13 ms·

Why Phone Fraud Starts with a Silent Call

69 points by joe5150 11y ago

CaptainZapp 11y ago
Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 has a fantastic feature for weird numbers that immediately hang up. Mostly those are call centers, though, and not fraudsters, at least in my experience. When you select the suspicious number from the call list you get a menu, on which you can block the number. It's very straight forward and savers me a lot of having to deal with impertinent assholes.
- andrewaylett 11y ago
  That really helps when it's the same number trying to call you again and again (and for the record, all of my Android phones have had the same feature). Unfortunately, here in the UK it's my landline that gets called (which doesn't have that feature) and almost always from a withheld or international number, which means I can't block just that caller anyway.
  - kbart 11y ago
    I'm not sure about stock Android, but on Cyanogenmod you can block calls from unknown numbers (not present on your contact list) or even block using wildcards. Extremely useful feature for my spam phone.
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      What if a legitimate person, such as a friend, gets your number from someone else? What if you use that number for business (e.g. you're a freelancer), and you want to be able to receive calls from customers? There's basically about a thousand scenarios where "block calls from unknown numbers" feature wouldn't work. I call it the "nuclear option" and just with nukes, the collateral damage just isn't worth it.
      - kodis 11y ago
        While immediately blocking all unknown numbers may well be excessive, I'd like a feature where all known good numbers (my "white list") go straight through, all known bad numbers (my "black list") don't even cause the phone to ring, and all other numbers go straight to voicemail. They'd be easy to review at my leisure for addition to my white or black list and the phone spammers would never again interrupt the peaceful enjoyment of my dinner.
      - kbart 11y ago
        I don't imply that this feature solves all the problems, but I know plenty of people (mostly attractive girls), that won't answer to unknown numbers on their personal phone anyway. Furthermore, there's log of blocked calls you can always check for repeated attemps and call back, or your hypothetical friend can send you sms to present himself.
  - antimagic 11y ago
    I kind of feel like saying "don't use landlines then dummy!" I mean it's a bit glib, but in all seriousness, why would you use landlines these days for telephone calls? Maybe it's different in the UK, but certainly here in France even the most basic phone plans come with pretty much unlimited domestic calls making the low-tech problems associated with landline phones just not worth the hassle anymore.
    - joe5150 11y ago
      For a lot of subscribers in the US, telephone is bundled with cable TV and internet packages. trying to purchase one or the other or both without the all-in-one bundle is usually more expensive. Also, at least in my market, I've been seeing a lot of scaremongering ads about how cell phones aren't reliable in an emergency and don't alert LE to your location immediately like dialing 911 from a landline does. It's ironic when these ads are placed by the cable companies which generally use digital telephone products that are susceptible to outages and don't work when the power is out, just like cable.
      - michaelt 11y ago
        Even if you save money by accepting a landline as part of a bundle, doesn't mean you have to plug a phone into the socket.
        joe5150 11y ago
        That's true, but I think most people will feel obligated to since they're paying for it anyway, and landline phones are cheap.
      - dublinben 11y ago
        You should check your cable bundle again. Chances are, they're charging you at least $20 for that digital 'landline' service you don't really use.
    - Shengbo 11y ago
      I'm also curious since I've never had a landline. Maybe we did at some point because it was bundled with other subscriptions, but never had anything plugged into it. I'd just use my cell phone for every single call I make anyway, so I don't really see the point of having one.
  - 4lun 11y ago
    I have the same issue, but on my mobile. Same message every time "We've been trying to contact you regarding mis-sold PPI.." but different number. Originally it was from a range of UK mobile numbers, but now it seems to all be foreign numbers so I guess the mobile operators picked up on it. Not really anyway to block it, but at least when it's an unknown foreign number I can be reasonably sure it's a scam and just reject the call.
- joe5150 11y ago
  You can block callers in recent versions of iOS as well, but I think the majority of people who are going to be subjected to these calls are getting them on their landlines. Blocking numbers at your phone service provider is never so simple.
  - bediger4000 11y ago
    never so simple - ha, what an understatement. I've called Verizon over the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" robocalls. The chummy customer "service" rep claimed he'd never heard of anyone with such problems. He was shocked, shocked I say! to learn that robocallers actually send different caller ID numbers, so it's useless to try to block them. This whole robocaller thing is dependent on a lot of different things, all of them due to sluggishness or callousness on the part of service providers and regulators.
- orjan 11y ago
  I use Truecaller[1], so far it has worked great. They crowdsource their blocklist so almost all telemarketers are marked as SPAM on their first call. You can then choose to proceed and take the call or add it to your blocklist. [1]https://www.truecaller.com/ https://www.truecaller.com/
tempestn 11y ago
Man do I hate robocalls. Every few days now I get these, "Since you are a valuable customer of [insert large consumer company here], we would like to reward you with [cash/vacation/whatever]. Please press 1 to accept." So many calls. Wishing for them to get shut down seems overly optimistic, so I hope they just get better at recognizing people who will never fall for their scam and stop wasting resources on those numbers... (Seriously though, I feel for the real victims, and obviously having your savings disappear is infinitely worse than being annoyed by scam calls every few days. Still annoying though.)
joe5150 11y ago
I think as telecom-as-a-service grows and facilitates further and further automation of this kind of thing, we may see the growth of phone call spam filtering the same way we have with email. Of course, telemarketing is nothing new, and so far nobody's really attempted anything like that to my knowledge. What if any technologies exist for PSTN that are analogous to DKIM or SPF in email?
manishsharan 11y ago
This article did not mention spoofed caller id, which is really scary and annoying. Normally I do not pick calls from numbers I do not recognize. With calller id spoofing, the fraudsters are able to show a phone number that is very similar to mine : the first 6 digits are identical to my landline ; this fools me into believing it is a neighbor or my kid' friends that is calling and I end up picking up the phone.
- eitally 11y ago
  It's not just fraudsters. Until recently, I was a reasonably high-up IT leader at a big corporation and I probably received 3-5 cold calls per day from vendors and other service providers. By the past 12 months, almost all of them spoofed my local area code -- this is what finally put me over the top. I no longer answer calls from numbers I don't recognize unless I am expecting one.
  - jsmeaton 11y ago
    In Australia that's flat out illegal. You must present a number, and that number has to be connected to your business so that the person receiving the call can call back.
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      Spoofing caller ID for financial gain is illegal in the US, too, with a $10K per violation fine. But having worked in wholesale telecom a bit, no one actually cares, because no one follows up. When you complain to your service provider, what happens is the vendor will say to the carrier sending traffic "hey calls from this number are getting us complaints, please shut it off". The call traffic just moves around or changes number. There will be several layers of resellers involved, so it's not like the resellers are being intentionally malicious and generating bad traffic, they're just relaying the calls for their customer and so on. No one actually wants to investigate, so getting calls from a certain number to stop is usually enough to please everyone. If the FCC wanted to, they could kill this stuff in a week just by adding stronger liability rules and making carriers vet their traffic. If resellers had even a $5000 fine liability for sending bad traffic, they'd pretty quickly figure out a way to limit their exposure. But without real pressure, the FCC is happy to let things stay as they are.
jimhefferon 11y ago
> Company researchers estimate 1 in every 2,200 calls is a fraud attempt. This number does not pass the smell test for me. About 2 out of 3 landline calls that I receive are fraud attempts.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  Maybe they're counting cell calls as well? I get maybe one call a month that I would classify as spam. Also, do you get many calls on your landline, or is it more that you get six calls a month, four of which are spammy?
  - greggman 11y ago
    I get almost no legit calls to my cell phone (no land line). So I get percentage-wise a very high number of spam calls. My solution is too add the number to my contact list and mark that contact as silent ring. There's 33 numbers spread across 4 "scam" contacts (a contact can only have 10 numbers). Some of those numbers have called up to 10 times. Where as if I check my "recent" call list there's been no more than 2 legit calls a month
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      Interesting; I wonder if there's a way to check which company currently owns those numbers. Then again, I'm sure it's a totally legitimate (no sarcasm) company; hard to make sure that 0% of your customers are spammers.
  - jimhefferon 11y ago
    > Also, do you get many calls on your landline, or is it more that you get six calls a month, four of which are spammy? I'm 56 so I get more calls on my landline than on my cell. :-) Maybe three calls a day, two on the landline, and of those the great majority of the ones during the day are spam (sometimes a dentist appmt-type call, but typically spam).
- tvanantwerp 11y ago
  With the exception of my wife, 90%+ of calls I receive are fraud attempts.
Asbostos 11y ago
Regarding giving out PIN numbers. Banks should make a better effort at informing customers that no other human should ever know their PIN or internet banking password, not even the bank's staff. As soon as you tell anybody your PIN, that means you're being scammed.
- blackoil 11y ago
  Unfortunately, scanners have evolved, they will tell you same and will forward you to take automated system.
bediger4000 11y ago
Everyone should let the robocalls play from start to finish, then press 1 (or whatever) to talk to a live operator. Lie to the operator. Take up as much time as possible, say "ummmm" a lot, ask for the operator's name, insist that you be called "Ed" or something. Take some time to "fumble" for your "credit card". I keep an expired gift card in my wallet to give out to fraudsters. Express "disbelief" when your account doesn't show up at "CitiBank" or whatever. If you have some knowledge of credit card number formats, give out a scrambled card number. I usually end up the call with a few anglo-saxon synonyms for the masculine organ of primogeniture, I reccommend you develop your own abuse technique. If enough people do this to fraudsters, and the occasional real credit card or bank person, then things will change.
- Terr_ 11y ago
  I do a milder version of this: I press the buttons, mute my mic, and leave the phone on the desk. Less work for me, but still costs them a little bit in terms of connecting to the phone of a real person who goes through their intro-spiel.
trentlott 11y ago
It would be interesting if there was some audio-based exploit that could be used against the systems in question. It would depend heavily on the nature of the software and the processing done, I realize. But if only one overly-clever person who wants an inordinate amount of praise and fame can manage it. . .

69 points by joe5150 11y ago

Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 has a fantastic feature for weird numbers that immediately hang up. Mostly those are call centers, though, and not fraudsters, at least in my experience. When you select the suspicious number from the call list you get a menu, on which you can block the number. It's very straight forward and savers me a lot of having to deal with impertinent assholes.

andrewaylett 11y ago
That really helps when it's the same number trying to call you again and again (and for the record, all of my Android phones have had the same feature). Unfortunately, here in the UK it's my landline that gets called (which doesn't have that feature) and almost always from a withheld or international number, which means I can't block just that caller anyway.
- kbart 11y ago
  I'm not sure about stock Android, but on Cyanogenmod you can block calls from unknown numbers (not present on your contact list) or even block using wildcards. Extremely useful feature for my spam phone.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    What if a legitimate person, such as a friend, gets your number from someone else? What if you use that number for business (e.g. you're a freelancer), and you want to be able to receive calls from customers? There's basically about a thousand scenarios where "block calls from unknown numbers" feature wouldn't work. I call it the "nuclear option" and just with nukes, the collateral damage just isn't worth it.
    - kodis 11y ago
      While immediately blocking all unknown numbers may well be excessive, I'd like a feature where all known good numbers (my "white list") go straight through, all known bad numbers (my "black list") don't even cause the phone to ring, and all other numbers go straight to voicemail. They'd be easy to review at my leisure for addition to my white or black list and the phone spammers would never again interrupt the peaceful enjoyment of my dinner.
    - kbart 11y ago
      I don't imply that this feature solves all the problems, but I know plenty of people (mostly attractive girls), that won't answer to unknown numbers on their personal phone anyway. Furthermore, there's log of blocked calls you can always check for repeated attemps and call back, or your hypothetical friend can send you sms to present himself.
- antimagic 11y ago
  I kind of feel like saying "don't use landlines then dummy!" I mean it's a bit glib, but in all seriousness, why would you use landlines these days for telephone calls? Maybe it's different in the UK, but certainly here in France even the most basic phone plans come with pretty much unlimited domestic calls making the low-tech problems associated with landline phones just not worth the hassle anymore.
  - joe5150 11y ago
    For a lot of subscribers in the US, telephone is bundled with cable TV and internet packages. trying to purchase one or the other or both without the all-in-one bundle is usually more expensive. Also, at least in my market, I've been seeing a lot of scaremongering ads about how cell phones aren't reliable in an emergency and don't alert LE to your location immediately like dialing 911 from a landline does. It's ironic when these ads are placed by the cable companies which generally use digital telephone products that are susceptible to outages and don't work when the power is out, just like cable.
    - michaelt 11y ago
      Even if you save money by accepting a landline as part of a bundle, doesn't mean you have to plug a phone into the socket.
      - joe5150 11y ago
        That's true, but I think most people will feel obligated to since they're paying for it anyway, and landline phones are cheap.
    - dublinben 11y ago
      You should check your cable bundle again. Chances are, they're charging you at least $20 for that digital 'landline' service you don't really use.
  - Shengbo 11y ago
    I'm also curious since I've never had a landline. Maybe we did at some point because it was bundled with other subscriptions, but never had anything plugged into it. I'd just use my cell phone for every single call I make anyway, so I don't really see the point of having one.
- 4lun 11y ago
  I have the same issue, but on my mobile. Same message every time "We've been trying to contact you regarding mis-sold PPI.." but different number. Originally it was from a range of UK mobile numbers, but now it seems to all be foreign numbers so I guess the mobile operators picked up on it. Not really anyway to block it, but at least when it's an unknown foreign number I can be reasonably sure it's a scam and just reject the call.
joe5150 11y ago
You can block callers in recent versions of iOS as well, but I think the majority of people who are going to be subjected to these calls are getting them on their landlines. Blocking numbers at your phone service provider is never so simple.
- bediger4000 11y ago
  never so simple - ha, what an understatement. I've called Verizon over the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" robocalls. The chummy customer "service" rep claimed he'd never heard of anyone with such problems. He was shocked, shocked I say! to learn that robocallers actually send different caller ID numbers, so it's useless to try to block them. This whole robocaller thing is dependent on a lot of different things, all of them due to sluggishness or callousness on the part of service providers and regulators.
orjan 11y ago
I use Truecaller[1], so far it has worked great. They crowdsource their blocklist so almost all telemarketers are marked as SPAM on their first call. You can then choose to proceed and take the call or add it to your blocklist. [1]https://www.truecaller.com/ https://www.truecaller.com/

tempestn 11y ago

Man do I hate robocalls. Every few days now I get these, "Since you are a valuable customer of [insert large consumer company here], we would like to reward you with [cash/vacation/whatever]. Please press 1 to accept." So many calls. Wishing for them to get shut down seems overly optimistic, so I hope they just get better at recognizing people who will never fall for their scam and stop wasting resources on those numbers... (Seriously though, I feel for the real victims, and obviously having your savings disappear is infinitely worse than being annoyed by scam calls every few days. Still annoying though.)

joe5150 11y ago

I think as telecom-as-a-service grows and facilitates further and further automation of this kind of thing, we may see the growth of phone call spam filtering the same way we have with email. Of course, telemarketing is nothing new, and so far nobody's really attempted anything like that to my knowledge. What if any technologies exist for PSTN that are analogous to DKIM or SPF in email?

manishsharan 11y ago

This article did not mention spoofed caller id, which is really scary and annoying. Normally I do not pick calls from numbers I do not recognize. With calller id spoofing, the fraudsters are able to show a phone number that is very similar to mine : the first 6 digits are identical to my landline ; this fools me into believing it is a neighbor or my kid' friends that is calling and I end up picking up the phone.

eitally 11y ago
It's not just fraudsters. Until recently, I was a reasonably high-up IT leader at a big corporation and I probably received 3-5 cold calls per day from vendors and other service providers. By the past 12 months, almost all of them spoofed my local area code -- this is what finally put me over the top. I no longer answer calls from numbers I don't recognize unless I am expecting one.
- jsmeaton 11y ago
  In Australia that's flat out illegal. You must present a number, and that number has to be connected to your business so that the person receiving the call can call back.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Spoofing caller ID for financial gain is illegal in the US, too, with a $10K per violation fine. But having worked in wholesale telecom a bit, no one actually cares, because no one follows up. When you complain to your service provider, what happens is the vendor will say to the carrier sending traffic "hey calls from this number are getting us complaints, please shut it off". The call traffic just moves around or changes number. There will be several layers of resellers involved, so it's not like the resellers are being intentionally malicious and generating bad traffic, they're just relaying the calls for their customer and so on. No one actually wants to investigate, so getting calls from a certain number to stop is usually enough to please everyone. If the FCC wanted to, they could kill this stuff in a week just by adding stronger liability rules and making carriers vet their traffic. If resellers had even a $5000 fine liability for sending bad traffic, they'd pretty quickly figure out a way to limit their exposure. But without real pressure, the FCC is happy to let things stay as they are.

jimhefferon 11y ago

> Company researchers estimate 1 in every 2,200 calls is a fraud attempt. This number does not pass the smell test for me. About 2 out of 3 landline calls that I receive are fraud attempts.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
Maybe they're counting cell calls as well? I get maybe one call a month that I would classify as spam. Also, do you get many calls on your landline, or is it more that you get six calls a month, four of which are spammy?
- greggman 11y ago
  I get almost no legit calls to my cell phone (no land line). So I get percentage-wise a very high number of spam calls. My solution is too add the number to my contact list and mark that contact as silent ring. There's 33 numbers spread across 4 "scam" contacts (a contact can only have 10 numbers). Some of those numbers have called up to 10 times. Where as if I check my "recent" call list there's been no more than 2 legit calls a month
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    Interesting; I wonder if there's a way to check which company currently owns those numbers. Then again, I'm sure it's a totally legitimate (no sarcasm) company; hard to make sure that 0% of your customers are spammers.
- jimhefferon 11y ago
  > Also, do you get many calls on your landline, or is it more that you get six calls a month, four of which are spammy? I'm 56 so I get more calls on my landline than on my cell. :-) Maybe three calls a day, two on the landline, and of those the great majority of the ones during the day are spam (sometimes a dentist appmt-type call, but typically spam).
tvanantwerp 11y ago
With the exception of my wife, 90%+ of calls I receive are fraud attempts.

Asbostos 11y ago

Regarding giving out PIN numbers. Banks should make a better effort at informing customers that no other human should ever know their PIN or internet banking password, not even the bank's staff. As soon as you tell anybody your PIN, that means you're being scammed.

blackoil 11y ago
Unfortunately, scanners have evolved, they will tell you same and will forward you to take automated system.

bediger4000 11y ago

Everyone should let the robocalls play from start to finish, then press 1 (or whatever) to talk to a live operator. Lie to the operator. Take up as much time as possible, say "ummmm" a lot, ask for the operator's name, insist that you be called "Ed" or something. Take some time to "fumble" for your "credit card". I keep an expired gift card in my wallet to give out to fraudsters. Express "disbelief" when your account doesn't show up at "CitiBank" or whatever. If you have some knowledge of credit card number formats, give out a scrambled card number. I usually end up the call with a few anglo-saxon synonyms for the masculine organ of primogeniture, I reccommend you develop your own abuse technique. If enough people do this to fraudsters, and the occasional real credit card or bank person, then things will change.

Terr_ 11y ago
I do a milder version of this: I press the buttons, mute my mic, and leave the phone on the desk. Less work for me, but still costs them a little bit in terms of connecting to the phone of a real person who goes through their intro-spiel.

trentlott 11y ago

It would be interesting if there was some audio-based exploit that could be used against the systems in question. It would depend heavily on the nature of the software and the processing done, I realize. But if only one overly-clever person who wants an inordinate amount of praise and fame can manage it. . .