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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

#81

Post by reaperducer »

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…

And when some scammer uses your number (since any number can be used by a scammer, it's just a number not a phone line), then under your scheme, you get cut off from all of your friends.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#82

Post by reaperducer »

aclimatt wrote: post #60
slater wrote: post #44

I wish (and I bet there's something on Android for this) that there was some kind of social app just for sharing scam numbers among trusted friends†. E.g., as your phone receives a call, it'd hash the number and compare it with you and your friends' reported "spam caller network". If you or your friends have marked something as a spam-originating number (number spoofing not withstanding, yesyes), it would either drop…

It's not just amongst your friends, but Google already offers this in the latest versions of Android. It says "Suspected spam call" below the number during the incoming call. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/3459196?hl=en

Most of the phone companies have similar apps.

AT&T's seemed to work OK for the first few months. Then calls started slipping through. Then AT&T started trying to sell me an "enhanced" version for $x/month.

So now the telcos have found another way to make money from phone spam.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#83

Post by cabaalis »

sq_ wrote: post #73
marcosdumay wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to side with the GP here. The options are completely losing the telephone system because nobody trusts anything coming from it anymore, or having those pre-2000 systems upgraded. It's a no-brainier. Yet, we seem to be committed into destroying the entire system.

It's really amazing how little trust people have in the telephone system now. At least on personal devices/lines, everyone I've talked about it with now refuses to pick up any call from a number they don't recognize, which is really the only option when 2/3 of the calls you get daily are spam. Most just assume that if it's important, the caller will leave a message.

> everyone I've talked about it with now refuses to pick up any call from a number they don't recognize

This is true, and also burned me last weekend. My dog set off my alarm system and the phone identified ADT as "potential spam" so I didn't answer it. The police showed up at my house. Fixed by adding ADT to my contacts, but the distrust is real.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#84

Post by ThinkingGuy »

linsomniac wrote: post #19
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…

I started doing that once. After 2 or 3 of those time wasting calls, I got one that the person said "Thank you for playing , you will continue to receive calls" and they hung up. IOW: They have so many resources available, and it is so cheap for them to make the calls, that even after they knew I was going to waste their time, they continued the calls. This was after I had tried their options for "press 1 to be remov…

and talking to someone and saying "please remove me from your list".

This could very well be an urban legend, and I know that most telemarketers are untrustworthy anyway, but I've heard somewhere that you actually have to explicitly say "put me on your do-not-call list" because the phrase "remove me from your list" allows them to interpret it a request to remove you from the do-not-call list.

Like I said, probably an urban legend.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#86

Post by e40 »

reaperducer wrote: post #81
MBCook wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And when some scammer uses your number (since any number can be used by a scammer, it's just a number not a phone line), then under your scheme, you get cut off from all of your friends.

This. Given the quantity andlocality of the numbers to mine, if I block them, it's only a matter of time before I block a number that matters to me.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#87

Post by EGreg »

asark wrote: post #67
ghaff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe technical or maybe just that the person who is going to send off money so that their social security number isn't taken away or so that the police don't come to their house and arrest them on felony charges are more likely to respond to a call--even a robo one--than a text message. On my cell phone, the biggest annoyance is that I have to turn on Do Not Disturb when traveling internationally which means only th…

> Maybe technical or maybe just that the person who is going to send off money so that their social security number isn't taken away or so that the police don't come to their house and arrest them on felony charges are more likely to respond to a call--even a robo one--than a text message. That occurred to me, but you can direct someone straight to a website that can then do god-knows-what with a text message, and th…

You guys are still thinking in terms of the phone system with publicly accessible numbers!

In future networks you’ll have to have an invitation path from the user, and if it gets abused you just mute a subpath so those people’s invites don’t result in auto-accepting messages. Simple!

A -> B -> C -> D

D attempts to send a message to A’s mailbox

A’s mailbox automatically accepts the message

If too many messages were sent from the subtree of invitations of B or C, just mute that branch.

Then the others have to jump through hoops like proof of work or pay crypto to be whitelisted and start a conversation to you.

Fixes all SPAM. You can make this compatible with an email gateway where the invitation is added as an email alias such as “foobar@dontspamme.com” and then emails to and from “foobar@“ would be proxied as messages to the actual non-email system I described, where foobar was the gateway corresponding to the “path A -> B”. It was compromised? Don’t accept emails from any new unknown email addresses sending to that endpoint without jumping through hoops.

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#88

Post by lotsofpulp »

adrianmonk wrote: post #72
ipython wrote: post #13

I get a ton of calls offering to lower my interest rate. Im surprised that the card issuing companies mentioned by name in the call- visa, MasterCard, etc. don’t take the same tactic that Microsoft used to take down botnets. Microsoft used trademark law to sue the botnet operators and have their domain names seized. Why can’t the same happen here with any US based voip operator they may be using?

Here's a minor technical correction about payments lingo. Visa and Mastercard aren't issuers. Payments are kind of a world of their own, but basically there are 5 parties involved in a credit card purchase: 1. The party that receives the payment. For example, a retailer like Amazon or Target. In payments lingo: "merchant". 2. The merchant's bank. This is where funds are going to end up. In payments lingo: "acquiring…

There is another entity involved also, the card processor:

https://www.vantiv.com/credit-card-processing/what-is

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#89

Post by netsharc »

paulie_a wrote: post #8
lol768 wrote: post #3

I would argue that the legality of this doesn't matter; there's a huge technical problem in that there's no authenticity guarantees at all when it comes to caller ID and the entire feature is badly designed and has always been open to abuse. SHAKEN/STIR is the (technical) answer to this, though I'll be interested to see to what extent it's adopted.

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 like Twitter, it'll be bots spamming each other..

Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

#90

Post by bfdm »

criddell wrote: post #63
lemcoe9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am glad that you "don't care" about breaking a few million phone systems across the world. Every single IT manager, however, does care. If you start having carriers wholesale-blocking calls based on their lack of STIR/SHAKEN's verifications, then you will completely disable the vast majority of IP- and POTS-based phone systems in the country, many of which were purchased/installed in the early-2000's. You can have…

> If you start having carriers wholesale-blocking calls based on their lack of STIR/SHAKEN's verifications, then you will completely disable the vast majority of IP- and POTS-based phone systems in the country, many of which were purchased/installed in the early-2000's. It's far too early for carriers to block by default, but consumers should have the choice. If I could set my phone to give a busy signal to any calle…

This would be great. Push back voluntarily on bad actors.
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