351–360 of 504 posts
If you want to contact me, message me on signal.
It's sad, but marketers and scammers have effectively ruined the idea of people reaching out to me on the phone. It's sad, but it is what it is.
My uncle almost drove two states away to give a stranger $10,000 because he was duped into believing his grandson had gotten into an accident and killed a pregnant woman. The only thing that stopped it was that he first needed to borrow the money, which led to my involvement. We made some calls and were quickly able to confirm that the grandson in question was at home and nowhere near the "accident" in question. My p…
was v sad because he felt supreme humiliation over the matter.
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Enough minor inconveniences and the barrier to entry will go up, this will favor the larger players but those you can then go after with other means. It's never going to be a one-stop solution. Ideally there would be a warning that a call does not originate locally, routing the call through a local representative would generate yet another signal that you might be able to close off, including the possibility to decla…
> If the will was really there I'm pretty sure this problem could be tackled. Probably, but not with any of your proposed methods. I have talked with some SMS spammers and none of what you proposed would affect them. And for SMS spammers these inconveniences are a much bigger part of the cost of doing operations than for a company which needs to have employees in a call center. They have to spend a lot of money on bu…
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Certainly most of my inbound calls in Ireland are scam calls. Not sure this is solved EU-wide, maybe just in your specific EU country? As far as I know the solution is to require more anti-spoofing techniques (e.g. SHAKEN/STIR) for caller ID and then cut off the carriers who don't provide that, plus the carrier providing the numbers enforcing stronger terms on their users.
I'm in NL, and it seems to be solved here. I'm not sure _how_ it was solved (or they avoided it becoming a problem in the first place), mind you.
I think the US gets targeted mostly because of language. Indians learn English in school and it's not uncommon for a legitimate call in the US to come from someone with a strong accent.
I built telecommunications systems / software for some time. The unfortunate truth here is that telecom carriers absolutely already have everything they need to largely put a stop to it but they knowingly ignore it. It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing. It's expensive to run outbound campaigns in almost any other country, and very cheap in the US (fractions of a penny per minute compared to 5…
This is a classic example of an unintended consequence of deregulation. Normally we could petition our elected officials and get something done about it. But lobbyists have come to so completely dominate our legislative process that whole industries have effectively coopted the government through regulatory capture. On top of that, they've hoodwinked half the population into thinking that regulation bad. At this poin…
To comment on a now deleted post to this comment: I’m not arguing that bad regulation doesn’t exist which can perpetuate and help continue market failures. I’m arguing that good regulation is the fix to known market failures and economists on both sides recognize that.
Disclaimer: I am a person of Indian origin. I personally do not think reprimanding India will solve this. If somehow India stops this the void will be filled by scammers from some other country. This calls for reforms in telecommunications systems / regulations / norms / protocols.
As if those would-be scammers in other countries presently don't scam.. because Indians do? How do Indians presently scamming stop would-be scammers in other countries from doing the same? That's nonsensical.
Face the facts, this is an India problem. Harsh economic sanctions against India are necessary to solve this problem, and if that fails, null routing India and the whole of South Asia if necessary. And if diplomacy fails, escalation to military strikes against Indian telecom infrastructure would be in order.
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Lucky you. I usually get one or two spam calls a day in Europe (France/Germany) but they are marked as spam. Bless the people keeping that red list up to date. This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls.
> This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls. Yes, of course we do. Verizon and T-Mobile, at the very least, mark calls as "likely spam" reliably. Can't speak for any carriers as I've not been a customer of theirs for some time.
1. It was introduced only within the last couple of years, even though spam calls have been happening for much longer than that 2. A bunch of calls escape the “spam likely” designation even though I’m on one of the major carriers
So I’d say although we have it, it’s not nearly as reliable as I’d expect it to be.
I built telecommunications systems / software for some time. The unfortunate truth here is that telecom carriers absolutely already have everything they need to largely put a stop to it but they knowingly ignore it. It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing. It's expensive to run outbound campaigns in almost any other country, and very cheap in the US (fractions of a penny per minute compared to 5…
I'm not sure how much was commercial benefit vs lazyness/no incentive to solve the issue directly - the telcos aren't making a lot of money on inbound calling. It's just a problem that didn't impact them directly - only their customers.
It's mind-boggling that the United States allows this kind of thing to happen. In the EU I get maybe one spam call every couple of months. From the stories you hear from Americans on HN, Americans get multiple spam/scam calls a day, and the vast majority of their inbound calls are spam/scams. What is going wrong in the US that isn't going wrong in the EU? Language barrier? Regulatory capture?
The US just has large number of people in one country code who mostly speak English, have high incomes, a uniform retail landscape ("go to CVS and get a Google Play card" works everywhere), and an abundance of options for telephony. It's not like Indian scammers are beholden to EU law but not US law.
It’s not an ideals problem. Even very conservative economists would agree that there exists a negative externality in the transaction between the call center and the telecom company on the person being called where there should be some cost on the transaction to account for that externality.
So, it’s not even a conservative liberal thing (intentionally not using party names as those names may not reflect conservative or liberal ideals). It’s a policy problem. Write your member of congress.
I built telecommunications systems / software for some time. The unfortunate truth here is that telecom carriers absolutely already have everything they need to largely put a stop to it but they knowingly ignore it. It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing. It's expensive to run outbound campaigns in almost any other country, and very cheap in the US (fractions of a penny per minute compared to 5…
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