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FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

consumeraffairs.com

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Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#101

Post by viraptor »

lemcoe9 wrote: post #57
viraptor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telco billing records are very detailed. They can identify the call from the time it reached you and know who initiated it (their customer or some specific other telco). The fact you see the originating number is irrelevant to the telco and shouldn't matter for any applicable law. To sue someone, the court would still need to ask the telco about the owner of the number. Right now they would need to ask for the initia…

This is not completely true. Especially in VoIP, there are usually 1-5 layers of FCC-licensed phone companies involved in the call. The CLEC (Bandwidth, Level 3, AT&T, Comcast, et al) sell their numbers to Class 3 ITSPs like Flowroute, SIP.US, VOIP.ms, SIPSTATION, Twilio, etc, and then frequently that service is once again sold to another vendor that might have an actual end-user using the service. Just because one c…

You're completely right. I didn't mean it's going to be a single step. If the answer is: it came from another telco X, you ask them. And repeat.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#102

Post by GauntletWizard »

SilasX wrote: post #99
avivo wrote: post #70

This is nice and perhaps actually useful for going after international organized criminals...but still doesn't prevent anything. We need actual authentication for Caller ID. Urgently. Fake voices are already being used to steal millions ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48908736 ). I co-authored the paper linked here, which goes into some detail about why this all matters, particularly for voice cloning... https:…

Hm, I almost feel like it's the spam problem all over again where the appropriate fixes involve tradeoffs that many (not me though) find unacceptable, and we need to adapt the famous spam solution forum letter: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt (I just came up with a version for robocalls but I don't want to post it here because it's a giant wall of text that I don't think pays for itself in terms of contributi…

Pastebin it.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#103

Post by SilasX »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #102
SilasX wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I almost feel like it's the spam problem all over again where the appropriate fixes involve tradeoffs that many (not me though) find unacceptable, and we need to adapt the famous spam solution forum letter: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt (I just came up with a version for robocalls but I don't want to post it here because it's a giant wall of text that I don't think pays for itself in terms of contributi…

Pastebin it.

https://pastebin.com/0htfZWQD

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#104

Post by ananonymoususer »

I'm all for it, but one gripe I have about Consumer Affairs' reporting is that they interchange the words "regulations" and "law" to mean the same thing. As we witnessed during the Net Neutrality see-saw, regulations enacted by the FCC are not "law", and can change at the whim of a new administration.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#105

Post by parliament32 »

netsharc wrote: post #89
paulie_a wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that phone companies won't do anything about it. Nor the FCC There's a bunch of solutions. I received 19 spam calls spoofing cell numbers. That's a felony I suggest everyone that get an illeagl robo call to call your rep Everytime. Ask them to block India entirely. The problem would be solved very quickly. Or block all calls from Florida and Texas. The nuclear option The basic one is just waste their time. A…

Hah, Google already showed off their "book a hair appointment and have a human-sounding robot call the salon for you", what the callees need is a robot that either try to figure out if it's the real IRS calling (although, wait, the IRS sends letters) or an Indian scammer. If it's the latter, then run the "tie them up unnecessarily" script. Until the scammers figure this out and respond with their own bot. Then, just…

Half of this exists: in Android you hit "Screen Call" and the google bot picks up for you. It says something like "this user is screening your call, please state your name and the reason you're calling" and their response gets transcribed live onto your screen. From there you can either pick up the call or hang up + spam mark it.

It's honestly pretty great, I use it all the time.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#106

Post by musicale »

TheSoftwareGuy wrote: post #77
viraptor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that easy. You can get a call from X with a prefix from B and it's just how routing sometimes works. In the same way an internet connection from Germany to the UK may actually arrive from an interconnect in Amsterdam. But it doesn't matter. What matters is the responsibility of each party to point out who sent the call to them. (And that's not even mentioning the issue of how you'd map providers to prefixes.…

It should really be more like how the internet works with IP addresses. Its easy to send an IP packet with a source address that is whatever you want, but if you do that the receiver is going to reply to someone else and you won't be able to establish two way communication.

Ideally the ISP does basic ingress policing and doesn't accept packets from source addresses outside its range.

Yes, I know most ISPs don't do this. But they could if they wanted to.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#107

Post by deelowe »

avivo wrote: post #70

This is nice and perhaps actually useful for going after international organized criminals...but still doesn't prevent anything. We need actual authentication for Caller ID. Urgently. Fake voices are already being used to steal millions ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48908736 ). I co-authored the paper linked here, which goes into some detail about why this all matters, particularly for voice cloning... https:…

We just need a way to hold carriers accountable. Once they start having to pay fines for unsolicited calls on their network, they find ways to fix the caller id issue pretty quickly.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#108

Post by e40 »

MBCook wrote: post #53
e40 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers are random so why would sharing the numbers help reduce anything?? I never get calls from the same number. I've had the same scammer call me 3 times in one day from 3 different numbers. This is the scammer that has called me 100s of times in the last 2 years: http://www.caribbeandiscountsinternational.com/about/ I tried to contact Tucows to complain, no way to do that. Then, I filed a report with ICANN th…

You’d be surprised. Maybe YOU don’t get calls from the same number (though I do at times) but it seems like scammers will use one number to call 100,000 people then switch to a second number and call again. So as long as someone reports it lots of people will benefit. It’s not a random number per call, which would make this approach unfeasible. This shared block list is basically how Nomorobo works and it’s quite eff…

but it seems like scammers will use one number to call 100,000 people

I seriously doubt that, given the locality to my own number.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#109

Post by paulie_a »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #12
paulie_a wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that work for you? You would end up in prison.

The solution proposed (fine the product manufacturer) is a response to the difficulty of identifying those behind robocalling/telemarketing. That same difficulty would arise when trying to identify those abusing the process in the way I described.

There is no difficulty in detection

There is a lack of will

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#110

Post by paulie_a »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #34
paulie_a wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget fines. Everyone in the company needs to be charged with felonies under Rico Spoofing numbers could be considered a criminal organization Take down every single person

That's a little excessive. The janitor was told that they were a legitimate marketing org, and it's completely unreasonable to expect them to investigate enough to find otherwise.

No I stand by that statement. You knew you were in a scammer company.

Actions need to have consequences. But they currently have none

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