[HN Gopher] 2400 phone providers may be shut down by the FCC for...
___________________________________________________________________
2400 phone providers may be shut down by the FCC for failing to
stop robocalls
Author : impish9208
Score : 136 points
Date : 2024-12-11 18:41 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.fcc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.fcc.gov)
| gs17 wrote:
| The full title of "Over 2,400 Voice Service Providers Face
| Removal for Failing to Comply with the Robocall Mitigation
| Database Filing Requirements" is a lot more clear.
|
| > Removal from the database means other providers will be
| prohibited from accepting call traffic from these providers.
| dang wrote:
| Unfortunately that doesn't fit HN's 80 char limit. I've taken a
| crack at it, but if anyone can suggest a better title, we can
| change it again.
|
| (Submitted title was "FCC Could Block Over 2,400 Providers from
| Robocall Mitigation Database".)
| zimpenfish wrote:
| "2k4 VSPs face removal re: compliance fail re: robocall
| mitigation DB filing reqs" is 80 but I'd say it was probably
| a bit on the cheating side.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 2k4 VSPs
|
| As an English speaker, I'd interpret 2k4 as 2004, not 2400.
|
| In Chinese that structure would mean 2400, though I don't
| know how widely understood the K would be.
|
| Where are you from?
| gs17 wrote:
| Yeah, it should be 2.4k in English. Can probably trade
| the 's' in "reqs" for the decimal point.
| whatsupdog wrote:
| 2.4k has the exact same number of characters as 2400.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| On the other hand, "2.4k" is inherently imprecise,
| whereas you'd need "2400+" to be similarly imprecise.
|
| You also save on the comma in "2,400".
| jandrese wrote:
| 2,400 telephone providers fail to stop robocalls, may be shut
| down by the FCC.
|
| I'm not sure if being removed from the Robocall Mitigation
| Database is tantamount to being shut down, but it sounds like
| it to me.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! I've used that, reordered just a bit.
| ksp-atlas wrote:
| Yeah this headline smells of crash blossoms, I read "face
| removal" as in the act of removing a face and I got confused
| water-data-dude wrote:
| Yeah, I had to read the HN title a few times before the meaning
| clicked
| tyingq wrote:
| I have seen a significant decrease in the amount of spam
| telephone calls over the last couple of years.
|
| Is that what everybody else is seeing? That maybe Stir/Shaken is
| actually starting to work?
|
| I guess it could just be that generational social change... where
| more people just don't take phone calls. So the ROI for spam
| calls has reduced...
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It comes in waves; pretty much nothing for months and then 5+ a
| day for the past few days.
| tyingq wrote:
| If it is that the ROI is just real unattractive for spam
| calls now... I wonder if the waves are just new people trying
| to spam for the first time. And taking a little bit of time
| to figure out that it's not profitable.
|
| If so that's not great. Because there's probably an infinite
| supply of people ready to waste their money trying get-rich-
| quick crap.
| karlshea wrote:
| Spam calls have decreased, spam texts increased.
| op00to wrote:
| Especially spam iMessage, which you'd think Apple would have
| a good handle on. Always iMessage from a foreign number.
| neom wrote:
| surprised to read this, never had imessage spam once,
| didn't know it was even a thing.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I have had the opposite. I think it really just depends on
| which lists your number is on.
| kmoser wrote:
| I tend to agree about the lists. I get a couple of spam
| calls and texts a week, which seems to be much, much less
| than what most of my friends get.
|
| My father gets multiple spam calls every day. He lets them
| all go to voice mail, so nothing about his behavior
| encourages them to keep calling. Yet they keep coming.
|
| I've had my cell number for about 15 years, and for another
| 10 years prior it was a land line, so 25 years in total. My
| father's cell number is only about 10 years old. So despite
| having a much older phone number, I get way less spam calls
| and texts than he does.
|
| Part of that may be what lists we're on. Another reason may
| be that for the past 20 years, when ordering things online,
| 99% of the time I give a fake phone number. Companies claim
| they want it in case there is a problem delivering your
| order, but even before I started doing this, I never had a
| company call about an order they couldn't deliver. Once or
| twice they emailed me about an order they couldn't fulfill
| (out of stock, etc.), but I do give them a legit email. The
| 1% of the time I give a real phone number is when I'm
| dealing with a serious transaction, e.g. a bank or
| insurance or medical company.
| loeg wrote:
| I still get regular spam calls and spam texts. Maybe half the
| texts are obvious scams (make $1000s a day from home reshipping
| stolen goods) and the other texts are conversation starters
| that shady telcos can explain away as plausibly harmless (but
| are likely to be the first step in deliberate pig butchering
| scams).
| kisonecat wrote:
| I don't feel like I've gotten fewer spam calls.
|
| My favorite spam call was someone wanting to make a cash offer
| on the Ohio State University building that my office is in.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| "I tell you what, let's talk numbers. By the way, do you
| happen to have an interest in bridges?"
| x0x0 wrote:
| I may be atypical because I started a company and unfortunately
| used my personal cell is several places which got into sales
| databases. And made a political donation.
|
| For me, it got so bad (multiple calls per day) I've stopped
| answering anything that isn't in my contacts already.
| monkpit wrote:
| > I've stopped answering anything that isn't in my contacts
| already.
|
| Isn't that what everyone does? Or is it just a millennial
| thing...
| hydrolox wrote:
| I think it's mainly a millennial and gen z thing-- older
| generations still answer all calls, at least those that
| aren't into tech. I think it's just easier to realize that
| anyone not in your contacts will either leave a voicemail
| or text you if it's that important.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| We ignore it too. But I can tell the ones who do answer.
| They get extremely irate if you do not pick up when they
| call. As if it is their personal line to you and you
| should drop everything for them. I dump them into
| voicemail too.
| reaperducer wrote:
| That is only practical when you are young and life is
| simple.
|
| Get married. Start a business. Get sick. Buy a house. Have
| children. Make interesting friends. Travel extensively.
|
| Once life gets interesting, you start missing important
| calls with that strategy.
| dumbmrblah wrote:
| I have all those things. If it's truly important they
| will text or leave a voicemail if I don't pickup.
| icehawk wrote:
| The only thing I haven't done on this list has have
| children, and I haven't yet missed an important call with
| that strategy.
|
| If it's important, they can leave an relevant voicemail.
| dboreham wrote:
| I'm several decades not a millennial and haven't answered
| the phone since...before the millennium.
| gs17 wrote:
| I think it must vary a lot between numbers. My girlfriend gets
| a huge amount of spam calls. I get almost none, and we're on
| the same network. I do get a ton of spam texts though.
| naravara wrote:
| The robocalls are more rare for sure. But there's been a huge
| uptick in shitty recruiters calling me with lowball offers for
| shitty jobs. I've had to remove my phone number from my resumes
| and delist it from indeed and stuff but it doesn't seem to be
| helping. I don't know how they're finding me and they refuse to
| tell me.
| m3047 wrote:
| I apologize for the commercial plug, but when I switched off of
| CenturyLink and onto Ooma last year my robo / spam calls went
| way down. Part of that is that they have some filtering
| options, part of that is that I believe they provide telemetry
| to something akin to NoMoRobo.
| sooperserieous wrote:
| About 7 weeks ago I picked up a new AT&T SIM to use for data
| backup while my fiber connection was out. Never placed _any_
| calls and only 1 text to my current mobile number to capture
| the new number. I get 4-6 calls per day, most labelled "Spam
| Risk". This period included the last couple of weeks of the US
| election and the volume then was much higher from what I am
| guessing was robo-war-dialing election campaigns.
|
| Even though I'm in an older generation and prefer voice over
| text I have adopted the habit of only picking up callers that I
| know I want to speak to.
| barryrandall wrote:
| I've noticed a slight drop-off, but my phone is still useless.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I've seen a significant decrease in both calls and text in the
| past months (though I haven't quantified it)
| Animats wrote:
| I get very little phone or SMS spam. All SMS spam gets replied
| to with "STOP", which, for most of the SMS services, is a
| strike against the spammer. I've been on the Do Not Call list
| since it started.
|
| Email spam is repetitive enough that the usual Thunderbird
| filters work. If a spam email has an unsubscribe link, I click
| on that and add the sender to the block list. If it doesn't
| have an unsubscribe link, I try to find out which service sent
| it and send them a notice of a CAN-SPAM law violation. The
| usual suspects (Mailchump, SpamGrid, etc.) do terminate
| accounts for that, to prevent being blocked themselves.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| > which, for most of the SMS services, is a strike against
| the spammer.
|
| Huh, didn't know that. I assumed that it was nothing more
| than baiting a response, verifying that the phone number is a
| hit.
| jandrese wrote:
| I've not been asked about my car's extended warranty for months
| now.
|
| I think the FCC finally shutting down just one or two blatant
| bad actors made a massive difference in robocalls. It just took
| them months (years?) to do it.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I had a huuuuuuuuuuge increase the past couple months (10-20 a
| day). Almost all medicare fraud scams. They seem to be tapering
| down a bit (2-5 a day). It's interesting, because they have all
| my info (where I live, my full name, etc.), but somehow not my
| age? Because if they knew my real age, they shouldn't be
| calling me for medicare fraud scams... I wonder if maybe what's
| happening is that the people selling leads lists for scammers
| are willfully omitting age information, so they can charge more
| for a larger list which is not obviously 50%+ garbage scam
| leads for medicare fraud.
|
| I also had an uptick in text spam (used to be very rare until
| maybe 9 months ago, then it became about 1-2 a day, now it's
| back down to just a few a week).
| snailmailman wrote:
| I still get multiple a day. Have had multiple a day for months
| (maybe years? My call log doesn't go back far enough to know
| for sure).
|
| I can't block them because they are different numbers every
| time, so I have _all_ unknown incoming calls set to go straight
| to voicemail.
|
| I don't even know what they are calling for. If I ever try to
| answer there is only silence on the line. But I haven't even
| done that in months- hoping the calls would eventually stop.
| (They haven't)
|
| One infuriating thing is that there is some sort of "verified"
| checkmark in my call log for some numbers? Or maybe not
| verified, but "valid number?" Why are they even allowing non-
| verified calls through? It wouldn't _stop_ the problem, as 1 /4
| of my spam calls have the icon anyway. But it would help,
| surely.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I don't wish android didn't offer to block the numbers as
| they are all spoofed.
| delichon wrote:
| I thought my girlfriend had abandoned me. My most frequent
| phone call by far was from a nice sounding recorded lady
| informing me that the extended warranty I never bought on a car
| that I never owned was in danger of expiring and this was my
| last chance to renew it. Ever. She would sometimes call me
| three times per day with that message but I haven't heard from
| her in months. I was afraid that my last chance had come and
| gone, or that she is no longer that into me. But it's just the
| FCC coming between us.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I haven't had a junk call since 2023 (aside from political
| polling) but I receive a fake usps text from international
| numbers pretty much daily.
|
| google's messages app is pretty good at corralling them into a
| spam folder but I do peep in there every now and then. I hope
| that whatever provider is allowing these gets disconnected.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I haven't had to handle any scam calls or texts since I
| switched to Android. I had no idea the feature was so
| effective. They should advertise it more.
| kmoser wrote:
| Do you think having an Android phone has something to do with
| the drop in scam calls/texts?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, because the calls and texts get classified into a
| "Spam & blocked" folder that I can go glance at if I feel
| bored. Some feature of either Android or the Google Pixel
| phone is doing this.
| thephyber wrote:
| My anecdote:
|
| I get no calls anymore, but I attribute it to pruning where my
| contact info is distributed and using the spam filters
| available on call/text.
|
| My father got (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day, consistently,
| until I realized why he wasn't answering his phone. He had used
| zero of the tools that the cell service provider and smartphone
| OS made available to him. Additionally, he likes talking to
| people, so he wouldn't be "mean" to tell callers/testers to
| take him off their list.
| 29834u98 wrote:
| Exponential increase over the past decade. Currently I get 5-10
| calls per day. I'll get the same robocall from the same LA
| phone number (I've never lived anywhere near LA) three times a
| day for a month advertising roof repair or some shit like that
| (I don't own a home).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I briefly saw a dropoff of spoofed calls, after STIR/SHAKEN.
|
| I have a business line, and pretty much every call to it is
| spam.
|
| The spoofed calls have picked up again. It looks like
| STIR/SHAKEN means squat.
| zelon88 wrote:
| Here's the link to the PDF;
| https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-408083A1.pdf
| dang wrote:
| Since there's a plain text version, we changed the url to that
| instead. (Submitted url was https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-
| could-block-over-2400-provi....)
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| PSA - use a free carrier lookup website to see where your spam
| calls and texts come from. Mine mostly come from Bandwidth
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_Inc.), Sinch
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinch_AB), and other such
| platforms with APIs. It appears these companies have very poor
| anti abuse practices. When I contacted them for help they
| basically refused to reveal how my number was obtained, what
| their practices were in establishing consent, and did no more
| than block one specific number each time from contacting me.
| Sometimes they claimed they're just a wholesale reseller and have
| no obligations to take more action. They didn't even respond to
| my repeated request to preserve data and communications relating
| to these repeated abuse cases. These companies should be shut
| down and their executives should be personally fined.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| What's an example of these free carrier lookup websites?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Some example websites I got from a quick web search:
|
| https://freecarrierlookup.com/
|
| https://www.carrierlookup.com/
|
| https://www.ipqualityscore.com/free-carrier-lookup
|
| By looking up the carrier you can then find the right company
| to complain to via their reporting process, if they have one.
| And additionally you can file a report to the FTC and FCC
| that mentions them.
|
| EDIT: The idea is that you complain to the company whose
| platform is sending you spam, the regulatory agencies at
| https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/ and
| https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/, your own cell phone carrier by
| forwarding text spam to 7726, and that will result in actions
| that hopefully will address that one situation but also
| collectively reduce spam for everyone. Without identifying
| which platform sent you the spam, you cannot know which
| company to go complain to (they usually have a reporting tool
| on their website). And you can name them in your complaints
| to the FCC and FTC.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I'm assuming that you search for the originating phone
| number of spam callers? It was unclear to me from context
| how this would help in the manner you suggested, for
| blocking or reducing spam calls.
| bluGill wrote:
| There should be a way to submit a complaint to the FCC for each
| instance. I don't know how, but it should exist somehow.
| lxgr wrote:
| Don't most spam calls/texts these days use fake caller/sender
| IDs anyway?
|
| > It appears these companies have very poor anti abuse
| practices. When I contacted them for help they basically
| refused to reveal how my number was obtained
|
| How would a service provider know how your customer obtained
| your number?
|
| But you reporting that you're receiving unwanted calls/texts
| from one of their customers should of course still trigger some
| action on their side - if indeed that's the number that
| contacted you, per the above.
| m3047 wrote:
| Ooma isn't in there (woot! that's my VOIP to DECT provider).
| There's a Zoom Telcom, but I don't think it's the Zoom we all
| know.
| alwa wrote:
| I wonder which state abstained from "the FCC's robocall
| enforcement partnerships with leaders from 49 states, the
| District of Columbia, and Guam."
| _n_b_ wrote:
| It's Nebraska.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Sorry, I feel dumb for asking, but what does "voice service
| providers" mean here? Like, Verizon and TMobile etc etc? Can't be
| because there aren't 2,411 cell companies.
| woodson wrote:
| I assume any company offering VoIP services that interact with
| phone numbers (Direct inward/outward dialing, DID etc) is
| potentially included. E.g., virtual PBX, Twilio and so on.
| bluGill wrote:
| Verizon and TMobile are voice service providers, but not in the
| 2411 in question. The providers in question are small phone
| companies.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| My googling kind of indicates these are VoIP providers. But it
| still seems weird there are this many.
|
| My vague guess is that these many providers have existed
| primarily to facilitate robocalling - to force the FCC to play
| wack-a-mole to get rid of them and FCC is now acting on them en
| masse, which might be more effective. But people who know this
| stuff might pipe up on the question.
| RajT88 wrote:
| "The sleeper has awakened" it feels like. The benevolent dictator
| which is the FCC is finally making some progress.
|
| I fear the FCC will start reversing this progress once the new
| guy takes the reins. Without further comment:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/media/brendan-carr-trump-fcc-...
| Hilift wrote:
| A voice/wireless provider can abuse a lot of things and get
| away with it now. Even if it is an obvious problem, the FCC
| doesn't do anything about specific complaints unless you hire
| an attorney to file a formal complaint. All of the wireless
| providers that sell cheap wireless can terminate your account
| and say they don't know you and there's nothing you can do.
| Actual telecoms that have skin in the game (Verizon, AT&T,
| Sprint, etc) can't do that due to there is usually a
| state/local regulator that can intervene.
| gosub100 wrote:
| If this leader is the good guy, why did it take them 4 years to
| do anything? That's a poor measure of progress.
|
| The best thing they could do is make it impossible to spoof
| numbers or at least be able to reject them. Even then, you
| should be able to block anyone calling from a number that you
| cannot call back.
| dmurray wrote:
| This seems like the US catching up with the EU.
|
| The normal complaint about the EU's approach to regulation is
| that it's too vague and companies won't do business there in case
| they're found in breach of the vague laws.
|
| In practice, at least on this subject, this just isn't a problem.
| I can't link to the directive that outlaws spam phone calls (it
| predates GDPR) but the telecoms clearly get told to stop
| facilitating them and yet I've never heard of a company that
| claims they were erroneously barred from the market.
| bityard wrote:
| I _really_ wanted the headline to read "2600 phone providers"
| latexr wrote:
| A lot of people won't understand the reference. An explanation
| or a link would be useful.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking#2600_hertz
| jmhammond wrote:
| This person is putting Hacker in hacker news
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| I'm in Northern Europe and lately spam calls, and especially
| spoofing from random peoples numbers have become so bad i know
| multiple who stopped taking any calls, or even changed their
| phone numbers.
|
| To me the whole system is archaic - i know gen z would never ever
| take a call from someone they don't know, or even call each other
| - it's simply not something you do.
|
| And i'm kind of coming to the same conclusion. Practically we
| need something new though.
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