrote:
| 1) Emails are decentralized and the telephone network is much
| less so. It's controlled by a relatively small number of
| companies. I can't run my own server and connect it to the
| VoIP network and start sending packets. The major companies
| can all agree to ban caller ID spoofing and block any
| carriers that allow it to happen, or at least block any of
| them for domestic numbers. But they don't.
|
| 2) We actually have kinda solved the caller ID problem with
| email. We have SPF and message signing and the Telco industry
| seems to be dragging their feet to implement equivalent
| caller ID verification technology. Imagine if you could block
| a spam caller and report their endpoint on the telephone
| network. They'd at least have to purchase a new number each
| time this happens, rather than just impersonating as they do
| now.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Is email _truly_ decentralized? Roll your own and you 'll
| encounter issues with deliver ability just from being new
| in the market. Large providers manage their own block lists
| and prevent some messages from some ips being delivered at
| all. This is a practice that shuts down decentralization
| and creates an oligopoly, although I agree it isn't as
| severe as the tele situation.
|
| There are ways to enter the VoIP market by purchasing trunk
| access but iirc that's still controlled by a few big
| players.
|
| Another difference is that email in your junk folder still
| contains the information. Blocking a spam call means no
| information gets stored.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > Emails are decentralized and the telephone network is
| much less so. It's controlled by a relatively small number
| of companies
|
| E-mail is largely controlled by a small number of
| companies. The vast majority of people use Microsoft,
| Google or Yahoo Mail. The reasons it's not centralized is
| the same as with phone numbers - interoperability.
|
| As you note, all the major e-mail providers already
| implement SPF and DKIM which is more advanced than anything
| the carriers are talking about implementing. Spam remains a
| problem. I think spammers will evolve the same techniques
| of attacking and taking over "valid" endpoints and routing
| traffic through them as they do with e-mail today. Of
| course, this is a good thing. It raises the expense and
| risks associated with spam phone calls. Still, I think the
| claim that any technical measures will stop these calls is
| unhelpful hyperbole.
|
| Ultimately the only way to actually stop these is to starve
| these services for funds which will be lobbied against
| heavily by large players who rely on these services
| (knowingly or unknowingly) to drive sales.
| briffle wrote:
| Honestly, its like all the huge DDoS attacks by spoofed UDP
| packets. In both cases, their is already tech in place, that
| prevent you from forwarding packets for networks that are not
| 'under' you (BCP 38 came out in what, 2000?) But their is very
| little incentive for the provider to do the work.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| This doesn't sound like an informed breakdown of the issue
| thewebcount wrote:
| For me this is the most infuriating part:
|
| > The Commission does not collect criminal fines for violations
| of section 227. > If a party fails to pay a forfeiture, we refer
| the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice for further
| enforcement action. We have referred to the Department of Justice
| forfeiture orders involving violations of section 227 by Adrian
| Abramovich, Marketing Strategy Leaders, Inc., and Marketing
| Leaders, Inc. (Abramovich), Philip Roesel, dba Wilmington
| Insurance Quotes, and Best Insurance Contracts, Inc. (Roesel),
| Affordable Enterprises of Arizona, LLC, and Scott Rhodes a.k.a.
| Scott David Rhodes, Scott D. Rhodes, Scott Platek, Scott P.
| Platek (Rhodes). 34 _During calendar year 2020, the Attorney
| General did not collect any forfeiture penalties or criminal
| fines for violations of section 227 cases that the Commission has
| referred._ We lack knowledge about the U.S. Department of
| Justice's collections beyond those cases.
|
| It said earlier that these entities owe tens of millions of
| dollars in forfeitures. Why were they not collected? If these
| criminals know that there's no penalty, they'll continue acting
| badly. (And we can see already that they do this. They change
| names and start over.)
| xxpor wrote:
| Are you upset about the lack of criminal penalties imposed
| directly by the FCC? That's mostly just an organizational
| issue. The FCC isn't law enforcement. They can only impose
| civil penalties.
|
| Referring the issue to the Justice dept is really the only
| thing they can do. I think this goes for all independent
| agencies. Of course, once it's referred over there, it goes in
| the big tumbler of prioritization for the FBI/US Attorneys....
| and I'm not shocked they wouldn't immediately jump on a non-
| violent, extremely technically complex case.
| bluGill wrote:
| They should jump on all cases. That their job is hard is not
| an excuse to not do it.
| ncphil wrote:
| Can't help but think that if marijuana
| decriminalization/legalization finally happens, law
| enforcement will be rooting around for other low hanging
| fruit. Seems like this just might fit the bill. Imagining
| heavily armed SWAT teams breaking down the doors of call
| centers and swarming in. On that happy note...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| based on how law enforcement has worked historically it
| probably depends on the racial demographics and political
| leanings of the perpetrators
| degenerate wrote:
| In today's telecom world where everything is tracked and logged
| down to the microsecond, it's extremely angering that the only
| reason we still get robocalls is because the players in the
| telecom game are making _a lot of money from letting them
| happen_.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Phones and snail mail have been supplanted by equivalent
| Internet services, and both are trying to stay alive/relevant
| by selling out to annoying commercial interests.
|
| Telegrams gave way to phones, but it was never possible to spam
| someone with telegrams, and they had a cost per word.
| tdeck wrote:
| If telcos want the phone to be relevant, this is the wrong
| way to go about it. Just 10 years ago I answered my phone
| when it rang, even with an unknown number. Does anybody do
| that anymore? It's become nearly unusable, for example, as a
| way for businesses to contact customers they have an actual
| relationship with because of all the spam.
| thewebcount wrote:
| > It's become nearly unusable, for example, as a way for
| businesses to contact customers they have an actual
| relationship with because of all the spam.
|
| On top of that the telcos are joining in on the fun. I am
| an AT&T cell phone subscriber and in the last month they've
| started robo-calling me non-stop to sign up for their
| ailing DirecTV service. Who in their right mind would
| subscribe to that with all the better streaming options
| available? But the worst part is that they technically
| aren't breaking the rules themselves because we do have an
| existing business relationship (if you can call paying my
| bill on time and doing everything in my power not to
| otherwise interact with them a relationship).
| ktkoffroth wrote:
| I recently questioned this when setting up my mother and
| grandfather with TV and internet for their new house. The
| internet TV provider either don't have, or charge so much
| extra for channels they consider "essential" (that's
| another issue) that it's not worth getting the service,
| as the price is equivalent or more to a satellite TV
| provider.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I'm not 100% sure, but that may be a scam.
|
| I recently got one of those, and I'm not an AT&T
| customer.
| monkpit wrote:
| A scam or a dodgy 3rd party (or both?). DirecTV has a
| reseller program where anyone can become a "retailer".
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > Who in their right mind would subscribe to that with
| all the better streaming options available?
|
| Large swaths of the US can't get usable broadband. These
| people use satellite TV services. Of course that market
| is already developed so growth requires pestering the
| people with better choices available.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I'd really like to be able to use my phone for real
| relationships with natural persons too even if they're
| not in my contact list.
| monkpit wrote:
| But you're assuming that the ATT/DirectTV calls are legit
| and direct from HQ. DirecTV is resold through 3rd parties
| all the time, I am pretty sure these calls are from a 3rd
| party or even a scam.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Imagine if nobody ever used or knew about traditional
| phones, and then someone came up with the "Phone app":
|
| "Yea, so here is an app you will love! Install it, and it
| allows anyone, anywhere, anytime, to interrupt whatever you
| are doing on your device, background whatever app you are
| running, cause it to ring, buzz, and notify! Further, if
| you press the green button, it will allow that random
| person to start talking to you."
|
| Even if it managed to get past either of the app stores'
| rules, who would install such an intrusive app?
|
| Yet, every smartphone sold today has that exact annoying
| app pre-installed!
| charcircuit wrote:
| Why would you frame it like that? It's all about how you
| market it.
| phkahler wrote:
| Imagine if it also reliably indicated who was calling you
| and had super easy blocking capability.
|
| Also, what if you could set time and day for availability
| - i.e. for work related numbers.
| zipswitch wrote:
| ridaj wrote:
| US telcos know at best two things at this point: keep the
| network up and collect rent. They cannot solve complicated
| social problems like spam or internet security. They just
| don't have the skills or the willingness to invest. We will
| all continue to pay them if only for internet access, and
| for a good price too thanks to countless mergers leaving
| consumers with few choices, but they are otherwise
| transforming into dumber and dumber pipes at a pretty fast
| clip. There's more profit to be made for them being a dumb
| pipe while device and OS manufacturers pick up the security
| / spam slack for free (eg, how much is anyone actually
| willing to pay for spam filtering) because it lets them
| provide a trusted environment to sell apps and ads in.
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(page generated 2021-12-29 23:00 UTC)