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Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

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Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#91

Post by sk0g »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80
7373737373 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an utter technological failure. How and why is this even (still) possible?

Why are ads a thing on cable? On the web? It's literally the same problem, and since this site's audience is likely more familiar with the latter, it should be clear it's not a technological failure, but a social/legal one.

YouTube ads have no ability to interrupt my day-to-day life out of the blue, and also don't poison a legitimately useful communication medium for personal relationships.

Phone spam is much more harmful than ads you kinda-sorta opt into, IMO.

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#92

Post by gruez »

mullingitover wrote: post #25

I wish we could euthanize this garbage, antiquated phone system. It shouldn't be expected/required that every adult has a phone number when the system is so irredeemably broken and dangerous. If the web didn't have HTTPS, it would be illegal to conduct sensitive business over it. Yet we're stuck with this entrenched telephone system, the best we can do is STIR/SHAKEN, and that's not real security.

>If the web didn't have HTTPS, it would be illegal to conduct sensitive business over it.

Source? According to this timeline[1], e-commerence with credit cards predate SSL. Therefore I'm not really convinced that there's some law against it, except for laws that were introduced after SSL was a thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce#Timeline

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#93

Post by tiffanyg »

troydavis wrote: post #29
jdanyow wrote: post #24

Would it be possible to build an app to automate all this?

Great question. I think the biggest challenge would be maintaining high-quality reports/complaints. Basically, preventing people from reporting things that they opted in to but are frustrated with (just because it's really easy to do). There's a chance that the reports would actually become worse (less actionable) if it was too easy or too automated. A small challenge is that the high-quality carrier lookup APIs char…

You'd undoubtedly have to design, at least at some point, for such a system to be explicitly attacked. I'm not assuming you haven't considered that, just pointing out that this might factor into how one might approach building something from the start.

I'd suggest it will depend on goals / scale - if not many are using, probably would be ignored even if bad actors were aware of it. If it started to have real effects, there'd undoubtedly be very intentional efforts to attack it. Beyond just the sporadic script kiddiez / for the lulz set ...

Edit: sorry, "app" - to potentially use the app in some malicious way ... Not sure my comment is so useful, but, I'll leave it since it's unfortunately all too easy to end up with unintended consequences. Though, I favor fighting this garbage wholesale and support any efforts to interfere with the deluge of BS / noise with modern communications tech.

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#94

Post by sk0g »

mastazi wrote: post #68
AussieWog93 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a cultural thing, but at least in Australia nobody under the age of 60 would ever leave a voicemail. If you're deliberately making yourself hard to contact this way, a lot of people will just stop calling you.

Wait a second, do you pick up any call you receive? IME Australia is one of the worst places with regards to spam calls (by far the worst out of all countries I lived in), if I allow calls from numbers not already in my contacts, I get an average of around 10 spam calls per week. If it's something important like my daughter's school or strata or the lawyer, they do leave voicemails.

Honestly pre-COVID I got spam calls maybe once a quarter. After giving out my number every second time I left the house, that number is more like a few times a week.

I would say I am pretty privacy conscious (when possible), so this may not be the average person's experience.

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#95

Post by sk0g »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #54
zamadatix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can cut through a surprising amount of spam by just reading the voicemail after letting an unknown number ring. If they didn't bother to leave one it was either not at all important or the vast majority of spam calls. If they did leave a voicemail you can generally tell whether it seems even remotely legitimate and, if it does, call back at the number. E.g. if you have a kid and the school calls they will leave s…

This might be a cultural thing, but at least in Australia nobody under the age of 60 would ever leave a voicemail. If you're deliberately making yourself hard to contact this way, a lot of people will just stop calling you.

That's surprising to me, almost everyone I know will leave voicemail. Recruiters especially, which tends to be myst of my legitimate phone calls TBH!

Though with people of my age "cold calling" isn't all that common, typically you text the person first to make sure they are available and keen on a call. Unless it's an emergency of some sort, of course.

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#96

Post by johnbatch »

habosa wrote: post #63

I got a spam call seemingly “from Verizon” (their main number) on my Verizon phone. I called them and told them and they said “oh yeah that happens all the time don’t pick up when we call” That’s when I realized we’ll never win. The spammers have won.

That’s bad. I do know T-Mobile blocks calls to their phones spoofing the 1-800-TMOBILE number as of a few years ago.

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#97

Post by scoot »

tinus_hn wrote: post #76
mullingitover wrote: post #25

I wish we could euthanize this garbage, antiquated phone system. It shouldn't be expected/required that every adult has a phone number when the system is so irredeemably broken and dangerous. If the web didn't have HTTPS, it would be illegal to conduct sensitive business over it. Yet we're stuck with this entrenched telephone system, the best we can do is STIR/SHAKEN, and that's not real security.

You can rest assured that the phone company 100% securely knows who to bill for the call. They just aren’t telling you.

Lol, no. "[call|charging] [data|detail] records" (CDRs) are batch transferred over FTP, followed by a pseudo ETL into a billing system. It (mostly) works, but it's an archaic mess.

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#98

Post by rglullis »

scoot wrote: post #97
tinus_hn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can rest assured that the phone company 100% securely knows who to bill for the call. They just aren’t telling you.

Lol, no. "[call|charging] [data|detail] records" (CDRs) are batch transferred over FTP, followed by a pseudo ETL into a billing system. It (mostly) works, but it's an archaic mess.

To be fair, T-Mobile and AT&T are on sFTP nowadays.

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#99

Post by steelframe »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #64
mullingitover wrote: post #25

I wish we could euthanize this garbage, antiquated phone system. It shouldn't be expected/required that every adult has a phone number when the system is so irredeemably broken and dangerous. If the web didn't have HTTPS, it would be illegal to conduct sensitive business over it. Yet we're stuck with this entrenched telephone system, the best we can do is STIR/SHAKEN, and that's not real security.

100%. My son got sick at school last week and I ignored the call from the school nurse because I have been so thoroughly conditioned by daily scam calls to ignore any unrecognized number. It’s insane that this is still a problem.

The exact same thing happened to me last week. My son got sick at school, enough so that they ended up calling the paramedics. But I had been spammed so much the week before with spoofed phone numbers from my area code that I had my phone on "Do Not Disturb" allowing only people in my contact list through. I thought it would be fine since the school's phone number is in my contact list.

Unfortunately the school's systems were down and so they weren't able to call me from the school's regular phone system. They called from random personal cell phones, so that went straight to voicemail. It wasn't until someone was literally sent to my house to bang on my door that I got notification of my child's medical emergency. They were about to administer medication that would NOT have been okay to give him, and I was lucky to be able to contact them and tell them to hold off before they did it.

Never mind reporting them to a phone provider. If something had happened to my son I swear to God I would have gone full Liam Neeson "what I do have are a very particular set of skills" on the jackass who's running that specific phone spam operation.

Re: Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

#100

Post by Scoundreller »

aimor wrote: post #81

I've been reporting spam calls and texts to the FCC for a few years now. Does it do anything? I don't know, certainly not immediately, and the problem persists. I tried the method spelled out here for my latest batch of "Your USPS package has arrived" texts, but the phone numbers (example: +63 936 631 6676) just give an "invalid number" response. Not unexpected. Every official channel seems to be failing us on this o…

My own experience is that reporting to Google's Safe Browsing whatever is a waste of time. A lot of scam sites geo-block or redirect to a random news site when visiting from $OutsideTargetArea, so that seems to break a lot of/most automated screening.
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