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FCC fines robocaller record $120M

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Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#41

Post by Rjevski »

wpietri wrote: post #40
Rjevski wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in telecoms. The billable minutes thing is absolutely true. You might not directly pay for them as a customer, but carriers pay each other for inbound calls, so whatever carrier that is originating the robocalls is paying the next carrier in the chain, and that one pays the next, and so on until it finally reaches your phone. We’re not talking much on a single call (the prices are often around 0,01$ or even le…

I believe that for some carriers the billable minutes thing is significant. But what I'm really skeptical of is rectang's assertion that the FCC has been bought off by the same carriers for whom this is significant revenue. I certainly believe that the FCC is too influenced by large telcoms companies. As we see with the Michael Cohen thing, large companies believe they can buy influence. But those same companies that…

It’s not really been bought off by those exact carriers, but by the telco industry as a whole.

The industry is honestly shady as fuck. They’re being pushed into irrelevance by the internet and VoIP (where there’s no such thing as paying for minutes, thankfully), have thousands of employees to pay (despite not doing much, as they became irrelevant over time), and so while incoming call revenue is maybe 1% of total revenue for someone like T-Mobile, it’s still paying for some useless people’s pay checks, so of course those are gonna fight back.

Now aggregate that across the entire industry - everyone fighting for their 1% of total revenue - and you’ve still got a strong pushback.

Finally your carrier knows they’re not going to loose your 100$/month over robocalls because you have nowhere to go. The situation might change if one carrier bites the bullet and implements a working solution (but good luck given that it requires industry-wide cooperation), then the other carriers will wake up as they now know customers actually have a competitor to go to.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#42

Post by mikekchar »

ikeboy wrote: post #5
lend000 wrote: post #3

The real problem is the lack of security and authentication on telephone networks, which enables number spoofing with virtually no chance of reprisal -- foreign callers (realistically out of the FCC's jurisdiction) use VoIP services to create calls that originate from an IP address from the telephone network's perspective, and the phone network makes no attempt to authenticate the metadata (like the phone number that…

I've suggested in the past that every instance of provable spoofing where they did not control the claimed number should result in a fixed fine. $100 sounds about right. Every phone network will then quickly begin passing on that cost to anyone they "peer" with and it will be a non-issue soon enough. Is there a compelling reason to allow such spoofs?

I'm afraid I didn't read TFA, so apologies if I'm getting the wrong end of the stick. Also it's been 20 years since I worked in PSTN stuff. But at least at that time, the security in the protocol was ridiculously lax. IIRC, with PRI there was literally a bit that you set to say that the originating number was checked and was legitimate. Every other switch on the way through would accept it blindly.

In most areas it was illegal to set that bit unless you were a telco. It was also illegal to sell equipment that set that bit unless you were selling it to a telco. But... it's not that hard to hack.

Someone who's more current can probably give you better information. As to why nobody does anything about it... well.. why should they? They literally don't care. The equipment manufacturers aren't going to change the specs (because it's pretty darn hard to change specs and they are all trying to screw each other over in the specs anyway). The telcos aren't going to demand that the specs are changed because people are making telephone calls -- exactly what they want. It's only if the governments demand the change -- and it will take laws to do that (even then, I imagine that it's cheaper to lobby against the law than to change the equipment -- you have absolutely no idea how crappy those systems are).

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#44

Post by rayiner »

Rjevski wrote: post #41
wpietri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that for some carriers the billable minutes thing is significant. But what I'm really skeptical of is rectang's assertion that the FCC has been bought off by the same carriers for whom this is significant revenue. I certainly believe that the FCC is too influenced by large telcoms companies. As we see with the Michael Cohen thing, large companies believe they can buy influence. But those same companies that…

It’s not really been bought off by those exact carriers, but by the telco industry as a whole. The industry is honestly shady as fuck. They’re being pushed into irrelevance by the internet and VoIP (where there’s no such thing as paying for minutes, thankfully), have thousands of employees to pay (despite not doing much, as they became irrelevant over time), and so while incoming call revenue is maybe 1% of total rev…

T-Mo has two larger and one smaller national competitors. Do they want the $0.50 they get from robo callers more than the $70 they get from luring a user away from Verizon or AT&T?

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#45

Post by murph-almighty »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #34
post_break wrote: post #30

Can we please get phone OEMs to enable a feature to only allow calls from people in our contact list? Baked in. No apps that scrape your phone book to do it. If you're not on my contact list, go to voicemail and I'll decide if you're legit. And have an option like DND where if you call in rapid succession then I'll pick up.

I'd prefer an open source software solution but, either way, they'd start leaving voicemails, which is still annoying to manage. However, a lot of them already leave a 3 second blank voicemail, so that would at least eliminate the ignore/reject call step and the rude interruption.

I stopped using voicemail due to the shitty UI back when I had a dumb phone- I didn't want to spend 5-10 minutes waiting to listen to all my voicemails and sit through a robotic dialog.

Today, I use an iPhone and now use voicemail as a basic call filter. If I get a call from a number I don't recognize I immediately let it go to voicemail. At my leisure later in the day I can check the transcription service to see if it's spam.

I find it bizarre that the feature fell out of use for me, and came back into it because of this recent spate of spam phone calls.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#46

Post by lioeters »

rectang wrote: post #17

The FCC has dragged their scapegoat into the public square to torture in a big show for the brutalized masses. But how effective has the FCC been at actually curtailing the problem of robocalls? This FCC won't do anything meaningful because they've been bought off by the telecoms, and the telecoms make money hand over fist on robocalls: http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-fcc-ro... "The problem," he…

Regulatory capture ("corruption and legalized bribery" in other words) is the critical point that should be raised in every discussion regarding FCC. Without addressing this formative power dynamic, there can be no meaningful progress.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#47

Post by Rjevski »

rayiner wrote: post #44
Rjevski wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really been bought off by those exact carriers, but by the telco industry as a whole. The industry is honestly shady as fuck. They’re being pushed into irrelevance by the internet and VoIP (where there’s no such thing as paying for minutes, thankfully), have thousands of employees to pay (despite not doing much, as they became irrelevant over time), and so while incoming call revenue is maybe 1% of total rev…

T-Mo has two larger and one smaller national competitors. Do they want the $0.50 they get from robo callers more than the $70 they get from luring a user away from Verizon or AT&T?

Even if they wanted the 70$, at the moment there’s nothing they can do about robocalls without cooperation from the entire industry. A robocall doesn’t look any more shady than a normal call from a receiving carrier’s perspective; whatever solution they come up with will have tons of false positives.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#48

Post by toast0 »

Rjevski wrote: post #39
wtallis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question wasn't about why spoofing exists at all. It was about spoofing where they did not control the claimed number . If you want to place a call with spoofed caller ID info, your provider should require you to prove that the spoofed information is legitimate, not fraudulent. Otherwise, the telco should be obligated to strip the suspect caller ID information from the call so that the recipient can properly iden…

A cryptographic solution is absolutely necessary. Most reputable telcos already restrict spoofing or require tons of paperwork to prove you own the number before allowing you to use it as caller ID (like Twilio for example). The issue is that the PSTN is essentially a huge, worldwide message queue to which pretty much any telco can connect around the world, including shady ones - even if US law actually does fight sp…

A certificate system could work, but really all that's needed is traceability.

If I complain about a call, that should be trackable to the origination carrier and account, and if either one gets too many complaints, it gets thrown off the network (and other penalties).

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#49

Post by codazoda »

I've permanently turned on Do Not Disturb and configured it to allow calls from people on my contact list. This won't work for everyone but it works really well for me. I no longer get unwanted calls. People I don't have in my contact list are forced to leave a message without my phone ever ringing.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#50

Post by amluto »

Rjevski wrote: post #35
ikeboy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've suggested in the past that every instance of provable spoofing where they did not control the claimed number should result in a fixed fine. $100 sounds about right. Every phone network will then quickly begin passing on that cost to anyone they "peer" with and it will be a non-issue soon enough. Is there a compelling reason to allow such spoofs?

There are legitimate reasons for spoofing to work given how fucked up the PSTN is. Mobile roaming is one for example - when you roam on another carrier and place a call, that carrier directly originates the call and “spoofs” your caller ID to make it look like the call originated from you. Some companies may use different carriers for either load balancing or least-cost routing and so both of these carriers are requi…

I think the correct approach is economic, not technical. Make a rule that, if you get a spoofed call, then your telco owes you $100, not subject to any arbitration clause or other contractual waiver. Give a way out to avoid actually killing the telcos: annual penalties are limited to a few percent of annual gross revenues.

The telcos will find a technical solution real fast.

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