Do we even need spoofing at all anymore, are there legitimate uses which can't reasonably be resolved other ways?
FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
91–100 of 124 posts
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#92If they want, the local phone companies can easily block international calls that have local caller ID.
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#93Great! I'll tell all the scammers calling my phone that what they're doing is illegal. That should stop them.
In that case, why bother making anything at all illegal? Criminals are just going to be criminals anyway.
It's a matter of severity and demonstrable willingness to ignore consequences. Scamming and fraud can earn you a spot in prison for a serious length of time, whereas phone spoofing is probably just a fine or probation, IANAL. In general it defies reason that the people who purposely violate existing major laws are going to be dissuaded by tacking regulations onto their methods.
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#94I 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…
This is supposed to be a forum for civil discourse. As someone who lives in Texas but has friends and family all over the country, I don't find banning all my calls from crossing state lines to be a very civil suggestion. How about all the calls that spoof Illinois numbers that call my Illinois-numbered cell phone? How is keeping me from calling my mother going to stop that?
Fuck your ban.
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#95I 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.
The solution doesn't have to be at the phone network level either. It would be easy enough for a regulator to simply fine any company whose products are advertised or sold through telemarketing. Make it the companies problem that some of their marketing contractors or affiliate schemes lead to illegal calling.
You know those people who say they're with Microsoft and they want to use RDP to troubleshoot your Windows installation proactively? They're not actually affiliated with Microsoft, as shocking as that may sound. Neither are the 0% credit card folks who call repeatedly from "Visamastercard" affiliated with any bank or credit card company.
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's one of those technical things that makes sense when it's said, but doesn't really hold any merit. Here is what the law requires.
> If a person or entity making a call for telemarketing purposes (or on whose behalf such a call is made) receives a request from a residential telephone subscriber not to receive calls from that person or entity...
This is from 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d). If someone says "please remove me from your list," I believe any reasonable individual should understand that as a request to stop calling.
If they get a request to stop calling, a telemarketer must immediately record the number to the company's do-not-call list and comply with the subscriber's request in a reasonable period of time not exceeding 30 days, and the telemarketer must honor the request for 5 years.
If you want to get technical about it, it doesn't even say the request must be made on a phone call. Presumably, one could make a written request. Perhaps someone could even offer as a public service a way to preemptively send copies of form letters to the addresses of known telemarketers requesting no calls. Someone like the postal service.
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#97Best feature coming in iOS 13 is an option to silence all calls from non-contacts.
I installed the public beta for that alone because I get so many of these types of calls, and it's saved me 19 interruptions so far this week.
Obviously blocking all unknown numbers isn't an option for everyone, but it's been great for me.
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#98They haven’t fixed it. They just made what scammers do illegal for one more reason. Unless they make telecommunication operators liable, this will remain a problem.
Yep. Solution is recursive fines. Spam calls from network provider? Issue a warning. Keep it up? The fines start and don't stop coming in until the calls stop. They ignore the fines and are outside your jurisdiction? Warn every company they transit through. They don't block them? The fines start. Rinse, repeat, until you find someone who you can effectively fine or who cares about the warnings (because you can effect…
My mother-in-law has alzheimers and is in a care facility, but she really values the independence of having a phone, say to call family.
In the past she'd been scammed by the "your grandson is in jail" scam and the bank stopped her.
One day she was really worked up because she was sure someone was going to come to her facility at 4pm and demand their money from her, and it was all tangled into my family needing money or something. Luckily she has no direct access to funds anymore.
Enough was enough. I found a product that I could put on her phone line that lets me white list her calls. It also suppresses the first ring because with Alzheimers, the last thing you need is the phone ringing once constantly.
It isn't perfect -- it has to be configured over bluetooth and only from a cell phone. I'd prefer a device that lets me do this remotely over the web, but this is what we're using for now:
https://www.amazon.com/Call-Control-Home-Automatically-Telem...
For ourselves, I have a linux box running ncid. I just wish I could find a first ring suppressor that works on POTS. The FRS22100 I tried resulted in a fast busy for any caller -- didn't conform to whatever the central office required.
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#99This is nice and perhaps actually useful for going after international organized criminals...but still doesn't prevent anything. We need actual authentication for Caller ID. Urgently. Fake voices are already being used to steal millions ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48908736 ). I co-authored the paper linked here, which goes into some detail about why this all matters, particularly for voice cloning... https:…
Hm, I almost feel like it's the spam problem all over again where the appropriate fixes involve tradeoffs that many (not me though) find unacceptable, and we need to adapt the famous spam solution forum letter:
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
(I just came up with a version for robocalls but I don't want to post it here because it's a giant wall of text that I don't think pays for itself in terms of contribution to the discussion.)
Re: FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case, why bother making anything at all illegal? Criminals are just going to be criminals anyway.
It's a matter of severity and demonstrable willingness to ignore consequences. Scamming and fraud can earn you a spot in prison for a serious length of time, whereas phone spoofing is probably just a fine or probation, IANAL. In general it defies reason that the people who purposely violate existing major laws are going to be dissuaded by tacking regulations onto their methods.
As I recall, certainty of punishment is generally a far more effective deterrent than severity. In any case, what I think the law would really get is leverage against the US-based phone companies who gateway the traffic onto our phone network.