FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
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Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#2The ease at which caller id is spoofed could be solved by the carriers. If sent called id information doesn't match line termination information (geo location and owned phone numbers) block the call.
Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#3The ease at which caller id is spoofed could be solved by the carriers. If sent called id information doesn't match line termination information (geo location and owned phone numbers) block the call.
This, just like IP spoofing is something that should be straightforward to correct. However, the carrier in both cases has incentives to continue allowing it (getting to charge for minutes, or bandwidth).
Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#4I work in the telecom space. I was previously over the carrier network at MagicJack and oversaw about 600 million minutes a month of telecom "traffic". I can say that the awareness is a step in the right direction, but these "solutions" are anything but a solution.
I don't think it's as simple as people think - for example, simply make sure the person owns the CallerID. At what point in the call stream would that be validated? You have to think that, when a call is made through a typical VoIP provider, it is most likely passed through 10 carriers (through arbitrage long-distance, then IXCs, then tandem/CLLI/POI CLLI).
I believe a good step would be to simply let the FTC trace using the CIC code that all carriers send over the PSTN/traditional telecom network. That way, the FTC could track a particular call or number through all the carriers until it reaches the originating information. The FTC has the capability to do that now, and based on the number of subpoena requests I've received (about 10/day), they actively do it.
The problem is that the companies doing the "illegal" robocalling (business to consumer/DNC or TSR violations) are overseas. There is no way, IMHO, that it can be stopped as long as long-distance providers exist.
Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#5The ease at which caller id is spoofed could be solved by the carriers. If sent called id information doesn't match line termination information (geo location and owned phone numbers) block the call.
This, just like IP spoofing is something that should be straightforward to correct. However, the carrier in both cases has incentives to continue allowing it (getting to charge for minutes, or bandwidth).
I wouldn't say that carrier's have a large incentive. Dialer or robocall traffic is normally frowned upon in the telecom community. We charge per minute, and dialer traffic is the worst offender or taking up large amounts of resources, while providing very little minutes. To give you an idea, a typical robodialer user may have 30% of their calls answered, and an average call length of 16 seconds. Whereas a "retail" or normal long-distance customer has an 85% answer ratio (ASR) and a 2+ minute average call length/duration (ACD). All of the tier-1 telecom carriers have strict rules AGAINST this type of traffic. From a business perspective, a single T1 (23/24 channels), I can get ~200-300k minutes/month worth of usage. With a dialer customer, I can expect about 40k minutes/month
Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#6The ease at which caller id is spoofed could be solved by the carriers. If sent called id information doesn't match line termination information (geo location and owned phone numbers) block the call.
No, it actually cannot. The phone network is a massive bunch of criss-crossing and mutually-dependent relationships. It is intractable to know if a given company is "allowed" to send a certain calling party number.
Not to mention such a restriction would break many applications that depend on the source caller ID being forwarded. Call forwarding applications, some 911 implementations, etc.
Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#7I work in the telecom space. I was previously over the carrier network at MagicJack and oversaw about 600 million minutes a month of telecom "traffic". I can say that the awareness is a step in the right direction, but these "solutions" are anything but a solution. I don't think it's as simple as people think - for example, simply make sure the person owns the CallerID. At what point in the call stream would that be…
Yeah, if these were real solutions, I'd pay a lot more than $3K to get the details on them. I've spent far more than that on the problem.
At one point we were doing around a billion calls a day by a customer that swore they had nothing to do with dialer. They mixed the traffic very skillfully, so they always kept their overall statistics just at the contractual limit.
Blocking repeated source numbers just means people start making up numbers. At that point, you can't really block things. You could perhaps get a score of the likelihood of a call being legit, and perhaps retroactively you could determine a bunch of calls had a high amount of dialer. But I don't think it's possible to find an algorithm that has a good-enough accuracy rate to do real-time blocking.
Of course, from a telecom perspective, I don't really care about the content of the call. I just want the avg duration to not be so low that other carriers get upset. To that end, simply making sure dialer customers don't hangup immediately seems to suffice.
Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#8I work in the telecom space. I was previously over the carrier network at MagicJack and oversaw about 600 million minutes a month of telecom "traffic". I can say that the awareness is a step in the right direction, but these "solutions" are anything but a solution. I don't think it's as simple as people think - for example, simply make sure the person owns the CallerID. At what point in the call stream would that be…
Why not just fine the provider that brought the call into the US? They would suddenly have a strong financial incentive to find a way to pass these fines onto the originator.
Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#9Interesting prize money amount of $3,133.70. I assume this is supposed to reference leet?
Re: FTC Announces Winners of “Zapping Rachel” Robocall Contest
#10I work in the telecom space. I was previously over the carrier network at MagicJack and oversaw about 600 million minutes a month of telecom "traffic". I can say that the awareness is a step in the right direction, but these "solutions" are anything but a solution. I don't think it's as simple as people think - for example, simply make sure the person owns the CallerID. At what point in the call stream would that be…
Why not just fine the provider that brought the call into the US? They would suddenly have a strong financial incentive to find a way to pass these fines onto the originator.
How does ATT know it's a robocall? Also, the FCC (not FTC) mandates that ATT or any tandem-interconnected company accept ALL CALLS that come into their network via a tandem