Make note of the telephone number and add it to the Project Mayhem page. This effort uses code sent from VOIP phones to flood these numbers: https://www.patreon.com/ProjectMayhem
Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
41–50 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neat! There's a business called Pindrop that conduct an analysis of audio data to guess where a call is originating from. The idea being, if a call originates from somewhere like India it'll take roughly a certain route that will produce certain audible artifacts on the line. They also score a bunch of other stuff. I'd recommend reading the patents their CEO filed if you're interested. It's interesting. I wondered if…
Yeah, those guys are great. I run into them at security conferences all the time. Their tech is mainly aimed at the financial sector to make sure the person calling in is who they say they are. In our case, we don't/can't analyze the audio stream of consumer calls. We can only work with the meta data of the call. Our algo comes down pretty hard and fast on calls that come into our honeypot. These numbers have been ou…
I noticed that under "new robocall recordings" the recordings are all from October 25, 2017. Not sure if this is a bug or you stopped updating them on that date or something.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#43Make note of the telephone number and add it to the Project Mayhem page. This effort uses code sent from VOIP phones to flood these numbers: https://www.patreon.com/ProjectMayhem
How do you add something to a patreon page??
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
T-Mobile offers a spam blocking service that stops calls from reaching my phone, because of that there's no way for me to gauge just how many are being blocked. What is your take on network level spam filtering? You're blocking 1300 numbers a day. I assume the spammers rotate numbers, so if someone gets a recycled number that was on your list, what happens? These spammers get connected to the telephone system somehow…
T-Mobile actually uses Hiya for that. Samsung uses Hiya as well for their equivalent service. You could just download the app directly
Actually, First Orion/PrivacyStar powers the T-Mobile spam product. Samsung does partner with Hiya, though.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#45Founder of Nomorobo here. We put a stop to all of those annoying robocalls, telemarketers, and spam/scam calls and texts. It's about the only thing that works nowadays. It's not your imagination - these types of calls are out of control. According to our data, 40% of all calls made in the US are illegal, unwanted spam/scam robocalls. And those "neighbor" spoofed calls (same area code and extension) are especially pre…
T-Mobile offers a spam blocking service that stops calls from reaching my phone, because of that there's no way for me to gauge just how many are being blocked. What is your take on network level spam filtering? You're blocking 1300 numbers a day. I assume the spammers rotate numbers, so if someone gets a recycled number that was on your list, what happens? These spammers get connected to the telephone system somehow…
The spammers rotate through new numbers every few hours. We're actually adding 1,300 new numbers per day and the full blacklist is over 700k entries.
As for getting connected to the phone system - Yeah, they have to jump on the phone network somewhere and, in theory, the best way to stop these guys would be to at the ingress point.
The problem is that the phone system is built for interconnection. Even just one bad actor letting the traffic on spoils the system. Layer on top of that the way the network routes calls through multiple hops through multiple carriers and tracking the calls back to the source is nearly impossible. Throw in common carrier regulations (you can't just willy nilly block calls coming over the network) and it amps up even more. Finally, allow all this to be done for fractions of pennies and you get the perfect storm for robocalls.
As for the neighbor spoofed calls, make sure that you enter your phone number in Nomorobo so that we can make sure we protect the correct number block ([Area Code]-[Exchange]-[0000-9999]). In our initial release, we were only able to identify these calls but not block them. It had to do with blocking calls from families with sequential phone numbers. But, in our last release, if you give the app contact access, we can now scrub those numbers and fully block the neighbor spoofed calls.
It's been a bit of a balancing act between being privacy conscious (not needing your email/phone number/invasive contact access) and getting the job done. The balance that we've struck is this - you don't have to give us any of that and you'll get really good protection. But, if you try out the service and start to trust us more, we can do an even better job.
And finally, yes - it's going to take a lot of effort to tackle this problem. While Nomorobo isn't perfect - admittedly, the sim ring landline version is just a crazy hack that the carriers can't stop - the past 4 years have seen some great progress in the fight.
As more and more people become aware of robocall blockers and we show that it's actually a very safe way to protect people, only then will the larger industry come along (kicking and screaming the entire way).
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, those guys are great. I run into them at security conferences all the time. Their tech is mainly aimed at the financial sector to make sure the person calling in is who they say they are. In our case, we don't/can't analyze the audio stream of consumer calls. We can only work with the meta data of the call. Our algo comes down pretty hard and fast on calls that come into our honeypot. These numbers have been ou…
I noticed that under "new robocall recordings" the recordings are all from October 25, 2017. Not sure if this is a bug or you stopped updating them on that date or something.
Right now, we only grab one recording per phone number so that's the date that we recorded it.
But, the response to our sampling system has been really strong so we're expanding that to grab one recording per day per number. That way you can also go back in time and see the different scams that have been sent from the same number.
We're also building some deeper analytics so that you can see call volume by robocaller and graphs that show the changes over time.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#47I had the same problem a few months ago before I set up an automated virtual assistant to pre-screen calls[1]. It works with my existing phone number by forwarding all inbound calls to a small Linode box which plays an audio prompt and listens for specific keywords. (Whitelisted numbers get patched through immediately.) Since I made that post, the system has filtered 100% of the spammers and 0% of my actual contacts.…
Are you able to measure which cold calls are filtered, that you would otherwise like to hear? For example... A call from a garage to say your car is ready to be picked up, or perhaps some kind of emergency service? I imagine their calls would start with similar wording to sales calls. "Hello, can I speak to so and so?"
Good question! I set my prompt to verify that they at least know my first or last name, so it’s pretty good at reducing false positives. For calls that do get filtered, I keep the recorded audio snippets used for keyword extraction (originally used for debugging). If I had more time, I’d implement sending a muted/non-ringing push notification whenever a call gets filtered with an option to play back the recorded audio snippets from that session.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#48I had the same problem a few months ago before I set up an automated virtual assistant to pre-screen calls[1]. It works with my existing phone number by forwarding all inbound calls to a small Linode box which plays an audio prompt and listens for specific keywords. (Whitelisted numbers get patched through immediately.) Since I made that post, the system has filtered 100% of the spammers and 0% of my actual contacts.…
Impressive integration experiment! Is your phone line busy during call forwarding? Would it possible to package all this in mobile app instead? There is some Speech API available and maybe call control/recording too, but I am not sure - not an IOS dev.
Thanks! I think Google Voice has two lines in, so it’d return a busy tone when I’m in an active call with someone (one line for each person to do the call merging).
>Would it possible to package all this in mobile app instead?
Unfortunately the limiting factor would be background processing here; iOS isn’t permissive enough to really replace the server. I think it might be possible by using a background service on Android though.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#49Track them down and sue them in small claims court. I’ve collected nearly $10,000 doing this. Short story: calling your cell phone with automated dialing equipment and automated messaging (“press 1 to talk to someone”) is illegal per the TCPA. I’m not a lawyer but it’s fun to be amateur attorney for a day. Definitely a time suck though...
Have you perhaps written about your experience doing this? I'd love to read about it.
Here's a presentation I found to get you started:
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?
#50You may not be able to stop them, but you can certainly annoy them to all hell: http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/