[HN Gopher] FCC imposes record penalty against transnational ill...
___________________________________________________________________
FCC imposes record penalty against transnational illegal
robocalling operation
Author : kimi
Score : 180 points
Date : 2023-08-04 12:26 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.fcc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.fcc.gov)
| pasttense01 wrote:
| I think this is mostly a PR gimmick as I don't think much of the
| money is collectible.
|
| I would think it should not be all that difficult for telephone
| companies to implement spam blocking measures: so why isn't this
| happening?
| insanitybit wrote:
| I don't know if it's still the case but Verizon used to _charge
| you_ to block spam calls - so if you didn 't pay and they
| _knew_ you were being called by a spam number, they would still
| let it go through. Absolutely insane. It was something like $4
| a month.
| scns wrote:
| They should be fined too. Trying to rip off their customers
| instead of protecting them.
| lolinder wrote:
| See my other comment. The FCC is claiming to have finally done
| that, instructing providers to completely cut off this
| operator.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000227
| 6DM wrote:
| This is very similar to advice on the internet given to
| people, "Just block the number that you got a spam call
| from."
|
| Unfortunately, spam calls come from a new random number every
| time, ensuring that blocking the number doesn't work. Also,
| the number is spoofed, I even got a call from my own number
| once.
|
| My understanding is they can easily just setup a new
| route/new ip/new account and start making calls again.
| lolinder wrote:
| This would be less like setting up a new IP address and
| more like setting up a whole new AS. Sure, it can be done,
| but it costs the scammer a lot more than a simple blocked
| number.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| To those complaining about getting constant calls. This is
| fixable if you want to fix it.
|
| 1. Set up voicemail
|
| 2. Set to ignore all calls from numbers not in your phone book.
|
| 3. Resist the FOMO that they count on you being suckered into.
|
| This is just a form of "you may have already won!" The Ned
| Flanders moment of "but what if it's an emergency?" Emergencies
| don't come from random numbers. Random numbers with legit calls
| will leave messages.
|
| Take back control of your time. You aren't thrall to your phone.
| sdfignaionio wrote:
| >This is just a form of "you may have already won!"
|
| If someone contacts you claiming you have won a prize, and it
| appears to be from a real but shady business (e.g. a car
| dealership), consider falling for it. The scam is most likely
| illegal and you may be able to collect. Your local government
| should have a consumer protection agency that can help you do
| so. Just keep your cool and document everything.
|
| I've taken two car dealerships to court for this. It was fun
| and profitable.
|
| Also, it appears the scam is illegal at the federal level.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/...
|
| I am not a lawyer. You should read your local laws.
| smeej wrote:
| How "profitable" are we talking about here? The time expense
| of going to court can be pretty high, but for a high enough
| reward, I'd consider "falling for" many things!
| sdfignaionio wrote:
| I got settlement offers of $500 and $1000, the amounts of
| the advertised prizes, before going to court. In the first
| case I got the offer as soon as the consumer protection
| agency e-mailed the dealership. In the second case I got
| the offer as soon as they received formal notice of suit.
| Filing the reports took me about fifteen minutes. Filling
| out the notice of suit took me about an hour, most of which
| was research.
|
| I took them to court because the settlement offers
| contained clauses I didn't like. I could have recovered the
| money with less work. Going to court took an afternoon,
| most of which was spent sitting in a waiting room.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I think there's a non-zero risk that you'll eventually run
| afoul of local organized crime like this.
| xp84 wrote:
| Biggest problem I see is if you're checking your voicemail, you
| have to at least start to listen to every one of the scammer
| call voicemails if you're going to catch the real ones. It's
| tedious.
| kneebonian wrote:
| I tried that approach for a little bit. They ended up filling
| up my voicemail box within like 4 or 5 days.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Huh. I've never had telemarketers leave messages. Their
| system seemed to detect and give up.
|
| If that's what other people experience then yeah, this may
| not be a silver bullet.
| ehnto wrote:
| I wonder if it depends on the pause in the voicemail
| automated reply. Their systems detect if someone is talking
| before connecting I believe, I pause before talking to
| unknown numbers and you usually get some white noise then
| it hangs up. Versus a real person who would probably say
| "Hello?!"
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I own a business. What you propose isn't really a option.
| People leave a voicemail, telling me to call them back. Even if
| I do so right away I almost always get voicemail. Even calling
| back 10 minutes later and then 30 results in...voicemail. If I
| leave them a message or text to call me back again the universe
| often chances it to be when I'm in the bathroom or driving.
|
| It's infuriating.
| psd1 wrote:
| I can't speak for your customer base but, personally, I
| despise being called.
|
| 95% of calls from businesses are announcements rather than
| conversations. There is zero need to interrupt me in real-
| time to tell me my car is ready; it is not going to make me
| come any quicker.
|
| SMS is far less invasive.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| totally agree: asynchronous messaging fits the idea of
| maintaining momentum, for me anyway, and for most folks i
| know for decades.
| glennpratt wrote:
| When my doctor calls, I cannot get a call back through their
| system, I've tried, and I don't have a list of their outgoing
| numbers.
| jjav wrote:
| > To those complaining about getting constant calls. This is
| fixable if you want to fix it.
|
| For people who are even remotely customer-facing their job
| involves answering calls from unknown numbers, so that's not a
| solution.
| aomix wrote:
| Very fixable but something about reading strategies for proper
| use of the phone makes me really angry. It's on me to be on
| guard and suspicious at all times instead of using the phone to
| make calls and not thinking about it besides that. Every way I
| can communicate is out to get me!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 100% agree. It's ridiculous that we need to gatekeep an
| onslaught of people ringing our phones and doorbells wanting
| to sell us or defraud us.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I have been doing this for years and it creates a steady stream
| of problems when people change numbers without telling me. The
| spam situation is so apocalyptic that I deal with these
| problems as the lesser evil, but it seems very weird to present
| this as a "fix" rather than a steep tradeoff that might work
| for some people.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I don't follow the number change problem. These people
| wouldn't leave a message?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Of course, but the interrupt semantics are lost, which is
| the problem. I'm not convinced that you actually live this,
| because if you did you would know this.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Emergencies don't come from random numbers.
|
| This is an absolute that just plain isn't true. For instance,
| out-of-state PD calling my sister-in-law from an unrecognized
| number to inform her that her sibling had died suddenly. There
| are numerous instances where an unrecognized number may need to
| contact someone for an emergency. I don't say this to disagree
| with the general sentiment of your post, but I do disagree with
| that particular statement.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| In that example, would the person not have just left a
| message, "Hi it's Name, please call me back right away"?
|
| I just don't understand how we got to a place where the way
| things worked for decades suddenly doesn't work anymore. We
| would leave our homes and not be reachable. Most urgent calls
| aren't actually "emergencies."
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's partly true, but also sometimes that was a problem.
|
| In the same way mobile phones shouldn't have to worry about
| working with emergency services numbers as before we had
| mobile phones we were still calling them. In other words:
| it is sometimes better to do things that weren't done in
| the past.
| jancsika wrote:
| > I just don't understand how we got to a place where the
| way things worked for decades suddenly doesn't work
| anymore.
|
| You're making up a past that didn't exist. During the
| entire period where caller ID existed in the U.S., I can
| only think of a single person who screened their calls in
| the way you've outlined. (And that person also happened to
| screen calls from known numbers, too, so it doesn't really
| count.) Everyone else would screen obvious calls coming
| from toll free numbers (1-800, etc.), and just take a
| chance on the remaining unknown numbers. An answering
| machine/ringer could be turned off for special occasions,
| but that's no different than putting a cell in airplane
| mode or whatever.
|
| In fact, there was an entire genre of comedy albums devoted
| to messing with incoming telemarketer calls during this
| period. Those albums wouldn't have resonated like they did
| if most people had been screening all unknown numbers.
| atyppo wrote:
| Your second point is very interesting to me as someone born
| in 2000 who's only really known a world where this is true.
| It seems so distant and novel from where we are today.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Doctors refuse to acknowledge the existence of voice mail.
| It might be some perceived legal/liability thing or maybe
| it's just a manifestation of their arrogance, but in my
| experience no doctor will ever leave a voice mail ever. I
| fully expect that if one of my relatives ends up
| incapacitated in the hospital and I'm their first contact,
| the hospital phonecall will go unanswered (not in my
| contacts list, so my phone won't ring) and I'll receive no
| voice mail or SMS.
| isykt wrote:
| If your relative ends up incapacitated, it won't be a
| doctor who calls, it will be a social worker. They will
| leave a message. There are other situations that result
| in a person not being able to answer their phone: being
| asleep, being in a movie theater, being on an airplane,
| being in a tunnel, being on a camping trip, having a cell
| phone that malfunctioned, having a cell phone with a dead
| battery, being on another call when the call was
| received, being out of the country and using a local
| SIM...
| supertrope wrote:
| Some doctors offices interpret HIPAA's privacy rule as
| not letting them release any information until they've
| verified the far end of the phone call by asking for your
| name and DOB. So VM is out. I've seen others let you
| specify on the intake form: Full voicemail OK? Y/N. Brief
| voicemail OK? Y/N.
| jjulius wrote:
| >In that example, would the person not have just left a
| message, "Hi it's Name, please call me back right away"?
|
| Sure, but whether or not that suffices for someone is
| pretty circumstantial.
|
| Like I said, I don't disagree with your general sentiment,
| just the absolute. And hey, change happens, c'est la vie.
| isykt wrote:
| How would picking up the phone made any difference here? The
| sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you checked your
| voicemail isn't going to change that.
|
| The same goes for "But what if my kid is throwing up at
| school?" They'll deal with it, or someone from your contacts
| will probably text you.
|
| As a sibling comment said, this was our lives for the decades
| between when the telephone was invented and when cell phones
| became ubiquitous. I promise it'll be okay if you don't leap
| to answer every unknown call that lights up your screen.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| > The sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you
| checked your voicemail isn't going to change that.
|
| Maybe so, but my cousin passed away suddenly nearly 10
| years ago and I was the one who received the call because
| his family was out of town.
|
| The thought of missing that call because I had to disable
| unknown numbers because we live in a society that doesn't
| value privacy enough to leave people alone is really
| depressing.
| supertrope wrote:
| The power of technology means anyone in the world can
| initiate contact with anyone else. Without a method to
| moderate initial contact, spam filters, ignore buttons,
| social etiquette, etc. our phones would ring
| continuously, our inboxes would get 10,000 emails per
| day, and our phones would chime continuously with push
| notifications. Spam is 99% of raw email traffic, and
| robocalls are a significant fraction of total call count.
| Nomorobo estimated 1/3.
| jjulius wrote:
| >How would picking up the phone made any difference here?
| The sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you checked
| your voicemail isn't going to change that.
|
| Sure, in that specific instance. But it doesn't have to be
| strictly for a death. Spouse gets into a car crash, or has
| some kind of medical emergency, where they're still alive
| but they're trying to get in touch with someone from the
| family to notify them of their whereabouts and current
| condition.
|
| >I promise it'll be okay if you don't leap to answer every
| unknown call that lights up your screen.
|
| I think you missed the part where I said I agreed with the
| general sentiment but disagreed with that specific
| absolute, but thanks for being a touch condescending.
| bleepblop wrote:
| I once got a spoofed call from the number 666-2012. They told me
| I was going to hell with an obviously modulated voice. I just
| replied, "Finally!!" The person on the other end didn't know how
| to react to that. This was probably around 2009ish? After that
| time though, random calls were never fun like that.
|
| They became predatory from then on out. I tried to play around at
| first, messing with them and such. Then it became relentless and
| the blocking never seemed to work. Then I just switched to
| letting random numbers go to VM. That seemed to have cut off
| about 50% of robocalls over time. Then eventually I got a pixel
| phone. Just the call screening alone is worth it. I may get 1 or
| 2 random numbers calling me a month now. And I usually don't even
| know they called unless I look at my call log.
|
| I am happy that trend is starting to be picked up by other phone
| makers. Good on the FCC for clamping down on this stuff. It has
| been a long term problem and there is still a lot more of these
| people out there. I hope they learned a lot and can utilize this
| knowledge in the future to shut more people down.
| Arrath wrote:
| > After that time though, random calls were never fun like
| that.
|
| My aging father loves to play with the scammers any chance he
| gets. One day he got the classic "Grandpa! Oh thank god you
| answered, I've been arrested in Vegas and I need bail money or
| terrible things are going to happen!"
|
| After a few beats of shocked silence he launches into
| "BILLY?!?!?! The family has been trying to find you since your
| mom ran off with you 15 years ago! Where is she? Where have you
| been? Are you well? We just want you to come back home! We've
| had a PI looking for you for over a decade. Give me the address
| of the jail and I'll send our lawyer to pick you up."
|
| Usually they're not equipped to deal with such a plot twist and
| just hang up.
| tiltowait wrote:
| I really enjoyed messing with the "Microsoft tech support"
| calls I would frequently get. In addition to keeping them on
| hold for half an hour "while my computer turned on" (aka I made
| and ate breakfast), I liked to try to follow their directions
| on wholly inappropriate hardware and seeing how they responded.
| After telling one guy that "chrome" wasn't a recognized
| command, he asked me what was on my screen and got very excited
| when I replied, "READY."
|
| Alas, my old Commodore 64 proved scam-proof.
|
| (As an aside, I remain _amazed_ by the scammers ' patience.)
| pixl97 wrote:
| Kitboga on youtube is a great channel if you want to watch
| scammers get strung along for hours while he pretends to be a
| confused old man while actively getting the services used by
| the scammers cancelled.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Why did you submit this when you surely knew there was a giant
| thread on it already? Help keep the conversation organized
| jjulius wrote:
| >... when you surely knew...
|
| What makes you so confident? The discussion in the original
| post was for a TechCrunch URL, not the FCC url used here, so HN
| wasn't going to flag the dupe when OP posted this. Not only
| that, but the thread for the TechCrunch article is currently
| post #98, all the way back on page four[1] at the time of this
| comment. HN doesn't have a search feature either. This[2] is
| all one needs to do, rather than wasn't energy chastising
| someone based on an assumption.
|
| Edit: What an odd account. It looks like this user, by and
| large, just points out duplicate threads, rather than diving
| into discussions.
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/?p=4
|
| [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36999524
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Not odd, recently pointing out dupes because they have been
| getting out of control lately....
|
| The TechCrunch article is way down page 4 at time of comment
| because it's old news already! Want to talk about it? Great!
| Go there!
|
| The point of the dupe calling out is to stop conversations
| from repeating and being split up across multiple threads.
| When the discussion consolidates around one thread (whether
| it's the official post or not) that's where it should stay.
| OP could share the post and then comment with a link to the
| main discussion thread.
|
| Guessing the OP was up on the story because of an earlier
| post about the FCC thing a day or so ago.
|
| HN doesn't have a search? what are you talking about? The HN
| search powered by Algolia is excellent. Bottom of the site.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Want to talk about it? Great! Go there!
|
| No point in giving someone grief for not noticing something
| that they have to go digging for and might miss along the
| way.
|
| >The point of the dupe calling out...
|
| I know what the point is, but there's a better way to do it
| - in fact, I linked to an example of someone doing just
| that. Your comment goes above and beyond that in a negative
| way and doesn't "assume good faith"[1].
|
| >HN doesn't have a search? what are you talking about? The
| HN search powered by Algolia is excellent. Bottom of the
| site.
|
| I've been here long enough and have never noticed it, so
| I'll again give OP a pass there, too.
|
| I think you need to find something better to do with your
| time. The fact that you do this so often and that you've
| escalated to attacking someone for it demonstrates that you
| might be letting duplicate posts on an internet forum
| bother you just a bit too much.
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Tao3300 wrote:
| You need a different hobby. There's no junior mod award. I
| was under the impression this was account was a bot.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Aside: what's with the no HTML page option for these news
| releases... Docx? TXT? That's why we end up on media report
| sites to talk about this
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989845
| decremental wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wish Canada would be this effective.
|
| Unfortunately, our telecoms control the regulators, instead of
| the telecoms living in fear of the regulators.
| voytec wrote:
| dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989845
| the88doctor wrote:
| Does this mean no one will be trying to reach me about my car's
| extended warranty?
| duxup wrote:
| I'm at about 2 calls a day.
|
| But it ebbs and flows and there are days I get 6+ calls.
|
| it's horrible.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Yeah, I'm at 2 calls minimum, plenty of days where I hit 4+
| though. I don't pick up my phone to unknown callers anymore.
| e40 wrote:
| Me, too. I've noticed a weird trend. Voicemail that is 20
| seconds of silence. I can hear the sound of breathing. No hello
| or anything. Once I picked up and got the same thing. I even
| said "I can hear you breathing" and got the hang up after 20
| seconds. They're all from different numbers so I don't think I
| have a stalker.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| With smartphones you can sortof mitigte them but this really
| ruined non smart phones
| duxup wrote:
| Agreed, google and apple do a pretty good job flagging them.
|
| Doesn't mitigate the disturbance entirely, but it helps.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| My main phone is a (non-smart) VOIP phone. It gets zero spam.
|
| I have a mobile, but it's old, and the battery no longer
| holds much charge, so despite being mobile, it never moves;
| it sits on my desk plugged into power. I only have it so I
| can receive and respond to SMS challenges.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have a business line on my cellphone.
|
| That means it's published, and is known as a business line.
|
| I probably get 30 s[c|p]am calls a day on it. None of them are
| the ones these guys ran.
| pindab0ter wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious as to why this isn't a problem in Europe. I
| live in the Netherlands and no one I know has ever received even
| a single call.
|
| What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?
| cge wrote:
| In addition to the other comments here, there seems to be a
| significant difference in the ease of making calls from
| different numbers in the US vs EU, both in caller id and in the
| call source. I get constant spam calls to my US phone lines,
| never from the same numbers and now usually from geographically
| nearby area codes (same-area-code spam seems passe these days).
| I get a handful of spam calls a year to my EU phone lines, but
| they are usually from international, outside-EU numbers,
| seemingly in hard-to-pursue jurisdictions. (This ignores some
| of the impressive texts in the EU a few years ago that managed
| to come from short names of real banks; those seem to have been
| an unusual exception and I assume the exploit involved was
| fixed.)
|
| Looking at VoIP sites, I can easily get a phone number in
| seconds, for cents, with almost no documentation, and any area
| code, in the US. Lines in the EU cost significantly more, take
| longer, and often require documentation, especially for
| geographic area codes.
|
| I expect that the type of access used in the US for these calls
| simply isn't feasible in the EU, and so the calls there need to
| be from 'real' numbers in countries where the scammers are
| safe, which then makes them easy to filter out and far less
| effective. The access in the US just seems weirdly open.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And a stronger culture of "calling party pays" outside of
| North America.
|
| VoIP rates to call a euro mobile number can be $$$. Meanwhile
| in Canada, it's the same cost as a landline, and available
| for fractions of a cent to any nobody like me.
| HPMOR wrote:
| This is complete speculation, but I imagine it is a function
| of the United States developing telecommunications first (+1
| area code). People needed easy entry to the communication
| networks and screening bad actors was not a major concern.
| Whereas European and other regions developed their
| infrastructure later, when these threats were more salient.
| njovin wrote:
| My experience with Robocalls (I get 25-30 per day) has been
| that the overwhelming majority are trying to run a scam against
| Medicair (the US government's health program for older people)
| by fetching some personal information from the victim, which
| they then use to send fraudulent bills to Medicair.
|
| So I assume that the ease of scamming the US government in this
| regard contributes to us being the victims here.
|
| Edit: I hadn't RTFA and now I see this fine was about auto
| warranty scams. Second theory: lots of Americans are living
| below the poverty line, public transit sucks here so most
| people need cars to get to work, and it can get risky/expensive
| relying on an older vehicle to be able to get to work, so it
| makes an easy target to offer somebody what looks like coverage
| for a likely expensive auto failure for a few hundred dollars.
| supertrope wrote:
| Signing people up for private Medicare plans is not
| fraudulent. Making robocalls to hawk them like is. Thus the
| whole product category becomes shady by association (car
| warranties, solar leases, debt consolidation loans,
| timeshares).
| costco wrote:
| Typical scam looks more like this: They try to get
| information from your Medicare card. Then with your info
| they bill Medicare for $6000 custom back braces while
| sending you a $30 Chinese generic one (some physician who
| wittingly or unwittingly accepted a "work from home" job
| may be signing off on prescriptions for these). Despite
| Medicare policy, they don't care about collecting any copay
| from you, they just want to bill Medicare. The elderly
| person doesn't lose anything but Medicare does obviously.
| See https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.fl
| md.36... for a particularly advanced formulation of this
| scheme.
|
| It's incredibly lucrative and has cost this country tens of
| billions of dollars a year for at least a couple decades. I
| wish more was done about it.
| malaya_zemlya wrote:
| They are rampant in RU and UA. One of the craziest stories is
| how Ukrainian phoine spammers weaponized their skills to coax
| Russians into setting fire to government offices
|
| https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/01/phone-scammers-coa...
| mattmanser wrote:
| You do get the occasional one in the UK. I get one every 2-4
| weeks I'd estimate.
|
| I imagine part of the reason it's not a bigger problem in
| Europe is not a lot of people speak Dutch/German/etc. in the
| countries where these scammers are often calling from. They all
| speak English though.
| robnado wrote:
| My goto is to speak a non-english language that most people
| where I live should know. If they don't understand, I hang
| up. It's a very simple heuristic that allows me to answer
| important calls while filtering out 99% of scammers.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| France had quite a few spam calls for a while. They got the
| (en francais) "This is DHL calling and we have a package for
| you" from a real person...
|
| There are a lot of French speakers in the world in poor
| economic conditions. Probably proportionately more than
| English. But it's still not as bad as English calls in North
| America.
|
| (In Canada, I just respond in broken French to these calls,
| any official call would be able to transfer me to a French
| speaking (and 99.9% certainly bilingual attendant)).
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| American spam calls include clearly midwestern dialect
| (chicago, st louis, with a big distance span from there)
| prerecorded nonsense stories presumably by an unwitting voice
| actor.
|
| I imagine that voice actors in German would be less useful
| because answering often yields a clearly non North American
| accent person clearly complicit in whatever scam is being
| attempted
| supertrope wrote:
| English language. A large pool of marks to robocall, and
| English speaking call center workers make spamming and scamming
| economical. Compared if you needed to find French, Spanish,
| Italian, Dutch, etc speakers.
|
| It's expensive to call EU cellphones. In the US people are
| billed to receive calls (of course these days people usually
| have unmetered calling but the legacy of cellphone numbers not
| costing any more to call than a landline continues).
| PsylentKnight wrote:
| I think that's a good point. There's also the fact that most
| (nearly all?) spam calls come from India, where lots of
| people know English.
| rbultje wrote:
| > What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?
|
| Setting up a business in Europe (for example in the
| Netherlands) requires significant paperwork. In the US, it's
| done in a few seconds. In the US, it requires years of court
| proceedings or (in this case) government agency investigation
| to shut down a business. (No idea how long that takes in
| Europe, but I hope your governments are more powerful than
| this.)
|
| Regulation can be a good thing.
| bluGill wrote:
| Regulation is a double edge sword that often comes back to
| bite you. So is lack of regulation. It is really hard to find
| the right balance.
|
| It being hard to start a business in Europe means that they
| are not as innovative, but they also miss out on many scams.
| pembrook wrote:
| I can assure you, people running robocall scams out of
| Nigeria and Morocco could care less about the ease-of-
| incorporation in the territories where their victims are
| located.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They still need a way to accept payments and ultimately
| funnel money out of those territories, and when moving lots
| of money, a corporation is very convenient.
|
| You can work around it of course but this ultimately
| reduces the profitability of the scams, so better due
| diligence around companies still fights scams by making it
| less profitable.
| kimi wrote:
| Looks like the wind has changed, and they want to give a string
| signal of what is allowable or not. See also
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36975701 from yesterday.
|
| Not sure whether actually get the $300M paid....
| mannykannot wrote:
| "Two of the central players of the operation, Roy M. Cox and
| Aaron Michael Jones, were under lifetime bans against making
| telemarketing calls following lawsuits by the Federal Trade
| Commission and State of Texas."
|
| We can hope that the size of the fine will set the stage for
| some significant jail time, as it seems unlikely that anything
| else will work.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| I had 6 of these per day. Now all of them get blocked by:
|
| https://f-droid.org/packages/me.lucky.silence/
| sh1mmer wrote:
| $300M is a big fine, but if they are saying this scam ring made
| over 500m calls did they really make anything close to this much?
| It would seem surprising to me if you could make anything close
| to $0.60/call with cold calling even if there are whales it just
| seems like a stunt number.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is. Even if they made just $10mil,
| fining them out of existence (and giving precedent for such a
| big fine later) is still a good thing.
| charlieo88 wrote:
| The fine isn't to remove the profit, it's to punish them for
| the 5 billion scam phone calls. They are being fined 5 cents
| per call.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| It's a fine, not a compensation order. The robocalls were
| criminal offences, not just attempts at unfair enrichment. The
| purpose of the fine is to punish the offender and to deter
| others.
| __ryan__ wrote:
| It was 5 _billion_ calls to 500 million numbers over a 3 month
| period.
| mrits wrote:
| 4 billion were to me though
| moneywoes wrote:
| Will this be enforced?
| capableweb wrote:
| Judging by the following part, it seems they'll at least try:
|
| > That enforcement action was taken in coordination with the
| Ohio Attorney General's Office, which brought a lawsuit under
| the Telephone Consumer Protection Act against several entities
| and individuals associated with the enterprise. The Commission
| also proposed a fine and offered the parties a chance to
| respond, which they did not do, resulting in today's
| unprecedented fine. Should the parties not pay the fine
| promptly, this matter will be referred to the U.S. Department
| of Justice for collection.
|
| But maybe the legal/justice system is so broken in the US that
| they'll just ignore it? Hard to imagine, but I don't live there
| so who knows.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| How do they collect it if there are no assets to seize?
| bleepblop wrote:
| The government will garnish your wages and any benefits
| such as social security to the end of your life.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| We're talking about criminal fraudsters. I really doubt
| they just walk into 7 figure jobs at a bank after this
| kind of thing.
| bleepblop wrote:
| Exactly. Being poor is its own kind of prison.
| sh1mmer wrote:
| I'd rather see them force technical measures that fix the problem
| than just issuing fines.
| lolinder wrote:
| According to yesterday's article on the same case, the FCC is
| claiming to _also_ have done just that:
|
| > "Armed with the facts [the FCC] gave phone companies
| permission to cut off this traffic before going one step
| further and directing them to block it outright. We got
| results. Following our action, the number of auto warranty
| calls fell by 99 percent," she [FCC Chairwoman Jessica
| Rosenworcel] wrote.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/03/fcc-fines-robocaller-a-rec...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989845
| fmajid wrote:
| The main measure pushed by the FCC under Ajit Pai (so he was
| not a total waste of oxygen) was SHAKEN/STIR, which is
| basically cryptographically signed Caller ID. Deploying this
| went amazingly rapidly by the standards of the telco industry,
| and specially considering how much legacy there is in the
| landline phone business where the switch makers Lucent and
| Nortel went bust 2 decades ago and obviously their software has
| not seen any updates in that long.
| deelowe wrote:
| I thought shaken/stir was going to do just this. Does anyone
| have inside knowledge as to why this hasn't fixed things yet?
|
| It isn't a hard problem. Once we can trace where the call
| originates, blacklists should be able to snuff this out pretty
| quickly. Once phone operators start getting penalized for this
| sort of thing, the problem will get much better.
| refurb wrote:
| It was interesting what Singapore did. Basically all numbers
| need to be registered, otherwise the default caller ID is
| "Likely SCAM".
|
| The government gave companies a heads up, but even Singapore
| Airlines and a few major banks had to send out emails
| apologizing for their texts being labelled as "Likely Scam"
| right after the change.
|
| Suffice to say legitimate companies got registered really
| quickly.
| smeej wrote:
| Is it harder to spoof a number in Singapore than in the U.S.?
|
| In the U.S., it's trivially easy to make your call look like
| it's coming from whatever number you want, so scammers just
| have caller ID display the real phone number for the bank
| they're pretending to call from.
| fmajid wrote:
| No more, see SHAKEN/STIR:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
| klysm wrote:
| That would result in less money flowing though
| nicechianti wrote:
| [dead]
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Last year, to stop this then-ongoing telemarketing campaign in
| its tracks, the FCC directed all U.S.-based voice service
| providers to cease carrying traffic associated with certain
| members of the enterprise.
|
| I thought it was not permitted (under ITU rules) to refuse to
| carry selected traffic.
|
| Years ago, I was getting robocalls from overseas; at least, the
| voices seemed to be overseas. I asked $SOMEONE[0] to put a stop
| to it, and they said that was illegal. But perhaps ITU rules only
| apply to international calls; or perhaps the ITU[1] has finally
| got off it's ass and done something useful, for a change.
|
| [0] It was years ago; I imagine I asked my landline provider,
| which was probably BT.
|
| [1] The ITU, as far as I can tell, is essentially a body to which
| governments that are members send representatives. They're
| supposed to be engineers; but they're there to represent their
| government's interests, not to improve the global telecom
| network.
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