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Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

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Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#181

Post by ayyjohn »

randomerr wrote: post #43
blang wrote: post #33

I was wondering aloud at work the other day if robocalls could actually spell the end of the phone number. It is extremely rare that I actually make a telephone call to talk to someone, it's been replaced with facetime and google hangouts, and it's very rare that someone calls me on my phone number that isn't a scam call. Pretty much the only time I get calls that I need to pick up are when my kid's day care is calli…

I think phones are stilled needed. They're still the most reliable form of communication. But I see most people switching to white lists. Anyone not in your address book will get sent to voicemail right away.

this is off topic but a friend linked me a comment you made a few months ago about the IBM dress code and "work being for work" and he can't find the article so I was hoping you might have it somewhere or remember the title or anything!

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#182

Post by JdeBP »

noonespecial wrote: post #146
abakker wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"this call is in reference to your credit account...there are no current problems with your account, please press 1 to be connected to an operator that can share an amazing opportunity for you $something" I've never clicked '1', and never felt I've missed out, but I've gotten that same call from local numbers in my same block maybe 50 times already this year.

I always punch 1. I feel its my civic duty to waste 10 minutes of their time (usually while speaking in my best Monty Python accents). The interesting thing is that I usually only get a person 1/2 the time. The system just glitches to hangup the rest of the time.

It's not a glitch. This sort of system (which will be some form of predictive dialler) relies upon there being far more in-progress calls than human agents. Sometimes, therefore, there's no available agent to connect a person to. This nature of such systems is why some countries regulate them.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#183

Post by rconti »

enzanki_ars wrote: post #153
rconti wrote: post #122

What an asshole. His whole line of logic seems to be: * Open source software and long distance companies make it too easy * Why didn't they stop me? * They should have regulated me. * Other people do it worse.

I can kind of understand his point though. We have the technology to stop this, but the companies don't care enough to try. We face the same problem with DDOS attacks and ISPs. It's too easy to do, and it's easy to stop, but unless people are able to influence companies with their wallets, we won't get anywhere.

We do have the technology to stop this, but it doesn't change what a miserable sack of crap he is. It doesn't absolve him of being the ONE PERSON ultimately responsible for his behavior. And you can't tell me if a simple blocking method was put in place, that he wouldn't try to work around it. In fact, why do you think they don't dial from the same phone number every time? He's already trying to work around the (very rudimentary) methods people and providers use to stop this garbage.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#184

Post by pandaman »

noonespecial wrote: post #146
abakker wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"this call is in reference to your credit account...there are no current problems with your account, please press 1 to be connected to an operator that can share an amazing opportunity for you $something" I've never clicked '1', and never felt I've missed out, but I've gotten that same call from local numbers in my same block maybe 50 times already this year.

I always punch 1. I feel its my civic duty to waste 10 minutes of their time (usually while speaking in my best Monty Python accents). The interesting thing is that I usually only get a person 1/2 the time. The system just glitches to hangup the rest of the time.

I started doing the same a few weeks ago. It could be a coincidence but the number of calls seems to decrease. Not that I was getting a lot but now I go for many days without any at all. I just get to the life person and put the phone on mute. As far as my disruption goes it's about the same but I imagine the scammer's cost raises manyfold: they pay a lot more for the time on the line and their operators get disrupted on top of that. If I get a call to last a minute vs 3 seconds it takes to hang up it already makes my number an order of magnitude more expensive to call vs. a number that hangs up/does not answer.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#185

Post by JdeBP »

apotheothesomai wrote: post #118
jonknee wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why bother calling if you are not even going to attempt to scam me. I think it might be something silly like confirming the number has a person on the other end. For selling to other spammers. Not sure why they can't do both at once though, so maybe I'm off.

Pretty sure that is the reason. It's the phone equivalent of verifying an email. They ping, you pong, it goes on a list of verified numbers.

It isn't, though. Getting a ringing response is enough to validate a number, and someone who isn't making the effort to check contact lists against do-not-call registries won't be making the effort to track numbers that do not answer, either. In any case, RTNR to such people simply means that there's no-one to answer right now and is no reason to discard a number.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871131 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873537 for what's actually happening.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#186

Post by JdeBP »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #158
gowld wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telcos are usually your ISP, so they win either way.

And they can upsell you to VOIP service which offers more controls on incoming calls.

... but none of the guarantees that inetknght was bemoaning the lack of.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#187

Post by JdeBP »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #159
ghaff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it is that their are legitimate reasons to spoof CallerID such as when a company wants to set all outgoing calls to show the main company name and number, even when the call originates from a direct inbound dial line. Carriers could block calls from numbers that supposedly don't exist or dial out--and I believe some are starting to offer than as a service. But if they spoof as a real number, that won't work.…

The phone companies could only allow spoofing caller ID to a number you already use. That should be easy enough.

It's not. The PSTN isn't one giant cohesive system. It's a federation of lots of companies in lots of countries. Getting such a system in place requires filtering between carriers as well as everyone filtering what subscribers can do. You may have heard: not every country in the world likes every other country, and not every telephony carrier business likes every other telephony carrier business.

It is possible, but easy it definitely is not.

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#189

Post by JdeBP »

froindt wrote: post #111
randomerr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think phones are stilled needed. They're still the most reliable form of communication. But I see most people switching to white lists. Anyone not in your address book will get sent to voicemail right away.

> But I see most people switching to white lists. Anyone not in your address book will get sent to voicemail right away. Imagine the future of mobile adware...where they get access to your contact list, generate generic names of similar ethnicity to your real contacts, and add fake contacts. Or they add additional numbers to contacts you already have. "Oh, my friend Stan is calling. DANGIT NO I DON'T WANT A MEDICARE…

Given what a lot of people now know (or should know) about what Facebook and Google record about everyone, this is not the future any longer. It is achievable right now, and I would not be shocked to find that someone is doing it already. (I'd be disappointed and irate.)

Re: Man Accused of Making 97M Robocalls

#190

Post by jcims »

jessaustin wrote: post #147
nonbel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"If the average person was getting a hundred calls a day to the point where they couldn't use their phone service, something would happen." This does seem to be the endgame. The last excuse I heard was "what if a friend of a friend wants to invite you to her party so she gets your number from the shared friend, and she also does the same for a bunch of other friends of friends?"

I'm not on it, but judging by the parties I've missed, everyone else uses facebook rather than the phone for this purpose. This also seems problematic?

Do you ever wonder if Zuck has some kind of ghost profile for you anyway? This person that shows up in photos but has no profile...he probably knows your name and where you fit in the social graph.
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