331–339 of 339 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just disable all calls. That’s what I do. Real people call you on whatsapp or other similar apps.
Not sure where you are in the world but in the US having a phone number and receiving voice calls is pretty much required to participate in society. And using WhatsApp or other similar solutions is not very common.
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…
> The analogy doesn't hold because anyone can send an email to anyone else on any service at any time. Sorry, but I disagree. You can't just open a utility cabinet and establish TCP connections with random mail servers either. You have to explicitly enter a contract with a service provider to connect to Internet too. And every mail system out there uses a bunch of precautions, like SPF, DMARC and of course it refers…
Sure, my provider could ban me if they cared enough, but it's pretty much trivial to set up a new one.
And as you said, some of the email spammers use botnets. Which is yet another order of magnitude removed from the hassle of getting a telco to hook you up on the sort of scale we're talking about.
And sure, we have all sorts of institutional protections and blacklists to prevent spam, and yet we all still get flooded with spam. The only effective way out so far has been server-side spam filtering, which cannot be implemented in the phone network as long as caller ID spoofing is still allowed.
Call and text spam come through the same channels as any legitimate business. These people have the same kinds of commercial contracts as any business, and as far as the telco is concerned, their traffic is completely normal and legitimate.
That's the problem we're discussing: the telcos are not enforcing the anti-spam laws. They seem perfectly content to let these bad actors operate on their network. There is no subterfuge, no hacking, no foul play of any kind to get their traffic onto the network. The telcos simply let it happen.
The telcos also explicitly allow anyone to spoof caller ID so that the receiving customer can never know the true number they're being called from. The customer can never block the spammer because they just generate a new number each time.
Email spam and phone spam are not the same problem at all. Not even close. Email spam is simply people abusing the technology in spite of everyone's best-effort attempts to stop it.
Phone spam is institutionalized. The telcos have made a deliberate decision to allow this, and not offer any way for customers to protect themselves. Again, despite laws existing which should force them to stop the abusive traffic.
Years ago, I switched my home "land line" to a VOIP service provider. This provider allows you to build a simple set of actions which will occur when a call comes in. Mine works like this: Is the call from a fax machine? If yes, take the fax and send the fax to my e-mail. If no, move to the next step. Is the call from a number that's on my whitelist? If yes, ring my phone. If no, move to the next step. Play a recordi…
realphonevalidation.com provides this info:
Phone Number: 4509144061
Status: Connected
Phone Type: Landline
Subscriber Name: Unavailable
Carrier: Canada
Subscriber Type: Unavailable
which isn't that helpful and the other link just flat out refuses to look it up...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, just about any time you get a call from a business - the specific desk phone that you were called from has a number, but they prefer to ID as the receptionist or the menu system so you'll get that when you call back.
Is that really caller ID spoofing though? Presumably the desk phone does not have an individual external line and it all goes trought a central phone exchange. If that exchange is responsible for both the public phone number and the internal phones then it using the public number for outgoing calls is not really the same as a third party claiming to be calling from a number that they don't own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is easily proved wrong. If I get a brand new cell phone number, I still get calls for complete scams even though that number, as far as I've owned it, never opted in to anything.
Are numbers ever really brand new, as in you are the first to ever have that number?
This whole system needs to be automated. It should be as easy as clicking a "Report" button on my phone or in my SMS application.
I actually emailed the FCC[1] last month and asked about/offered to try to make this available to more consumers. A realistic MVP would be an FCC-operated wrapper for Twilio's Line Type Intelligence API, so that any consumer could find the carrier responsible for any US phone number. That's not perfect, but it's a great start. One step better would be that plus a unified contact form - basically, the process I descri…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually emailed the FCC[1] last month and asked about/offered to try to make this available to more consumers. A realistic MVP would be an FCC-operated wrapper for Twilio's Line Type Intelligence API, so that any consumer could find the carrier responsible for any US phone number. That's not perfect, but it's a great start. One step better would be that plus a unified contact form - basically, the process I descri…
Update that Mr. Egal responded and forwarded my message to the team responsible for robocall enforcement. It would be a great start if the FCC changed their reporting flow to also notify the originating carrier.