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'One Ring' Phone Scam

fcc.gov

341–350 of 367 posts

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My strategy is: if I don’t know the caller they can leave a voicemail. If it’s not important enough for a voicemail, it’s not important.

The problem with this for me is my voicemail is now so full of spam messages from numbers I don't answer or block that I can't ever get any useful messages if there are any. A lot of the time my inbox remains full and I can't actually receive new voicemails. It's just gotten to the point where the new voicemail icon has become a permanent fixture on my notification bar I totally ignore.

The concept of a 'full' voicemail is also backwards. It should be implemented as a circular buffer, if full, the oldest gets replaced.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is usually a setting to allow unknown numbers through if they call again within a short amount of time. That may help with the emergency case. Unfortunately the 2FA calls for my corporate login seem to come from different numbers each time..

That's a useless arms race because spammers can easily call twice.

You would think, but so far they don't seem to have figured that out.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#343

I can’t imagine why anyone ever answers the phone. I get at least ten robocalls every weekday. I don’t ever look at my voicemail and I haven’t answered a call in ages. Edit: I know I’m not alone because CNN just released a poll with no responses from people under the age of fifty, because they couldn’t reach enough of them by phone.

Work phones and/or being on-call. Encouraging non-PSTN calls can have huge privacy implications (e.g. using Facebook for health care provider communications). But ya; personally, I have a dedicated voicemail number that I hand out when I “must” provide a phone number.

What is the voicemail service you use?

I am very interested in a cheap voip service that is literally just voicemail. I'd love that. Especially if it's only $1-2/mo.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re talking about the CNN poll on Democratic Presidential candidates, then that’s a colossal mis-statement of the facts. They definitely did have people under 50 in the poll. There was a Facebook post making the rounds that took a single chart from the methodology statement and claimed that nobody under 50 was polled, incorrectly. I encourage you to read the full polling statement, available online, to see that…

I don't think I've misrepresented the outcome of the poll at all. Even after lumping together 18-49 year old respondents, an unusually coarse cohort spanning several generations, they still didn't have enough responses to get statistical power.

First, I don't see any table that lumps all responses 18-49. I do see a column for Second, the tables that show responses for all respondents do include values (not N/A) for all age groups, meaning that across the n=1000 poll there are > 125 respondents in each age group, meaning that at minimum 250 people out of the 1000 in the poll are under 50.

The categories that do have N/A are in questions that select for only Democratic or Democratic-leaning independents who are registered to vote -- which is only 411 respondents out of the poll. And that one does have a lot of N/A's, including in the < 45 column. Having N < 125 under 45 in a sample size of 411 people is disappointing, but hardly the same as "no responses from people under 50", which is what you wrote. It also doesn't mean that those responses weren't included in the poll, only that they didn't feel confident to break them out separately.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Mind boggling. Clearly he was trying to stand out, with his video responses, but that's just irritating, you could click a short email and read it in seconds on your phone almost anywhere, or, you have to wait until a time suitable to watch with audio.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#346
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also has to do with personality type. A sales type person is more likely a people's person that has more control over a voice communication than a typing conversation. They want to be able to directly counter your indecisiveness to land the sale, they can't do that in an email

That makes a lot of sense. I find it highly irritating though. I'm paying these people to do a job for me, I expect it done without further inconveniencing me. The last solicitor I instructed ended up leaving me with more work than had I not paid him to do anything.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#347

I wonder if the solution is remarkably simple: Make phone calls expensive again. Get rid of unlimited/free/super-cheap rates and make all callers pay by the minute again. Especially inbound international calls. Let people who want free communication use FaceTime and SMS and Email and whatnot. But make phone calls expensive enough that you know if someone is paying to call you it must be important. I got my first docu…

It's not about paying by the minute. It's paying by the annoyance: there should be a fixed fee for dialing someone that doubles if they hang up in some brief number of seconds. It's not about the total time I spend talking to robocallers, it's the interruption they represent and the effort to screen them out.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we will need to adopt a new system or just use existing framework (facetime, whatsapp, etc.). I already use white lists -- I simply don't answer the phone if the person isn't in my contacts list and I'm not expecting a call from an unknown number. I assume this is pretty common practice. > If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number? I almost never have…

> I almost never have LTE or even mobile data of any kind when I'm outside of cities (for a liberal definition of city) I'm curious what countries /places these are. My operator doesn't even activate 3G on modern phones, I literally have nothing aside from LTE/VoLTE. Since LTE got deployed on the low frequencies reclaimed from analog TV, the reception is generally BETTER than 3G etc. Also when there are natural disas…

> I'm curious what countries /places these are.

The United States. Not even the western or mountain states! One of the places I regularly go that doesn't have data coverage but does have voice coverage is in a national (or maybe state there?) forest in New York state.

> Also when there are natural disasters, the voice infrastructure is the first to collapse, but data in chat apps still makes it through

I don't have any experience with this, so I'll take your word for it.

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#349
post #157

From the website: How to avoid this scam: Don't answer or return any calls from numbers you don't recognize. If the FCC is recommending we don't pick up our phones, isn't something really wrong with the system?

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.

My solution has been to switch my ringtone to a silent MP3 file. A good trick, since iOS doesn't let you disable all incoming calls (AFAICT).

Re: 'One Ring' Phone Scam

#350

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.

Just not willing to do this. I never want to miss a call from someone talking about an emergency with a family member, the FAA calling about an unclosed flight plan, a recruiter (if job hunting), a delivery person, etc. I answer virtually all unknown numbers except the ones T-Mobile puts in as “Scam Likely.” What I do not understand is, given that the phone is a computer, why there is not an on-phone IVR which can so…

Set up your phone such that when you don't answer a call from a number you don't recognise, it will go to voicemail.

Set up your voicemail answering message to contain only two things: the tones that signify "This Phone Number Not In Use" (see http://www.k3pgp.org/telezap.htm) and a terse voice message, such as "Leave a Message", which imparts no usable information to the caller.

Now when the call goes to voicemail, two things happen: First, any robocallers will hang up when the hear the 'Not in Use' tones. Second, any humans will hear the 'Leave a Message' and they now have two options which are to hang up, or to leave a message asking you to call back.

You merely have to scan the voicemail messages and call back only those ones you choose to answer. The other 80% or more have been discarded 'automatically' before you get to hear them.

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