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Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

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Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#81

Post by Retric »

gonehome wrote: post #41
Clubber wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently had a bunch of calls and it seems like the callers are spoofing other people's numbers. I came to this conclusion when I didn't answer and called back. It was just a regular person who didn't know anything about it. A few days later, someone called me thinking I was robo calling them.

Yeah this is called 'neighborhood' spoofing - they do it to get numbers similar to yours (sometimes they'll even appear as a known contact). I use an app called nomorobo ($2/month) that's basically a blacklist that gets continually updated to block these calls prior to ringing my phone. The way they deal with the neighborhood spoofing is having local access to your contacts so they don't accidentally block any real n…

Interesting, but honestly 2$/month seems very high unless you get a lot of these calls.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#82

Post by feikname »

jrobn wrote: post #18
fosco wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even answer my phone anymore unless I know who's calling. I have considered enabling a feature that blocks all calls unless the caller is in my contacts list but I am concerned about missing something important. Any thoughts on this?

T-Mobile will sometimes display "Scam Likely" for me in place of the phone number. It's way to conservative though. It would be nice to have a way to report scam phone numbers back. Kinda like Apple's "was this voicemail translation helpful" in voicemail. I'm sure this would weed out scammers phone numbers pretty fast. Although, once a number is flagged its gone for good and phone numbers need to be recyclable.

> and phone numbers need to be recyclable.

Why?

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#84

Post by mindslight »

jschwartzi wrote: post #55
delinka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been spoofing numbers for quite some time. It only stands to reason that randomly generated spoofed numbers will be numbers belonging to other owners of phones. They think they're being clever about it: use the same area code and exchange numbers as the target, and randomly generate the final digits, hoping you'll think you know the caller and will answer.

I actually use this to screen calls because my exchange and area code are from T-mobile in Pierce County WA circa 2003 and I've long since moved away from that area.

The strategy falls flat when calling a cell phone, but seems to make a lot of sense when targeting landlines. A call from "someone around town" seems worthwhile to pickup.

Add in the fact that people with landlines are more likely to be older people whose priors expect a human to be calling, and the only real question is why don't the spammers catalog and then exclusively target landline prefixes with this method.

It seems like ILECs could start offering a service based on ingress filtering source addrs based on numbers they know haven't been ported out, but Ma Bell is the antithesis of innovation.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#85

Post by jtbenton »

jrobn wrote: post #18
fosco wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even answer my phone anymore unless I know who's calling. I have considered enabling a feature that blocks all calls unless the caller is in my contacts list but I am concerned about missing something important. Any thoughts on this?

T-Mobile will sometimes display "Scam Likely" for me in place of the phone number. It's way to conservative though. It would be nice to have a way to report scam phone numbers back. Kinda like Apple's "was this voicemail translation helpful" in voicemail. I'm sure this would weed out scammers phone numbers pretty fast. Although, once a number is flagged its gone for good and phone numbers need to be recyclable.

You should be able to report these numbers using T-Mobile Name ID app. https://explore.t-mobile.com/nameid?icid=WMM_TM_Q317NAMEID_2...

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#86

Post by delinka »

jpindar wrote: post #44

I too have mostly stopped answering calls from numbers I don't recognize. What I get are not spam calls, but silent calls. When I answer them there is no sound at all from the other end. If I let calls go to voice mail they leave long silent voicemails. I also get calls which ring for only a couple of seconds, hardly long enough to reach for my phone before they hang up. I've heard that these may be scammers trying t…

They might be attempting to get you to call back, but likely they're calling more numbers than they can actually connect. It increases the odds of getting answers on particular attempt, but they can also keep track of those that answered even if their talking robot can't service every connection. Now they know they've got a live number and will try you again.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#87

Post by hardly_a_mirage »

mintplant wrote: post #53
rubicon33 wrote: post #8

In the US we just had congressional hearings over Facebook. While Zuckerberg walked a fine line and performed as well as anyone could under such situation, I was left disappointed. He (more or less) took a beating from congress without ever pointing the finger back at them, or at the telecom industry, or the NSA, or anyone else who is breaking trust and downright abusing existing platforms and ignoring privacy. Robo…

I feel like I've read the exact same HN comment, comparing Facebook to the NSA, five times in the past couple days. Here it's barely tangentially related to the topic at hand. Is there some sort of mini PR push going on to mitigate FB's recent reputational damage?

I second this. I too noticed a bunch of suspiciously pro-Zukerberg top comments on frontpage articles that are even remotely related to FB.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#88

Post by manigandham »

gowld wrote: post #46
marze wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me, the outrage over Facebook data collection and sale. Isn’t it obvious that is their business model, and why they are worth $0.5 T? They want to know everything about everyone. Always have.

Their business model is data collection and advertising, not sale of collected data.

Businesses set their own model and can change it whenever they want.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#89

Post by ribosometronome »

mintplant wrote: post #53
rubicon33 wrote: post #8

In the US we just had congressional hearings over Facebook. While Zuckerberg walked a fine line and performed as well as anyone could under such situation, I was left disappointed. He (more or less) took a beating from congress without ever pointing the finger back at them, or at the telecom industry, or the NSA, or anyone else who is breaking trust and downright abusing existing platforms and ignoring privacy. Robo…

I feel like I've read the exact same HN comment, comparing Facebook to the NSA, five times in the past couple days. Here it's barely tangentially related to the topic at hand. Is there some sort of mini PR push going on to mitigate FB's recent reputational damage?

"Hey guys, remember how Facebook had to go in front of congress? Zuck did a crappy job there!" is not exactly a great, confidence instilling PR push.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

fosco wrote: post #9
rco8786 wrote: post #2

Hopefully this is the first domino that ends all this crap. Myself and everyone I know has been getting hammered with spam robo-calls for the past year or two with no signs of slowing down. I don't even answer my phone anymore unless I know who's calling.

> I don't even answer my phone anymore unless I know who's calling. I have considered enabling a feature that blocks all calls unless the caller is in my contacts list but I am concerned about missing something important. Any thoughts on this?

I'm seeing residential POTS equipment now listing up to 1,000 number blocklists.

None I've yet found clearly advertise a whitelisting feature, though that's obviously the direction to roll.

I'm also trying to see if Asterisk might be applicable here.

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