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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+%...
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.
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?
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.
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.
I answer every call, no matter what the caller ID says. In the last decade, I've probably gotten maybe 10 total spam/robo/telemarketer calls or texts. Strangers like recruiters or doctors never seem to have trouble calling me. My cell phone is posted all over the internet. On my website and my resume. I put it into probably a thousand forms online. What am I doing different? I've had the same Verizon plan and Google voice number the whole time. Are old numbers immune to this problem? Is the Google Voice-Verizon-Samsung combo of built-in spam filters just wildly efficient? I keep hearing about spam calls being an epidemic - are people just rawdogging their cell plan without turning on any spam filtering?
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm surprised Its Lenny has been ported to a cell phone app. At least we can have some fun with this
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.
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.
Every cell phone should have an option to block off calls by the country code or area code.
Regulatory capture isn't just an issue with the FCC. Big Companies benefit from Big Government
> 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?"