FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest

Michael,

You are exactly right. All the traditional means (like blocking a callerID) is far past it's useful time. The dialer companies are getting smarter as well. It's BIG business for them, so it's worth the money to figure out solutions.

Also, it's very difficult to error on the side of caution - you do not want to block a normal phone call, or your upstream will stop sending you calls and you lose money.

Typically, a dialer customer will hangup once an answering machine is detected (usually around 2 seconds into the call) - causing lots of short duration calls. What the dialer customer's are doing now, is simply holding the call open for longer, to raise their overall ACD. It's a tough game. The moment telecom carriers start caring about what the call is (call types, information in the call, etc) - they become liable.

I personally find the following low tech method effective for me:

o All home calls go to voicemail without exception. We pick up if we recognize the voice or the caller. No one seems to mind except my mother-in-law. She's gotten used to it though. I've also noticed everyone below a certain age rarely uses voice.

o I've added every number with which I regularly interact to my cell address book. If a call comes in from an unknown number, it goes to voicemail without exception.

YMMV.

Being both a math and a tech person, I would like to do a cost and effectiveness study comparing the purely technical solutions from the contest with solutions like the above.

Actually, most carriers aggressively turn down customers that send dialer traffic, due to increased overhead versus total minutes (most dialer calls go unanswered or last only a couple seconds). Carriers would LOVE a magical way to distinguish, in real-time, a dialer call from non-dialer. But since they can appear from any number to any number, there's no way to know.

Instead, the carriers look at aggregate stats, and if it's too bad, they raise rates, charge fines, or disconnect customers. Some companies take a hard line and just cut any customer off if they appear to have any dialer. Others don't want to throw away an entire customer for only one fraction of the traffic. So everyone dances this line, trying to jam as much dialer in as they can get away with.

The CSVs and Excel sheets thing is out of control. Basically the entire telecom infrastructure runs off assorted attachments sent to people with essentially zero verification. (I have a sinking suspicion that many other industries might run the same way.)

To govern which calling party number can get sent, you'd need an access control system that goes all the way down to the end user. For instance, if I start using Skype, I may want to place calls from Skype using my cell phone number. It's not desirable to block such usage.

Which means I'd have to have a way to make ABC Comm (who I bought my number from) signal their provider to signal their provider that I've now granted access to Skype. And this would be required every step of the way (ABC Comm would need to let everyone know which 5 providers they use. Each one of those providers would need to let everyone know which 20 providers they use, etc.)

So it's not really a lack of care or time. It's just that to make it work like you want it to actually work, you end up with this massively layered, complicated thing. And if any part goes wrong, you end up messing up people's calls. (And some of those calls could be 9-1-1 emergency calls, so you might end up killing someone.) All for what benefit, exactly?

The FCC could fix this problem overnight. They just need to levy fines, get serious about it. If I was liable for my customer's behaviour, I'd make them put up a deposit or go through some serious hoops - maybe require insurance. The entire problem would be solved within weeks. It'd just take a few hours of work in drafting the law to make sure good-faith actors aren't going to get hurt.