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Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

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Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#171

Post by gonehome »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #165
gonehome wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2$/month is not “very high” unless you’re living in the third world. I don’t mind paying it either since I can report numbers that get through to their blacklist. I feel like I’m fighting back.

It's high when you're basically paying because of a fatal flaw in the telecom system.

I’d prefer just an iOS whitelist (which seems like a much easier solution to this problem) - but this doesn’t exist.

The do not disturb work around mutes all notifications which makes it useless for me.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#172

Post by jonhendry18 »

skate22 wrote: post #149

Whats stopping us from having longer phone numbers. Everyone i care about talking to can scan a QR code or something. Also it would be awesome to have seperate outgoing and incoming numbers so i cant get added to a call list when i contact a business.

What would longer phone numbers accomplish?

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#173

Post by jonhendry18 »

esfandia wrote: post #101

How many of these people get prosecuted every year? Is there some sort of Interpol of spam/scam/phishing to coordinate efforts against these guys? They should be easy enough to catch. It seems that right now there's not enough disincentive for these people to stop what they're doing. If the decentralized web wants to have a chance to succeed, we'll need to find a solution against spammers and scammers.

Not many. And they make enough money that the fines aren't much of an obstacle.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#174

Post by makecheck »

Frankly, unwanted calls could be much less aggravating if phones had a proper UI.

In 2007, when the iPhone was first released, maybe the “phone” part was an important app. Now though, I can’t believe the phone app is still allowed to immediately interrupt anything I am doing and take over the entire screen!

What’s worse is that the Answer and Hang Up buttons could easily appear right under your fingers while you’re in the middle of using a definitely-not-phone app, causing you to do things you don’t want.

And why are my only options to “Do Not Disturb” (blocking everything, including stuff I don’t want to block), or to just sit and wait for the ringing to end? If I answer or hang up immediately, the spammer knows I’m a real person with a valid phone number and I probably end up on a list for more spam.

Here’s what I want: a checkbox that says “do not ever ring my phone, allow voicemail”, with an option to use a standard notification if a call comes in. Period. Tired of the full-screen-screw-whatever-you-were-doing-here’s-some-spam interface.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#175

Post by toast0 »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #168
toast0 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works fine for calls from your landline or cellphone. It doesn't work as well go businesses which may legitimately split incoming and outgoing service, so the outgoing carrier really has no way to know what source numbers are legitimate. There's also a pretty big business in traffic resale, and none of those guys have any idea. What would be more useful is accessible path information, so I can complain to my car…

"so the outgoing carrier really has no way to know what source numbers are legitimate." It shouldn't be difficult to get a single number that is legitimate and limit the caller id to that number. Any telecom carrier whose customer is requesting a wide variety of phone numbers ought to know that something sketchy is going on.

Let's say I'm a not entirely small company, with employees with phones on their desks who call customers and have direct numbers to be called. When they call out, the caller id should be their desk number so the people they're calling know it's them and answer the phone.

But the carrier that handles inbound calling charges an arm and a leg for outbound, so I'd like to use another carrier for outbound; I don't want to change my inbound carrier.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#176

Post by nichtich »

makecheck wrote: post #174

Frankly, unwanted calls could be much less aggravating if phones had a proper UI. In 2007 , when the iPhone was first released, maybe the “phone” part was an important app. Now though, I can’t believe the phone app is still allowed to immediately interrupt anything I am doing and take over the entire screen ! What’s worse is that the Answer and Hang Up buttons could easily appear right under your fingers while you’re…

I think 'do not disturb' has an option for only allow people from your contacts? and there are crowdsourced blacklist apps for scammer/harassment phone numbers.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#177

Post by ada1981 »

komali2 wrote: post #137
ada1981 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can request the debt collectors stop calling you and then they have to decide if they will sue you or not. If they keep calling they can be fined and you get the $$.

It's always a different debt collector. None of them have proof of debt so they're all just shitting my debt down the pyramid lol. I'm guessing the value goes down significantly each sell. I think it's reached the "penny stock" mark by now, I haven't had a call in 8 months.

Hmm... if you make the no-contact request you can also ask them to attach that to the file if they sell it.

Is it still on your credit report? You can challenge it.

If it goes to court you can most likely have it ruled invalid as well.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#178

Post by greenyoda »

MrMember wrote: post #142
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.

Yep, I know if a number has the same first six digits as mine there's a solid 95% probability it's spam. On rare occasions I'll get a text from a number in my area code with some variation of, "Do I know you?" so clearly other people are getting calls spoofed as my number as well.

I've also been getting lots of "same first six digits" spam, but yesterday I saw a new variation: only the first five digits were the same.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#179

Post by axaxs »

inetknght wrote: post #4

I've frequently wondered why, in this day and age, telcos are permitted to provide telephone service without any guarantee whatsoever of the originating phone number being accurate.

I actually get a large number of calls from gvoice numbers. I tested this myself. I was able to create a Google account and get a number, manually mind you, in less than one minute. Spoofing is one problem... allowing legit rampant abuse is another.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#180

Post by mintplant »

dang wrote: post #96
mintplant wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Please don't post comments insinuating astroturfing or shillage unless you have some more substantive reason for it—in which case you should email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. All this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . It's natural for things to seem this way, but that's because there's enough data on HN to produce seeming patterns of all kinds. Overwhelm…

You're right, on reflection this was unnecessarily silly/snarky of me to post here. Thanks for the course correction.
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