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Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

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Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#111

Post by dredmorbius »

inigyou wrote: post #94
mook wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that SHAKEN / STIR was supposed to do that by authenticating the phone numbers displayed against the telco that made the call. But as the other comment says, your telco earns money from scam calls and they don't want that to stop.

SHAKEN/STIR has a loophole for calls passing through legacy trunks that don't support it. So now certain carriers made a business model off of routing your scam calls through those trunks so they won't have to be verified.

Which is why we turn originating / sourcing / routing calls into a risk. See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130932>

There's a related issue apparently of small operators who can't afford (or haven't been bothered) to implement STIR/SHAKEN. Many of these are apparently small rural phone co-ops (its own interesting bit of telecoms history). There should be both support in providing them with such capabilities, and penalties for failing to do so, including liability for transiting spam calls to their own or other carriers' subscribers.

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#112

Post by dredmorbius »

inigyou wrote: post #95
ozim wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so penalties for telcos have to be higher than they earn from scam calls. 2-5% of scams succeed but penalty should be there accounting for 95-98% that did not succeed. IANAL but I know failed attempt at robbery or murder is also prosecuted, failed attempts at scam are not, because people just hang up and move on. Then the reality is society doesn’t have enough resources to deal with "scam attempts" - well we have to…

I don't think we want telcos to block scam calls themselves. We want them to be forced to give the subscriber's actual address to the police.

Why not?

And why would you impose a highly-intrusive personal-tracking system across billions of subscribers?

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#113

Post by dredmorbius »

LocalH wrote: post #22

Commerce should never have been made possible to happen on the internet. The moment it became possible to send and receive money through the internet, the end times began.

Or phones, or telegraph, or mail, or roads, or ...

Commerce and crime go hand-in-hand.

The Greek and Roman gods of travel and communication were also the gods of tricksters (frauds) and thieves. The etymology of "Mercury" may be related to that of "merchant". (Hermes rather less so.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(mythology)>

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#114

Post by dredmorbius »

dhosek wrote: post #15
ipython wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, the same telecoms that whine about how hard this traffic is to stop... are also selling a "premium" service to customers- who then manually tag unwanted calls so that the telecom can sell that data back to other customers...

I don’t seem to be charged for Scam Shield on my account. I’ve had one unknown number call and not leave a message over the last month, which is a far cry from the 20–40 spam calls per day some people report.

There are both free and premium tiers:

https://www.t-mobile.com/benefits/scam-shield>

The free tier seems to identify but not block likely scam calls. T-Mobile's website skews sales-heavy, and doesn't feature much technical information.

The premium features appear to be app-dependent, and may not work on feature phones.

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#115

Post by dredmorbius »

SoftTalker wrote: post #64

Is this a USA problem, or world-wide? If other countries don't have such a problem, why not?

It seems to be much worse in the US for now, though why is the subject of a great deal of speculation.

There's not much publicly-available research on the topic. One better source I've found is "Robocalls: A Worldwide or US-only Problem? Analyzing Spam and Fraud in International Phone Calls" (30 Jun 2026)

https://arxiv.org/html/2606.31790>

On the magnitude in the US vs. elsewhere:

Even though robocalls are an international problem, our findings indicate that US citizens are substantially more affected than the rest of the world. The median number of phone numbers in our US honeypot was 11 751, compared to 101 913 international phone numbers. Despite an almost tenfold difference in the number of available phone lines, the US honeypot numbers received 8 314 813 calls (95.1%) compared to 432 538 calls (4.9%) received by the international numbers. On average, a single phone number in our US honeypot received 707.5 calls during a nine-month period, about 2.62 calls per day. Non-US numbers received, on average 4.24 calls during the same period, about 0.016 calls per day.

The paper does not break out calls per person by country, though it discusses general patterns.

Hiya has an accessible report which highlights "seven key countries", with calls per month in parenthesis: The US (22), UK (5), Canada (6), Spain (13), France (18), Germany (3), and Brazil (29, highest in the world).

Americas: Brazil (29), Mexico (26), Chile (23), and the US (22) lead.

In Asia: HK (23), Indonesia (16), the Philippines (12), and India (8) lead.

https://work.hiya.com/hubfs/2025/Global%20Call%20Threat%20Re...>

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#116

Post by etchalon »

inigyou wrote: post #95
ozim wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so penalties for telcos have to be higher than they earn from scam calls. 2-5% of scams succeed but penalty should be there accounting for 95-98% that did not succeed. IANAL but I know failed attempt at robbery or murder is also prosecuted, failed attempts at scam are not, because people just hang up and move on. Then the reality is society doesn’t have enough resources to deal with "scam attempts" - well we have to…

I don't think we want telcos to block scam calls themselves. We want them to be forced to give the subscriber's actual address to the police.

They don't to block scam calls. They can easily limit who gets access to make them, making the resource itself precious enough no one would risk wasting it on a dial scam.

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#117

Post by inigyou »

dredmorbius wrote: post #112
inigyou wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we want telcos to block scam calls themselves. We want them to be forced to give the subscriber's actual address to the police.

Why not? And why would you impose a highly-intrusive personal-tracking system across billions of subscribers?

Because I don't want some stupid AI system to randomly decide I'm a spam caller.

And you know every other country has full KYC for phone connections, right?

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#118

Post by inigyou »

dredmorbius wrote: post #111
inigyou wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SHAKEN/STIR has a loophole for calls passing through legacy trunks that don't support it. So now certain carriers made a business model off of routing your scam calls through those trunks so they won't have to be verified.

Which is why we turn originating / sourcing / routing calls into a risk. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130932 > There's a related issue apparently of small operators who can't afford (or haven't been bothered) to implement STIR/SHAKEN. Many of these are apparently small rural phone co-ops (its own interesting bit of telecoms history). There should be both support in providing them with such capabilities…

Well then phone companies will stop originating/routing/sourcing calls. Do you want that? Your idea has been implemented for banks already, and the result is that machine learning algorithms randomly block transactions and close people's accounts for no reason.

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#119

Post by inigyou »

dredmorbius wrote: post #110
inigyou wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sign up for a newsletter from Google, then I report it as unsolicited. Boom, I just made Google pay me $10.

That's a familiar complaint from the world of email, where it's usually applied to mailing lists. If I were to steelman the concern, I'd look at a few related scenarios, say, where a subscriber is running a poorly-secured VOIP system and spammers hijack that to make calls. I'll ... get to that. First: the scenario here is phone systems, not email, so the traffic would be voice calls, possibly texts. That said, I'll c…

So I just sign up for $60, collect a bunch of calls and then report them all a spam, earning me a guaranteed $1000 from the phone company?

Re: Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

#120

Post by inigyou »

dredmorbius wrote: post #109
inigyou wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want the network to be so locked down you can't get access to it?

How do you reach that conclusion based on what I've written?

Because it happened to everything else where this idea was tried.
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