[HN Gopher] David Frankel is a man on a mission against robocalls
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David Frankel is a man on a mission against robocalls
Author : rbanffy
Score : 169 points
Date : 2024-04-25 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| Scarjit wrote:
| I wonder why this is such a large problem in the US. Here in
| Germany i don't even remember the last time i got a robocall (if
| ever).
| erehweb wrote:
| Maybe because of (from the article)
|
| "At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices
| come from the telecommunications operators. There's an
| imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over
| who gets to invade their telephone versus these other
| interests."
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I hope the modest amount of money it took to bribe the FCC
| commissioners is worth it to them. The FCC allowed 10 or 20
| sociopaths to make modest amounts of money while ruining a
| communication network used by billions.
| flerchin wrote:
| I don't have data, but it seems plausible that niche languages
| receive geometrically fewer attacks. I'm US, and looking at my
| call history 3/11 of the most recent inbound calls were spam
| which was correctly captured by google and I never saw it.
| Symbiote wrote:
| German is hardly niche, it's the 12th most-spoken language
| [1].
|
| Anyway, Britain and (as far as I know) Ireland also don't
| suffer from these robocalls.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_
| num...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It is niche in Indian call centers.
| flerchin wrote:
| 1.6% is pretty niche. Metcalfe's law absolutely applies.
|
| I don't have data to compare between the many countries,
| but anecdotally, Canadians suffer robocalls at a similar
| rate to US-ians.
| ljf wrote:
| I believe (historically at least), local calls in america were
| free - setting up a robocaller could take advantage of this -
| the only cost was energy. In the UK/EU the same calls would
| cost the robocaller money.
|
| Similarly, I understand it is free to send SMS in the states,
| you pay to receive them. Again this is a cost in the UK -
| though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited
| sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be
| rotated.
| bluGill wrote:
| SMS has been free for most people in the US for a long time
| now. For a while Europe was cheaper, but things have changed
| over the last 20 years, and they will continue to change.
| When SMS was cheaper in the EU, voice calls were vastly
| cheaper in the US, so when the EU would use SMS, the US would
| just make a voice call (at the time the US spent 2x as much
| for phone service, but used the phone 5x as much - I'm going
| to call that cheaper but you can read the numbers several
| ways).
|
| Robo calls make sense in the US in part because we used the
| phone more (remember historic), and in part because
| "everyone" spoke English and so you could ignore language and
| reach a lot more people.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > in the states, you pay to receive SMS.
|
| > Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless
| mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be
| worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
|
| The 2 scenarios seem to be:
|
| 1) SMS is included in the service. This makes sense. Original
| SMS were 0-cost to provide; they rode on existing control
| traffic.
|
| 2) Honest people pay per SMS. Spammers don't. As ever, this
| disproportionately effects honest poor people.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > I understand it is free to send SMS in the states, you pay
| to receive them.
|
| That has not been true in many years. Most people have
| unlimited everything. Cost conscious consumers do opt for
| plans with limits, but that's on data, not calls and/or SMS.
| sambazi wrote:
| a few years ago i received a week of robo calls after renewing
| a domain lease. don't remember which registrar but i do
| remember that my number was redacted in the whois record and
| concluded that their process must be leaky. (also german)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Because of the legal situation. In Germany commercial cold
| calling without consent is flat out banned and heavily fined.
| (up to tens of thousands in fines). I'm also German and had I
| think, one robocall in 20 years.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| This exact claim gets made in every single robocall
| conversation on HN. I've never looked, maybe it's always the
| same people making it? Pretty soon someone else from Germany
| will be along to tell you about how many robocalls they get.
| And someone from the US will mention they also get no
| robocalls.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| No, it's true, I was surprised to get a robocall a few months
| ago, because it was the first ever (I think) and I have had
| my number since >10 years now. It's just not a thing here,
| I've never heard anyone complain about robocalls.
| gwd wrote:
| And as an American who lives in the UK, I always make the
| exact same response, and I'm continually surprised that
| people still don't understand.
|
| In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the
| airtime to the cell phone. So sending out a million text
| messages costs almost nothing, because the expensive part is
| borne by the receivers.
|
| In the UK and EU, the person sending the call / text pays for
| the airtime to the cell phone. This price is defined by a
| government regulator is owed by the sender's network to the
| owner of the cell tower.
|
| So if some random person sends a text to me, and I'm using an
| O2 tower, that person has to pay O2 something like PS0.20;
| meaning to send a million text messages would cost you
| PS200k.
|
| The result is that I do get spam messages, but they're always
| far more directed: normally organizations that I've actually
| interacted with in the past. Sending a message to a thousand
| previous customers is a lot more cost-effective (I presume)
| than sending a message to tens of millions of random phone
| numbers.
|
| Ironically, the absolute easiest way to solve the US's spam
| call/text problem is actually market-based: make the caller
| pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the
| receiver.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for
| the airtime to the cell phone.
|
| Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited for
| calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on data.
|
| > The result is that I do get spam messages
|
| Ah, but I'm in the US and I don't get any spam texts :). I
| do get some robocalls though. It's not an easy to solve
| problem.
|
| > make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all
| the way to the receiver
|
| I think the complication here is that the source of the
| calls and texts are not other mobile phones. They're coming
| onto the network via SIP. The billing mechanism to bill all
| the way back to the sender might be impossible with the
| current technologies being used. I can send an email to
| make a text appear on my phone, and this is a feature I
| have used occasionally -- how do I bill for that?
| gwd wrote:
| > Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited
| for calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on
| data.
|
| Whether you pay per-SMS or whether you pay bulk for
| "unlimited" calls and texts, you're still paying for the
| path from the tower to your phone. Calling a cell phone
| in the US is the same price as calling a landline.
|
| In the UK, it's possible to buy a phone that has _no_
| outgoing minutes or texts. This is useful because people
| can still call you. In fact, at some point there was a
| provider that would pay you a "cut" on every SMS or
| phone call you received. And calling a mobile phone --
| whether you're calling from a landline or another mobile
| phone -- is more expensive than calling a landline.
|
| Which is almost certainly one of the key problems with
| implementing such a system in the US: in the UK and
| Europe, mobile phone numbers look obviously different
| than landline numbers, so you know ahead of time that the
| call is going to cost you more. In the US, they look the
| same, so you'd never know how much you would get charged.
|
| > The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the
| sender might be impossible with the current technologies
| being used
|
| If you call my mobile phone, my mobile operator will be
| paid for that call one way or another; I'm pretty sure
| neither they nor any of the companies in between your
| phone provider and mine are going to give it away for
| free out of the goodness of their hearts. Which means the
| charge-back mechanism is already in place; it's just not
| used in the US.
| cess11 wrote:
| It's only a couple of years ago that I learned that
| "robocalls", which I'd seen mentioned for, what, a decade or
| more?, are actually fully robotic and not just a
| telemarketing department using an autodialer for more or less
| cold calls.
|
| That's how weird this phenomenon is to a european. To me it
| was a solid "WTF?" moment. Since then I've wondered why I've
| never heard about US:ians tracking down these operations and
| destroying them.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Normally it's American exceptionalism -- assuming the USA is
| better than every other country. I think this is the first
| time I've seen someone assuming that since America has a
| problem, other countries must have it too.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > assuming the USA is better than every other country
|
| Do you really see that happening? "America Bad" is the
| dominant theme online, including on HN. I see -way- more
| "gosh I don't understand why America sucks so bad, it's
| totally perfect over here in Europe" than I see Americans
| claiming that the US is automatically superior. I feel like
| in the US we're playing defense way more often, trying to
| explain misunderstandings and ignorance about how things
| work here.
|
| To be clear, there are definitely things that work better
| in Europe. But there are things that the US does pretty
| well too. Nobody likes to hear that.
| atoav wrote:
| Person living in Germany: I got 10 _spam_ calls in my life,
| from actual human beings. I got _zero_ automated non-human
| calls in my life.
| timthelion wrote:
| In Czechia I get about 10 a year. Hardly what I'd call a big
| problem... My grandparents in canada get about 10 a day. My
| grandpa in the us got like 10 an hour before he died, many time
| live humans who knew his name and that he was an old man in a
| nursing home....
|
| This is %100 a North American problem.
| codemusings wrote:
| Consider yourself lucky. I too am in Germany and and I get
| calls on almost a daily basis. Robo and otherwise. Same with
| WhatsApp messages. I have my number for close to 20 years now
| though.
|
| Unless this gets regulated Telcos will continue to enjoy their
| profits.
| flerchin wrote:
| Any details on what he did? Any details on the total magnitude of
| calls?
|
| I agree that lead-gen is also part of the problem, but fraud
| seems especially dire. The new fraud vector seems to be SMS
| initiated.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| The interviewee discusses why robocalls weren't reduced decades
| ago.
|
| _Well, regulations are really, really tough for a couple of
| reasons. One is, it's a bureaucratic, slow-moving process._
|
| _There 's also this notion of regulatory capture. At the FCC,
| the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators.
| There's an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately
| has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other
| interests._
|
| The regulatory capture of the FCC has been discussed for 20 years
| - just not by major news orgs (or telco industry press, or most
| tech press).
|
| ref:
| https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Atechdirt.com+robocalls+fcc+...
|
| earlier ref:
| https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Adslreports.com+%22karl%22+%...
| gregmac wrote:
| > At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices
| come from the telecommunications operators. There's an imbalance
| in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to
| invade their telephone versus these other interests.
|
| This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still
| a problem. Ignoring the actual scam part, the companies
| terminating the calls (that is: your phone provider) is making
| money on two ends: they get paid by the originator, and they get
| paid by the consumer they're delivering the call to (you). The
| telco originating the call is getting paid by the spammer. Spam
| is profitable for everybody.
|
| > I think that we'll be able to push the genie a long way back
| into the bottle. The measure of success is that we all won't be
| scared to answer our phone. It'll be a surprise that it's a
| robocall--instead of the expectation that it's a robocall.
|
| I think a different genie is out of the bottle that _won 't_ go
| back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously
| interrupt any person and demand their full attention. I almost
| never answer my phone for that reason, not just because of spam.
| I'd just rather interact asynchronously via text or email,
| without interrupting whatever I happen to be doing. If I'm able
| I'll reply quickly, and I'm happy to switch to a synchronous
| phone call if it makes sense (I'd still prefer that over dozens
| of back-and-forth texts where nuance is tricky and it's easier to
| misunderstand each other).
|
| It's at the point if my spouse or most close family/friends
| actually _phone_ me, my reaction is "Oh no, what's wrong?"
| criddell wrote:
| > they get paid by the consumer they're delivering the call to
|
| That doesn't make any sense. I don't have the phone so that I
| can receive spam calls. If they were able to eliminate all spam
| calls overnight, people wouldn't cancel their service.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight,
| people wouldn't cancel their service.
|
| Are there many people without any phone service?
| gregmac wrote:
| Depending on your plan, you may be either paying for minutes
| or they're using up your allotment, which in some cases means
| you could end up paying a premium rate for going over. If
| you're on an "unlimited" plan, this bit is irrelevant but at
| the same time, the marginal cost of delivering calls is
| essentially zero once the network capacity exists.
|
| If you're roaming on another carrier's network, I'm not sure
| how the economics work there, but I suspect the other carrier
| gets paid regardless.
| NeoTar wrote:
| The user could be from a country where paying to receive
| phone-calls is unknown. From some brief Wikipedia research,
| this is only a common model in the USA, Canada, Hong Kong
| and Singapore
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiving_party_pays)
| wilkystyle wrote:
| > _I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won 't
| go back in: the expectation you can immediately and
| synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full
| attention._
|
| Definitely agree with this. Over the past five or so years I
| have adopted the following approach that ensures have control
| over 95% of the interruptions:
|
| - I have "silence unknown callers" enabled in iOS
|
| - Focus mode is on 100% of the time.
|
| - I disable notifications for all apps except for Reminders
| (interruptions I have configured) and the Phone app (calls from
| people in my contact list).
|
| To your last point, the people I am actually interested in
| talking to only call if something is too important/time
| sensitive to do via text, so this works well. Any other callers
| will leave a voicemail if it's actually important.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| This doesn't work if you're on-call (and don't have a very
| specific set of numbers that calls could be received from),
| run a business, looking for work or awaiting vendor calls.
|
| Now, do I charge my employer when I get a scam call on the
| work phone while I'm on-call? Technically I should.
|
| Also doesn't help that callerids get forged to be similar to
| your own number, which looks like the corporate block of
| phone numbers we have. Tho I think the networks have someone
| cut down on the ease of doing that (or at least tagging them
| as likely fraud).
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It's lousy for the elderly, who really suffer from this. Many
| older people spent their lives with a working phone system,
| don't really use texting, and expect things to work. So our
| decision to allow the phone system to descend into fraud is
| really harmful to them. I dread to think what our society
| will look like by the time I'm really old.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> I dread to think what our society will look like by the
| time I 'm really old._
|
| We strongly recommend you reserve your premium slot at the
| Soylent Green factory today!
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > Many older people spent their lives with a working phone
| system
|
| It's shocking how quickly the phone system has just up and
| vanished, replaced by a simulation of a phone system
| running over the internet, with little wireless
| supercomputers taking the place of the landline phone's
| 19th Century technology. Oh, pockets of the old circuit-
| switched voice network still exist, but they're rapidly
| being decommissioned.
|
| It didn't hit me until one of my dad's friends called him
| from an unfamiliar number - because he was forced to get a
| cell phone for the first time in his life. My parents are
| on a VoIP service with their old phone number, and it works
| nicely, but it still depends on working internet - a
| reversal from when getting TO the internet required working
| phone service.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The simulation would be fine if we hadn't abandoned it to
| scammers so that some two-bit VoIP services could make a
| buck. The result is understandable to young people: _you
| literally cannot trust any incoming call_ that isn't from
| a person you know very well --- because the only people
| calling your phone are people who want to do you harm or
| defraud you. And they call constantly. The worst part is
| that thanks to AI voice impersonation, even the "accept
| calls from people you know" heuristic isn't trustworthy
| anymore. How do you explain to someone who spent 80 years
| trusting a communication medium that we've decided to let
| criminals run wild with it, and we think that's fine?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > the expectation you can immediately and synchronously
| interrupt any person and demand their full attention
|
| Needs to end as soon as possible. Calling on the phone is one
| of the most rude things someone can possibly do.
|
| https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/
| xp84 wrote:
| Looking at that article, it's pretty obvious that the author
| is experiencing something like severe anxiety (as are some
| people close to me who share this aversion). While we should
| be compassionate and accommodating of such people, there are
| others who are much better able to communicate using voice
| than with text (heck, including the blind), and we shouldn't
| force them to only communicate the way the anxious ones
| prefer. The telephone already supports two-way "consent" - it
| doesn't answer itself and some people choose at their own
| risk to never answer it.
|
| Edit: my point is it's already not a demand, it's a notice:
| somewhere out there, someone thinks either you know something
| they should hear ASAP, or vice versa. What you do with that
| is up to you.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > severe anxiety
|
| That's a rather apt description for the feelings that
| telephones cause.
|
| > there are others who are much better able to communicate
| using voice than with text (heck, including the blind)
|
| Voice messages. All modern asynchronous messaging services
| support them.
|
| > it doesn't answer itself
|
| It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It
| interrupts. Grabs attention. _Demands_ attention. It wakes
| people up from their precious sleep. For basically no
| reason whatsoever. Usually because some asshole wants to
| pitch his products.
|
| As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a
| form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend
| myself from it.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It
| interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes
| people up from their precious sleep.
|
| Isn't this a configuration issue? iOS and Android both
| have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to
| accommodate a ton of usage scenarios.
|
| > As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to
| be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will
| defend myself from it.
|
| Characterizing an unsolicited phone call as wrong or rude
| seems backwards to me. I don't see fault being the
| caller's but rather the recipient's for not availing
| themselves of the resources at their disposal to control
| access to their attention.
| kelnos wrote:
| Isn't that a bit like saying if your home is broken into,
| it's your fault for not having better locks?
|
| I would agree that if you want better outcomes, you
| should learn about and use the mechanisms built into your
| phone to reduce distractions, but telling people it's
| their fault that others are treating them with rudeness
| seems a bit much.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Isn't this a configuration issue?
|
| No. It's a "people think phone calls are the most
| important things in the world and they override all other
| concerns" issue. It's quite visible in the design and
| implementation of phones and smartphones.
|
| > iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control
| for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage
| scenarios.
|
| They do not allow calls to be completely disabled. Even
| with all those configurations applied, all my Android
| phones still show a notification that someone is calling
| me and that calls were missed. The notifications cannot
| be disabled. Phone _still_ manages to be an absolute pain
| even when completely silenced. I got two of those
| notifications while writing this comment. Literally right
| now.
|
| The voice mail notification was the worst. It was
| impossible to get rid of. I tried killing the phone apps
| via debugger and they still came back somehow. Would not
| go away until I listened to all the voice mails in full.
| Of course companies would leave ads in the voice mail.
| Words can't describe how much I hated that thing.
| Mercifully I managed to turn voice mail off at the phone
| company itself after performing some arcane dialing
| incantations that I don't even care to remember.
|
| > I don't see fault being the caller's
|
| Well I do. Callers think it's OK to interrupt others.
| That's presumptuous and rude in of itself. The same
| attitude of an advertiser.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I look at it this way: Imagine a world where the concept
| of a telephone never existed. We all have these portable
| hand-held computers, but nobody's ever experienced a
| "phone" before. Now suddenly an app developer invents a
| way for "anyone in the world to anonymously contact your
| device, without your consent, have that device (by
| default) interrupt what it's doing, (by default) ring
| and/or buzz, (by default) pop up a full-screen modal over
| what you are doing, and if you press the button, that
| anonymous person is able to activate your device's
| speaker and microphone.
|
| I don't think this intrusive app would pass either major
| store's guidelines. This kind of device
| takeover/intrusion would be totally unacceptable to many
| (most?) users.
|
| But, since we already have a concept of what a "phone" is
| and have gotten used to it, culturally we let it slide.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| It sounds like you want a tablet w/ a data plan and not a
| smartphone. I don't know who makes one in the form factor
| of a phone (though, to be fair, phones are crazy big now
| and almost pass for tablets). I find that the market
| serves my desires very poorly, too.
|
| I don't regard people who are call the same way you do.
| That's just a difference in our experience and outlook. I
| don't think calling someone is inherently rude. Some
| people who call me have rude intentions (advertisers,
| scammers), but I've done what I can to insure I'm not
| bothered by those people while allowing the people who I
| want to share my attention with (family, friends, paying
| Customers) to reach me asynchronously.
|
| I can heartily share being frustrated with the whole
| "phone" product category. I think phones should be
| portable general purpose personal computers, completely
| under the control of their owners first and "phones"
| second (or third, or fourth). The market seems to
| disagree (and lots of people make special pleadings about
| how "phones" shouldn't be under the control of their
| owners because "they're phones" and not "computers"--
| much to my frustration).
| bbarnett wrote:
| Virtually every telephone device in use today, has the
| ability to change the phone ringtone, its volume, or mute
| it.
|
| You're literally complaining about your own inability to
| manage the devices you own.
|
| If there is any violence here, it's you. You with an
| active phone number, misconfigurating it, then blathering
| on about the results to others.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| You can rest assured that _my_ phones are well managed.
| As well as phones can possibly be managed. Their volumes
| are set to zero, they are muted and their ringtones are
| explicity set to silence on top of that.
|
| Disabling calls altogether _can 't_ be done. You bet I
| looked for that knob. Calls are literally baked into the
| OS. I even asked the phone company to turn off calling.
| Nope. So I have to live with constant useless annoying
| notifications that some bot is trying to call me whenever
| I'm actively using my phone. Welp. At least I managed to
| turn off voice mail. That was an especially horrible
| advertising vector.
|
| Only reason I even have active phone numbers is WhatsApp.
| Technically, I only need SMS for the verification codes.
| Explaining that to the phone company is futile though.
|
| Anyway, this only fixes part of the problem. Every other
| person in my life carries a phone with them. Older folks
| even have landlines. All those phones ring. _A lot._
|
| I don't generally make a habit of "configurating" other
| people's phones, for obvious reasons. I've tried convince
| them. It didn't work. They're OK with being routinely
| woken up by useless phone calls every single day because
| someone somewhere might one day need to call them on that
| phone to relay important news or something. It has a
| visible, measurable impact on their quality of life but
| they refuse to get rid of the phone. I think that's
| incredibly inhumane but it can't be helped.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Your main issue is that other people receive annoying
| phone calls yet are unwilling to take simple steps to
| address the problem?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That's part of it, yes. Also the fact that existing
| software was apparently built with the assumption that
| you always want to receive calls, that they are
| important, so important they can't be disabled or
| ignored.
|
| More fundamentally, I have a problem with interrupting
| synchronous communication, and especially the cultural
| acceptance of it. As I noted in my original comment.
|
| >> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously
| interrupt any person and demand their full attention
|
| > Needs to end as soon as possible.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| What can you do if you don't want to block unknown
| numbers, e.g. you get a call from a hospital about your
| injured relative, but you have blocked all unknown
| numbers
| abruzzi wrote:
| Its kind of funny--I'm the exact opposite. I don't have
| any messaging services other than email--no twitter, FB,
| WhatsApp, etc.--and SMS is silenced. If you want to get
| ahold of me, you either email or call. But I get your
| point that phones should allow the disabling of the phone
| app for those that dont want to receive calls. It is kind
| a historic memory that makes them default and always on.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| This feels like such a bizarre take.
|
| I love getting calls! I love hearing a human who actually
| wants to talk about something! Voices are much more pleasant
| than flat text. Voices have inflection and emotion and you
| can hear people laugh at jokes and anecdotes!
|
| Via text things like sarcasm are harder to recognize and it's
| not obvious how the person on the other end actually feels
| about what they're writing about - which makes some text
| conversations very confusing without lots of clarification.
|
| In a way, it's like getting a hand-written letter. It's more
| effort but it also feels more genuine and less sanitized than
| a text.
|
| I used to incessantly get the Car Warranty scam call, but
| that's been gone for years at this point. Now essentially the
| only calls I get are from real people.
|
| If I'm really busy or stressed or whatever (or at work),
| that's what voicemail is for. Then a reply can go out via
| phone, text, email or whatever.
| coldpie wrote:
| > This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's
| still a problem.
|
| I'm skeptical. I think "our network eliminated spam calls"
| would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network.
| Like I would definitely consider switching carriers if one of
| them genuinely solved the problem. Given the amount of mobile
| network advertising I see, there's gotta be way more money in
| actually fixing this and gaining new users, than there is in
| getting a couple fractions of a cent per completed call.
|
| It's not even a hard problem to fix. Just have calls sourced
| internationally set to default-deny for every account. If a
| user actually wants to receive internationally-sourced calls,
| they can turn it on. The number of people turning it on would
| be so small, spammers wouldn't bother at all anymore. Then,
| prosecute anyone sending spam calls from within the US (I
| assume we are already doing this). Boom, you've solved the
| phone spam problem.
|
| Now someone go implement it so I can start paying you for your
| superior product.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Make the "report as spam" button or notification cause the
| spammer or their sponsor to incur a $0.01 charge payable to
| the mobile provider. The money would be a rounding error for
| false accusations, but would decimate anyone sending massive
| spam calls.
| metabagel wrote:
| $0.10 - but you have to actually pick up the call before
| the "report as spam" button is available. Add a button
| which is "Hang up and report as spam", and put that button
| away from the regular hang up button, so it doesn't often
| get hit accidentally.
|
| Also, if the monthly bill is less than $1 in spam charges,
| then the charges should be dropped. Spam charges aren't
| intended for one-off annoying calls.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I want to work on a micro payment system like this but
| for email. The email is encrypted but not for privacy,
| for "proof of readability", the key is somehow decrypted
| off the blockchain only after, say, $0.05 is sent to the
| recipient. That starts a time delay that auto refunds the
| micro payment UNLESS spam button is pressed on the
| client. Then the nickel is claimed. People mailing back
| and forth will do so for free, because clicking reply
| will refund the nickel. In theory recipients could set
| their own price to talk to them. Coins would be real and
| absolutely redeemable for USD or other coin. To be clear,
| email content is NOT on the blockchain.
|
| Few problems:
|
| - have to pay upfront to send messages. - might have
| problems with liquidity finding traders to redeem with -
| Major mail providers such as Gmail may block forwarded
| encrypted content "for security" - would require add-on
| client to decrypt - people are sick of hearing about shit
| coins - need very low gas fee shitcoin - if shitcoin
| server goes down, email goes down
|
| I suppose you could do this in a cashless way and just
| request tokens from a miner. And if you ask for too many,
| too fast, you get denied or have to pay the miner. The
| idea would be to distribute them sparsely among people
| who don't send many messages. Maybe the shitcoin could
| somehow enforce not holding too many send tokens.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I like this and would pay for such a system. It doesn't
| need to use blockchain though, a normal escrow system
| would work. Everyone who signs up puts a dollar in
| escrow. If you send an email to your contact it's free.
| If you send outside your contacts it costs a penny, but
| the recipient can return the penny to you if they want.
|
| This makes it prohibitively expensive to send low value
| email, free to send high value email, and slightly
| expensive to send "probably valuable" email.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a
| major, major selling point for a mobile network._
|
| If you genuinely had free choice of multiple otherwise
| similar quality options, which is not the case in all
| markets/areas.
|
| Also, I wouldn't put it past the networks to promise to try
| to eliminate cold calls (to make it look like they are on
| your side), make a perfunctory amount of effort (the minimum
| to be able to say they are making an attempt), and still make
| the money they can from the other side.
| RajT88 wrote:
| This is textbook oligopoly.
|
| Sort of in competition but happy not to rock the boat.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| But that makes sense.
|
| I am a cynic, and I believe the real reason that nothing is
| being done, is because telecom companies love robocallers
| (they make a lot of money, and don't get bothered too much
| for customer service -I saw the same thing with spam emailers
| and fraudsters. Hosting providers love them, because they buy
| a lot of product, and don't ask for much customer service).
|
| I also think that politicians don't want to address it,
| because they use them, and people _really_ don 't like
| political robocalls, because they can be downright noxious.
| soco wrote:
| An idea which works for me: the 5 close contacts are set to
| buzzing, everything else is on silent thus has to wait for when
| I feel like looking at the phone. I also have the answering
| robot on for those who really have something to tell me (the
| few). This makes for a quiet day.
| 6DM wrote:
| Only problem I see is that now that everyone is ignoring calls
| and focusing on text messages, there's now a lot of spam text
| messages and that is only going to grow.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Does anyone know what "Delete and report junk" actually does
| on iOS? Is it a placebo button like "Close elevator door" and
| "Push button to cross street," or does Apple actually do
| something useful with those reports?
| mikestew wrote:
| I have my suspicions that "Delete and report junk" is about
| as effective as marking email as "junk" in the Apple mail
| client. That is, the Apple mail client will happily drop
| junk mail into your inbox no matter how many times you mark
| mail from foo@bar.com as junk. And yet I have to go dig in
| the Junk folder to find the shipping confirmation from
| orders@company_you've_heard_of.com
| janalsncm wrote:
| > the expectation you can immediately and synchronously
| interrupt any person and demand their full attention
|
| I agree, and the fact that there are so many other things
| demanding my attention is crazy making.
|
| If I had to guess, a few generations ago this was probably a
| complaint about the advent of telephones, even without
| robocallers and telemarketers. Now that spam has reduced the
| signal to noise ratio, it's amusing to see this pop back up.
| briffle wrote:
| For a few months in 2008, i was renting a house just over the
| area code boundary. I switched carriers just before porting
| became a thing. I still have that area code, and the only other
| person I know with a number in that area code is my spouse. I
| used to get many calls a day from that same area code (trying to
| appear as a local call) even though I now live about 2100 miles
| away. iPhones are great at sending them directly to voicemail if
| they are not in your email, address book, or recent calls, and I
| get one voicemail every few weeks that is mostly static now.
| resource_waste wrote:
| Area codes...
|
| There is a tri-county area. The poor county that few people
| live, the working class county, the professional class county.
|
| At one point I realized that myself and my 2 coworkers had the
| working class area code on a phone number list we created...
| and we were in the professional county doing business. I'm not
| sure if it was mental insecurity, but I felt ashamed that my
| entire team was from the working class area. The fact that we
| were all 'top of our class' didn't matter. Money didn't matter,
| we probably were making more than the client since we were
| profit centers.
|
| I need a new phone number. Seriously, in my area its
| judgeworthy.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| It's mental insecurity, 99%.
| resource_waste wrote:
| Maybe... I am near certain I couldn't use the poor area
| code for business purposes.
|
| Although with generous government subsidies to the poor
| area, it seems less taboo since young people have moved
| downtown.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 2 Skinnee J's had a great rap about the topic. They even
| managed rhyme "Ridiculous" with "Moby-Dickulous" in it.
|
| https://genius.com/2-skinnee-js-718-lyrics
| senkora wrote:
| If there is a possibility that this might impact your
| business, even a small one, then it is probably worth getting
| a new phone number and I would encourage you to do so.
|
| So much of business is based on perception and you don't want
| to give clients any reason to doubt you.
| jjcm wrote:
| The best thing I ever did was get a phone number from another
| state. I have a Hawaii number from the couple years I lived
| there. Even better is because it's such a transitory area, most
| of the friends I had in Hawaii had numbers from out of state.
| Because of that any time I see an 808 number, I know very
| confidently it's a spam call.
| criddell wrote:
| Why hasn't STIR/SHAKEN fixed the problem? I thought those
| protocols were supposed to be the TLS of the phone system and
| eliminate spoofed caller id. It would be nice if, when a number
| appeared on caller id there was also an A, B, or C to indicate
| the signing level.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Anecdata, but I've gotten less outright scam calls this past
| year.
|
| These days, it's just local shady companies. Think: "Expired
| Vacation" package timeshare pitches and lately callers asking
| if I have Medicare A and B.
|
| The Medicare stuff, I assume is some kind of fraud, but the
| kind where they talk you into being a customer for some service
| so they can bilk the government for that service (which they
| may or may not deliver). Fraud, but a more insidious kind - not
| unlike the auto warranty sales calls (which I seem to no longer
| get either).
|
| So mostly lead generation for shady domestic companies is what
| I seem to get. You can always tell, because when you ask the
| name of the company they hang up on you.
| criddell wrote:
| All the calls have spoofed caller ID so I would consider them
| all to be fraudulent and scammy.
| zamalek wrote:
| > I've gotten less outright scam calls this past year.
|
| Same, close to zero if not zero (I might have received one
| late last year or early this year). I do also try to make a
| bloody nuisance of myself; I'm snoot sure if they have some
| internal denylist, but I try my hardest to get onto it.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| For me, it's political texts from Illinois, which I moved
| away from 6 years ago. They seem to be doing this thing where
| you can unsubscribe from a given campaign, but when some
| other politician wants to do a campaign they will acquire
| that list without scrubbing the optouts.
|
| I was led to believe that this is technically allowed so I've
| been using an app (buzzkill) to junk any text containing the
| name of a politician.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Unsurprisingly, lawmakers make laws which excerpt them from
| obnoxious behavior which is not allowed for non-lawmakers.
|
| It's funny though - I live in IL as well, and don't get
| many political texts.
|
| What I do get matches the ratio of political spam I get
| across all of my various email accounts: It's 90% one
| party, and 10% or less the other. A fair amount of it
| doesn't mention party affiliation, and tries to copy the
| color scheme and design of the other state party even on
| their websites (which is pretty brazen). FWIW: I'm not
| registered with any party at any level and have never
| signed up for any political newsletter AFAIK.
| evilantnie wrote:
| STIR/SHAKEN doesn't prevent spoofing. It can verify in certain
| cases when a call is not spoofed but it's fairly limited and
| almost entirely mobile-to-mobile phone calls. It requires IP
| based network connectivity end-to-end, which just isn't
| possible in the US. If a call gets routed through a rural
| network and switches back to TDM, it will drop all STIR/SHAKEN
| data. It will still take years for US infrastructure to be
| entirely IP-based. Robocallers sign their calls with
| STIR/SHAKEN just fine, the originators do this for them, so
| it's not going to be a strong deterrent in my opinion.
|
| Devices support attestation level A display (green or grey
| check marks in your call logs designate this). If you haven't
| seen that check mark, then you probably haven't seen many
| A-level attested calls to your device. As far as device
| manufacturers go, they only care about A-level attestation,
| which makes sense as it has full traceback capability.
| sannysanoff wrote:
| I envision the app on the phone that implements AI secretary and
| answers unknown phone numbers on my behalf, and calms down
| calling party with various measures, with sort of captcha of
| various degree of offense. This will hold them off until they
| find a workaround.
| kxrm wrote:
| The Pixel 8 does this, it's called "Call Screen" and since
| getting it I never receive unscreened calls from outside my
| contact list. It's been very nice to have.
| imzadi wrote:
| I have such an app. It's called RoboBlocker. I used to use a
| different app called RoboKiller, but recently switched. Both
| work basically the same way. They automatically block known
| spammers/scammers and screen the rest.
| Bloating wrote:
| I'm surprised Its Lenny has been ported to a cell phone app. At
| least we can have some fun with this
| Bloating wrote:
| Regulatory capture isn't just an issue with the FCC. Big
| Companies benefit from Big Government
| herodotus wrote:
| My landline provider offers a "call-control" feature. When
| someone calls, if the caller number has not been accepted before,
| a voice asks the caller to enter a randomly selected digit. Only
| after this has been correctly done is the call permitted to go
| through. Probably deflatable, but it has eliminated my robocalls.
| The only downside is that legitimate robocalls (eg: doctor's
| reminder) might be blocked if I have not whitelisted the number.
|
| Simple solution, and I am surprised at how well it works.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Implement the technology to reliably identify what source country
| and/or provider a call was initiated from. Give me the ability to
| choose what countries or providers are allowed to make calls to
| my phone. Pretty soon the shady providers will go out of business
| and the rest will try harder to prevent robocalling on their
| service.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I opened the front page of HN, my eye was drawn to this headline.
| I instinctively gave it an upvote because this is the Lord's work
| this man is doing.
| CivBase wrote:
| Why not just give up on the legacy telephone system?
|
| Decades ago we had dialup internet - a service entirely unrelated
| to the telephone system, built atop the existing telephone
| infrastructure. The US or EU or whoever could simply design a new
| service built atop that existing infrastructure.
|
| Telecom companies could double as Certificate Authorities for the
| new system, providing and signing certificates used to
| authenticate both sides of a call and encrypt traffic between
| them. It doesn't even have to be limited to calls. They could
| also support text or even arbitrary data. It could be a
| revolutionary new platform for instant communication, separate
| from the internet and backed by major nations across the world.
| And the best part is the infrastructure is already built!
|
| Or they could keep playing cat-and-mouse games with spammers for
| all of eternity.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| This would break and complicate things. Make things
| incompatible. Look, we already have WhatsApp and it's still got
| spam. Granted, only message spam, but still. A new system might
| not solve the spam problem, but break and complicate a lot of
| things.
| CivBase wrote:
| What makes you think it would break things? We seemed to get
| by fine with dialup.
|
| WhatsApp is a private service facilitated over the internet.
| No government would (or should) trust Facebook with their
| communication infrastructure.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Every cell phone should have an option to block off calls by the
| country code or area code.
| lreeves wrote:
| How would that help? All the spammers spoof the numbers - hell
| a lot of them even make their spoofed ID just one or two digits
| off of mine, presumably to make me curious enough to answer.
| notact wrote:
| I see a lot of calls for being able to block an area code. That
| does not seem to be useful to me, living in a major metro area
| lots of legit calls (doctors office etc) share the same area code
| as spammers/political organizations.
|
| What I think would be useful is to be able to block based on
| incoming carrier. During the last election season, most calls
| were coming from various VoIP services (Twilio, etc), none from
| normal retail cell carriers. If I could block an entire carrier
| who specializes in providing text/voice marketing services,
| problem solved? Legit business users of those services would
| hopefully migrate away to more ethical providers when their calls
| start failing to connect.
| emeril wrote:
| I took the nuclear option of signing up for a new number in a
| area I don't live or know anyone and use "numbershield" on ios
| to block the entire area code
|
| now I get almost zero spam calls and virtually every call which
| comes through is legitimate
| afavour wrote:
| I'm surprised we don't see this as an issue in politics. Semi-
| seriously, any presidential candidate that pledged to stamp out
| robocalls would win a good chunk of goodwill from voters.
| callalex wrote:
| Almost 100% of scam calls are run out of India. There is no
| political will to hold India responsible because they are
| economically and geopolitically important to the USA.
| metabagel wrote:
| I make political donations to a few officeholders and candidates.
| I get a seemingly never-ending deluge of text messages from
| across the country requesting donations. I usually send a "stop"
| message, but the word is out.
| callalex wrote:
| I learned very quickly as a university student that engaging in
| the political process is heavily punished by the exact people
| you thought you were trying to help. I have never donated or
| campaigned again and it took 10 years to get off of all the
| spam lists.
| ipython wrote:
| My wife was at dinner with a bunch of other women the other
| night. Of a party of about 15, at least 12 of them had stories of
| their parents being scammed for a large amount of money. Even the
| scams that start online end up leveraging the phone system in
| some way. In total, the single table she was sitting at had lost
| over $10 million dollars to scammers - almost $1m per person.
| It's sickening.
|
| The phone system is entirely broken. It comes down to economics-
| there's zero cost to make millions of calls, so your economic
| benefit formula is obvious- you can make millions of calls
| because one of them will pay you back mega-$$$. There is no
| accountability and no way to automatically filter out spam (as we
| do with email, although to be honest, spam filtering isn't great
| either). I don't know what to do other than to increase the cost
| to make phone calls in order to address the perverse incentives
| at work.
|
| Edit: I'm curious about the downvotes. If you follow the links to
| the automated system that David built (a honeypot for
| robocallers) you see the top offenders are Medicare and end of
| life services. That jives with my own experience. So clearly
| they're targeting the elderly and therefore the solution is - ask
| them to look for a little stir/shaken attestation checkmark
| before answering their phone?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The most important feature of my phone is to make it very
| difficult to make a phone call to me. Google Pixel is quite good
| at this with about three layers of protection before a call gets
| through. It's absurd that we have to take these measures against
| criminals abusing our communications network.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _The measure of success is that we all won't be scared to
| answer our phone._
|
| Robocalls aren't what makes people actually scared to answer
| their phone.
|
| Depending on their specific situation, it's rather people like,
| oh, crazy exes, tax/bill collectors, police investigators ...
|
| Also, in general, any time people are in a situation in which bad
| news might arrive at any moment.
|
| Robocalls are nothing.
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