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'One Ring' Phone Scam

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Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#321

Post by etrautmann »

solotronics wrote: post #262
Waterluvian wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. The phone system is totally broken. A few years ago I disabled the incoming call part of my phone to everyone except a few family members and my wife. So far it's been great. Everyone who needs me emails me. I've yet to run into a situation where someone I needed to hear from would only call me.

There was an article on here a few months ago about how the organ donor system works. If you are on the list to receive an organ you get a phonecall and if you miss this call the organ goes to the next person on the list who picks up the phone.

Yes, but there should be an automated system that sends email, text, and calls to multiple family members simultaneously

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#322

Post by jgowdy »

mike_hollinger wrote: post #202

It occurred to me just last week that land line phones have caller ID as I was helping my parents port their land line into a VOIP service. How is it that cell phones, a nominally more advanced technology, lack this function which was retrofitted into the analog phone system? I'd love to read or hear more about how that came about.

Caller ID is an untrusted advisory best effort service. It has absolutely no integrity of any kind today. There's an American law against spoofing it in theory, but it's not very enforcable at the moment. Understand it's literally a string that you can set to any value, including complete nonsense, and calls will often work.

Heck, we constantly receive calls with invalid phone numbers. And it's not always on purpose, sometimes it's just crummy or small-time carriers in rural areas (no disrespect intended, this is just an honest statement from experience). If we ingress filtered all invalid numbers, it would almost certainly be devistating to our customers.

This is like with email. First we need an integrity mechanism, then we can start doing reputation and identifying bad actors.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#323

Post by jgowdy »

Marsymars wrote: post #315
jgowdy wrote: post #304

As someone who has worked in the telecom space for nearly 20 years, I really think we need to remove other countries from country code +1. People in any country should have confidence when they dial a number that it isn't unexpectedly billing them for international calls. This applies to people in any of the +1 nations, not just the United States. Otherwise, we need to set the rules and pricing conditional for being…

If it's done for their own benefit, probably easier for the US to remove themselves from the +1 area code than to remove other countries.

I tried to be clear that I believe the principle should apply to all callers. No on planet earth should second guess whether they're calling a different nation or not. That principle includes other +1 nations.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#324

Post by Marsymars »

jgowdy wrote: post #323
Marsymars wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's done for their own benefit, probably easier for the US to remove themselves from the +1 area code than to remove other countries.

I tried to be clear that I believe the principle should apply to all callers. No on planet earth should second guess whether they're calling a different nation or not. That principle includes other +1 nations.

Sure, but as a Canadian, I'm not bothered by it. My phone and VoIP plans all include US calling/texting. I'd prefer to keep the +1 prefix. The US is free to change theirs.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#325

Post by jgowdy »

Marsymars wrote: post #41
abtinf wrote: post #36

What baffles me about this is that getting people to dial these numbers has been a known scam for many years. The fix seems stupidly trivial: break up the North American Numbering Plan to move them out of the +1 zone. They just don’t belong there. Frankly, Canada should be moved out the +1 zone too.

> Frankly, Canada should be moved out the +1 zone too. Why? Who does that benefit? It's pretty common for phone plans in both the US and Canada to treat the US/Canada as a single region for the purpose of long distance calls and texts.

Good point. The purpose of my comment you replied to above was that there should be either pricing normalization such that callers aren't surprised, OR split the +1 country code.

Its not just "kick everyone out of the US country code", it's protect consumers by principle of least surprise sorta. But again, this only protects against toll fraud and not all of the other "Appear to be in a nation you aren't" scams.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#327

Post by pavel_lishin »

ibarrac wrote: post #289
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

heard a review of this app a few days ago that reminded me of Lenny https://www.robokiller.com/ - apparently the conversations it spews out are pretty hilarious also. Annoyingly I can't figure out what the subscription rate is, but can try it for a week for free

I've been using this for the last 3 weeks and it works really well. It has blocked 21 spam calls up to now. After the free week they charge $30 yearly or $4 monthly. You can set the spam calls to be answered with selected funny time-wasting recordings, but since that would be embarrassing if I get a call from a professional contact, I set them to be answered with a plain fax tone. Now I am back to being able to pick…

Can you toggle over to the "funny recording" on demand? I want to be able to say "ok, let me get my dad", and push the button to waste their time.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#328

Post by mpolichette »

peeters wrote: post #281

Why do we allow pay-per-minute phone services to even exist? There's no point to them in this day and age. If someone wants one of those services, there are plenty of ways to make it pay-per-minute without the phone company acting as a broker. Just end support for it, immediately.

I agree. If not this, then the phone company should at least require acknowledgment of the extra cost of the call.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#329

Post by mullingitover »

Imagine if the web didn't have SSL certificates. That's what the legacy phone networks are foisting on the public. It's a garbage service and if the caller identity problem can't be solved, we should shut the whole thing down as it's actively harmful.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#330

Post by lowercased »

alias_neo wrote: post #117
maccard wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do t disagree with you that answerinf your phone can be necessary, but most of your examples are cases where you are expecting a call - except your doctor/dentist. Why are they calling you and not you calling them to make appointments? Semo-related but it's infuriating how many companies refuse to contact you by email. I'm currently remortgaging a flat, and I've told the broker repeatedly to contact me by email, an…

The broker thing has happened the same way with me, the last two times I've done so. I'm starting to believe they don't want certain things in black and white so they would rather call you. It could just be policy though, who's to say. I do still find it irritating that they insist. I'm much more likely to respond to an email quickly than to a phone call and I only answer phone calls from my family while I'm at work.

Had an accountant that adopted some new platform and communication technique. Anytime I'd email, he would record a video and send back a link to a video. The videos weren't (easily) downloadable, and would expire pretty quickly. So... I never had anything useful to trace through history in. I switched accountants. New one is fine with answering basic questions about stuff via email. He will call sometimes, but it's not a requirement, and he certainly won't send videos.
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