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Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

reportphonespam.org

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

#231

Post by delfinom »

conception wrote: post #27
davchana wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most of the time, STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE (or clicking any link) marks the phone number or email as hot, and gets sold for more money in the market.

I wanted to note that for email this generally isn’t the case. Really spammy spam generally is easy to catch, I don’t think I’ve seen any in over a year. Any legitimate business generally adheres to unsubscribe requests. So if you unsubscribe from stuff hitting your mailbox generally you’ll stop getting it. My mailbox pretty much only gets signal to it, almost zero noise.

Yes, but there are also "fake legitimate business" spam and phishing emails. If you hit unsubscribe on that, you will absolutely be marked as a hot email to target.

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

#232

Post by MissTake »

baby wrote: post #204
katzgrau wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way I wish it could be (for me, personally), but some standardization among my friends is required. Which app do we tie our interdependence to? A very real question.

Literally everybody I know uses whatsapp

Personal anecdotal knowledge does not a standard make.

I’d not be shocked if many in my circle use WhatsApp but since I’ve never used it myself - ever - I’d not know for certain.

Neither statement makes the case for usage of WhatsApp a “standard” or not.

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

#233

Post by razakel »

vegardx wrote: post #230

We had a quite interesting case around text spam in Norway recently. A foreign student was arrested by the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) for allegedly spying and doing signal intelligence. What he was actually doing was driving around Oslo with an IMSI catcher, which he used to send SMS messages that tried to scam the recipient to devices that was intercepted. He had his dorm raided by the security services…

>According to his lawyer it was quite a traumatic experience

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

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

#234

Post by axelthegerman »

calamari4065 wrote: post #149
drdaeman wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> telecoms are interested in stopping spam. If they really cared, they would have addressed it by now I'm not so sure about this. No one (except for, obviously, spammers) benefits from email spam, every mailhost and network admin is most certainly interested in stopping it (to some extent), and yet my mailbox can prove that spam is still very much alive. Solving spam problems in a highly distributed large federation…

The analogy doesn't hold because anyone can send an email to anyone else on any service at any time. You can't exactly just climb up a telephone pole and tap off a few phone numbers for yourself. You have to explicitly enter into a contract with a service provider to use their infrastructure. Spammers and scammers are wasting infrastructure resources that the telcos could be allocating to users. The telco can just cu…

> You have to explicitly enter into a contract with a service provider to use their infrastructure.

Exactly. And proper providers make legitimate users jump through so many hoops. E.g. with Twilio I can't even send text messages to US long codes (regular numbers) anymore without assigning "campaigns" and giving sample text messages... All I wanted is that my users can pick a phone number and use SMS as an interface to send commands and queries. They (US government and Twilio) don't even let me do that in order to "fight spam".

> I suspect that telcos don't want to do anything about abuse because it's a very large fraction of their total traffic.

Same here. They keep adding process and restrictions on legitimate users to prove that they're working on it, but I don't think they really want to.

Sure, there are probably fishy international service providers that house legitimate AND spam traffic and are hard to block. But phone networks are much more centralized than email and should have better abilities to fight spam if they really wanted to (but instead keep profiting from it)

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

#235

Post by axelthegerman »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #183
calamari4065 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy doesn't hold because anyone can send an email to anyone else on any service at any time. You can't exactly just climb up a telephone pole and tap off a few phone numbers for yourself. You have to explicitly enter into a contract with a service provider to use their infrastructure. Spammers and scammers are wasting infrastructure resources that the telcos could be allocating to users. The telco can just cu…

> You have to explicitly enter into a contract with a service provider to use their infrastructure Sounds like you’ve never used Twilio before - or any other API-based SMS system

Ehm you need to create an account, accept their TOS, enter billing information and then some.

They can easily disable your account should you break the TOS (or for any reason really)

Not quite the same as hosting an email server somewhere

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

#236

Post by razakel »

sk0g wrote: post #94
mastazi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I run two numbers: one for trusted people like work, family and friends, and one that I assume is going to be spam.

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

#237

Post by troydavis »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #115
jupp0r wrote: post #55

It already takes me 45 minutes of my time to get a hold of a support person of my own carrier and I'm a paying customer. I commend the effort, but getting a human to answer a support hotline call in order to report a spammer number is so comically difficult and ineffective that I can't see a significant amount of people participating. Why doesn't my carrier have an automated system allowing them to communicate with t…

In the UK, you just forward the text to "7726" which is SPAM on a keypad. It's a requirement from the regulator. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice...

In the US, 7726 just goes to the receiving carrier (that is, your wireless provider), not the sending carrier. It can help your carrier filter the messages (eventually, sometimes…), but it doesn’t actually stop them.

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

#238

Post by mastazi »

razakel wrote: post #236
sk0g wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I run two numbers: one for trusted people like work, family and friends, and one that I assume is going to be spam.

The problem with this strategy is that sooner or later, the spammers will find your "trusted" number. After all, phone numbers are easily enumerable...

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

#239

Post by mastazi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #60
zamadatix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is genuinely pretty shocking to me. Would e.g. the person calling from the school about your kid getting hurt during recess just hang up and assume you'll call back immediately during the workday on the basis you had a missed call? If you mean for people you have relations with (friends/family/coworkers) most here gave up memorizing numbers a long time ago and none of those would show as an unknown number. This…

Does anyone still has voicemail enabled in the first place? Can't remember the last time I was connected to one. Can't remember last time I had one attached to my number either. (Geo context: Poland, EU)

If you don't have voicemail, they will send you an SMS. Parent's main point IMO was that if the call was really something important, the person on the other end will leave a message of some sort.

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

#240

Post by aimor »

troydavis wrote: post #177
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…

> example: +63 936 631 6676 It’s unlikely to work for phone numbers outside the US. Sorry :( For typical 10-digit US numbers, the carrier search sites work well, as does Twilio’s carrier lookup API.

Thank you for putting together this resource!

I read the rest of the FAQ, signed up for Twilio, and their API worked to identify the number.

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