8 ms·

Spam is back

104 points by KabuseCha 9y ago

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Thoughts on nomorobo? Ive been thinking of signing up. The spam calls are ridiculous. I have to keep do not disturb on 24/7, but some have caught on that they can call twice in a row to get through.
- bearbearbear 9y ago
  The problem with blocking numbers in bulk is that phone numbers are recycled all the time. If you block 500 numbers and then you apply for a job and the person who wants to call you back about the job just got a new prepaid phone, you might be blocking their number.
  - geraldcombs 9y ago
    If your potential employer is using a burner phone you might have worse problems than robocalls.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  I've had a very good experience with Nomorobo. Was getting ~1 call a day at home, now maybe 1 call every couple months gets through. The phone still rings once, then Nomorobo will intercepts and answers it. The spam calls were super annoying, so not dealing with it actually makes my day better.
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  I get maybe 5 calls a day. Nomorobo catches about 90% of them so they only ring once.
- eikenberry 9y ago
  What about just using a call blocker app. I use an app that can block all calls not in my contact list with everyone else going to voice mail. It is great and I never miss a call as anyone who I care about that is not in my contact list will leave a message.
- jrnichols 9y ago
  So far, I have had excellent luck with nomorobo and having t-mobile flag calls as "scam likely." went from 10+ calls a day to zero on most days.
tyingq 9y ago
The robocalls I get are so poorly done that I wonder if they even make money. I tried chatting them up a bit after being transferred to a real person and they have no sales skills. That's if you can even talk to a real person...the transfer often fails.
- sixQuarks 9y ago
  I'd say a very small percent of the calls actually transfer correctly. I love fucking with these people and look forward to trolling them, but I can never transfer from robocall to human. That's what frustrates me most.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  The robocalls are dirt cheap. Even the people aren't that costly. You only need a few suckers.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Really, though, they don't even try. I played the sucker really hard. They never got to the part where they ask for money. I think there's a large amount of amateurs just flushing money down the drain because it's cheap and they have no idea what they are doing.
- nikanj 9y ago
  The money is in selling the robocalls. People peddling junk over robot calls might not be the savviest entrepreneurs, and are easily convinced that riches await as soon as their campaign reaches millions
fiatjaf 9y ago
My life was awful until I started blocking numbers on my phone. But the "spam is dead" message is totally misleading. Email spam is still pretty much alive and well. Try running an email server yourself or even publishing an address handled by Mailgun online. Or, if you want some laughs, look at https://spa.mnesty.com/ https://spa.mnesty.com/
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Perhaps a better way of stating the thesis is that spam felt like a largely solved problem.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Since I recently changed isp I get lots of calls, apparently isp exchange migration lists, then the fun starts... I'm gonna start to block too.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  There's so much spam that Spamnesty can't keep up :/ It regularly gets rate-limited by MailGun for some reason.
bearbearbear 9y ago
This is a longform ad for a book.
petercooper 9y ago
On the flipside, junk calls provide more opportunities to deploy "Lenny": https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/ https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/
- Sniffnoy 9y ago
  I've never once been able to successfully deploy Lenny (or other equivalents such as the Jolly Roger Telephone Company) against a spam call. The calls are always from a recording, not a person, and after I put them through to Lenny (which is an annoyingly long process on an Android phone -- press add call, unlock phone, select Lenny, hit "call", wait, hit "merge", then mute myself) they always just hang up pretty quickly. Anyone have any idea if there's some way I could be using it better? Press a key to get through to a person, maybe, and then deploy Lenny?
  - roganp 9y ago
    This. I get a bunch of robo calls that appear to be for no purpose - there is no way to get a human on the other end of the phone (they just disconnect when you express interest in what they are selling). It's almost like the call itself is a scam, but not on me - like the call centers that offer this service are getting paid to make the call and not the conversion, so they dial my number and play a recording but have no facility to do more than that. Super frustrating.
    - rwbcxrz 9y ago
      They could also be checking to see if a human answers so they can sell your number or target you later.
- Splines 9y ago
  Are there any easy to use self-hosting packages for this kind of thing? There's also http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/ http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/ that is this thing turned into a service. I'd like to use these things but would like something I have more control over.
bpicolo 9y ago
I've been getting spam google calendar invites. It's insanely annoying - no idea how to stop it.
- spondyl 9y ago
  Oh yeah, I logged into my old Gmail account recently on my phone and my calendar was suddenly destroyed with a spam event for every day of the year. I take it that Google Calendar must've automatically imported them? Ah well, I nuked that account anyway in my annual data spring cleaning
- Leftium 9y ago
  https://www.labnol.org/internet/prevent-google-calendar-spam-inserting-new-events/2900/ https://www.labnol.org/internet/prevent-google-calendar-spam...
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    Not a great solution tbh. I do want to see events I haven't responded to in almost all circumstances - colleagues etc
RyanShook 9y ago
Spam never went away. I’ve had good success flagging calls using Hiya app. Most carriers have partnered with Hiya to provide a free version of the app in the App Store. AT&T’s is called Call Protect.
paulie_a 9y ago
I recently got a call about my student loan debt, which I have zero. The script these people follow is incredibly terrible. I played along with the person asking questions, "oh, so which student loan, with what bank?" "chase?" no, "wells fargo?", no, "bank of america?" no and then the person hung up on me.
- tonyquart 9y ago
  I think you need to consult this matter to lawyers or law firms. I just read an article that talks about similar fake debt collectors problem at https://www.lemberglaw.com/monitronics-tcpa-lawsuit-settlement/ https://www.lemberglaw.com/monitronics-tcpa-lawsuit-settleme.... There are so many complaints about them in these past few weeks. Hope this helps.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
microcolonel 9y ago
Phew, I thought they were talking about email spam coming back. This article is a bit clickbaity, and sorta tricks you into continuing to read until you figure out it's talking about social media, telephone, and SMS spam (by giving examples of people making progress against email spam, talking about email spam being a thing of the past). As a small email system operator, I have seen spam fluctuate greatly. In my case it accounts for around 99% of connections, and 95% of successful connections (valid reverse dns, working STARTTLS), but today it only accounted for about 10% of successful connections. Miraculously, I have seen penny stock spam in 2017.
PakG1 9y ago
Ironically, the problem of spam has created another weird problem. I'm not sure what's the right kind of thing to describe them, so I'll call them the ambulance chasers of the email world. But that doesn't sound right. Some kind of leech, patent troll, and mafia rolled into one? Last week, one of my organization's user email accounts was hacked. It started getting used to send out spam. We caught it pretty quickly and updated the password so that the spammers couldn't use it anymore. But it was too late, we got listed on several spam blacklists. As such, all emails from our mail server started going into recipient mailbox spam folders. OK, we just get ourselves off of the spam blacklists, right? Most of the spam blacklists gave us one of two options. First option was to manually request removal, some of them required sending an email to confirm what had happened and why we're confident the problem didn't exist anymore. Easy. Second option was to wait as their service monitored our email services to confirm if we were still sending out spam. If after a few days they confirmed that the spammy behaviour had stopped, we'd be automatically removed from their blacklist. Annoying wait, but reasonable methodology. Then the annoying ones. One spam blacklist would not remove us for a week, though we could expedite the process by paying them $106 USD. Otherwise, we have a week of going into people's spam folders. It's a friggin racket. Dare I say even extortion? The other annoying spam blacklist said that we could not get removed from their list because we were on several other spam blacklists, including the blacklists that required us to wait a few days for them to monitor our email behaviour, AND the spam blacklist that wanted us to wait a week if we didn't pay $106 USD. So we're on one spam blacklist for a week due to not willing to pay extortion fees, and on the other spam blacklist for a week because they're too meta to develop their own spam blacklisting mechanisms and just follow what other blacklists are doing. The meta blacklist annoys me more than the extortioner. Why are they checking whether we're on other spam blacklists? They should be depending purely on their own capability to identify spammers, not the capability of other organizations. Why do they even exist? There's no value added by being meta here. It really annoys me.
- kijin 9y ago
  Just like DDoS attacks are forcing websites to hide behind a small number of major services like Cloudflare, spam is forcing email users to consolidate into a small number of well-known platforms like Gmail and Outlook. It's just too much hassle otherwise. But unlike in the case of a website using Cloudflare's DDoS protection to fend off attacks, someone who gives up running their own mail server and signs up for Gmail isn't doing so in order to get any direct benefit from Gmail's spam filter. (Open-source spam filters have gotten good enough that they often do just as good a job as Gmail, if not better.) It's almost entirely because of the insane hassle of dealing with third-party blacklists as you said. Google and Microsoft should give them a medal or something. Many of the blacklist operators are highly moralistic, too. You'd think they were on some sort of holy crusade against the ultimate evil. Of course you are partly at fault for e.g. not enforcing strict password policies on your users, but a small percentage of users are going to get hacked no matter what. I wish the blacklists would redirect at least 10% of their moral outrage at the danger of centralization that they're so willingly facilitating.
King-Aaron 9y ago
I don't really know if spam ever left, for it to be 'back'. Though I do want to make a comment on the advertising in this site - I really, really like it. They're big graphics for those Macallan Rare Cask ads, but they are designed nicely and aren't "in your face", even though they are extremely prominent. I like this.
chrismorgan 9y ago
That constantly animated squiggly line is surprisingly annoying. Please: do not animate things like that. Animation can be good when triggered by user interactions, to signify state transitions, but simple gratuitous animations can be quite annoying.
- toomim 9y ago
  I liked it.
chrisz42 9y ago
You know why spam is back? Because it works! I didn't get my head around this until late when I started my own company. Mass contacting people is one of the easiest and successful ways. Of course, if you have the time and resources to do targeted marketing it's better, but what happens when you don't and you are an engineer who sees one or two opportunities to mass contact people?
- amelius 9y ago
  Perhaps we should spam people asking them to ignore spam, until it stops.
jarnix 9y ago
There is also a new form of spam in 2017 (and even before), that's the notifications that we get from apps on our mobile phones. Does every app ask our permission before pushing notifications (for example at night when you try to sleep) ? And every other website asking to push notifications on the desktop ? And every Messenger bot ?
revmoo 9y ago
It's so bad that I literally no longer take calls on my cell phone. Silent mode forever. The crime angle is important too; a while back I signed up to "refresh" my number on donotcall.gov and was suddenly inundated with calls. Turns out that criminals really appreciate having a live database with known-good phone numbers to call.
milesvp 9y ago
I'm surprised no one here is talking solutions. The fundamental problem is someone can connect to me and I have no way to trace it back to an organization who I can charge/sue. The first step is to start adopting standards that aren't free either in cost or in compute. For email, this could be as simple as requiring proof of work before accepting an email. For private telcos requiring the ability to charge the company connecting to my number would solve most of these problems too. I'd love spam if I had the equivalent of an 80's era 976 number.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  The solution is to not allow connections from unknown numbers, that is numbers which are not in my contacts. You can do other things like add CAPTCHAs, etc but really if I don't know you, I probably don't want to hear from you, in any capacity.
jftuga 9y ago
I can't press the space bar to page down on this article. I am using Chrome on a Macbook. :-(

104 points by KabuseCha 9y ago

Thoughts on nomorobo? Ive been thinking of signing up. The spam calls are ridiculous. I have to keep do not disturb on 24/7, but some have caught on that they can call twice in a row to get through.

bearbearbear 9y ago
The problem with blocking numbers in bulk is that phone numbers are recycled all the time. If you block 500 numbers and then you apply for a job and the person who wants to call you back about the job just got a new prepaid phone, you might be blocking their number.
- geraldcombs 9y ago
  If your potential employer is using a burner phone you might have worse problems than robocalls.
WillPostForFood 9y ago
I've had a very good experience with Nomorobo. Was getting ~1 call a day at home, now maybe 1 call every couple months gets through. The phone still rings once, then Nomorobo will intercepts and answers it. The spam calls were super annoying, so not dealing with it actually makes my day better.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
I get maybe 5 calls a day. Nomorobo catches about 90% of them so they only ring once.
eikenberry 9y ago
What about just using a call blocker app. I use an app that can block all calls not in my contact list with everyone else going to voice mail. It is great and I never miss a call as anyone who I care about that is not in my contact list will leave a message.
jrnichols 9y ago
So far, I have had excellent luck with nomorobo and having t-mobile flag calls as "scam likely." went from 10+ calls a day to zero on most days.

tyingq 9y ago

The robocalls I get are so poorly done that I wonder if they even make money. I tried chatting them up a bit after being transferred to a real person and they have no sales skills. That's if you can even talk to a real person...the transfer often fails.

sixQuarks 9y ago
I'd say a very small percent of the calls actually transfer correctly. I love fucking with these people and look forward to trolling them, but I can never transfer from robocall to human. That's what frustrates me most.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
The robocalls are dirt cheap. Even the people aren't that costly. You only need a few suckers.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Really, though, they don't even try. I played the sucker really hard. They never got to the part where they ask for money. I think there's a large amount of amateurs just flushing money down the drain because it's cheap and they have no idea what they are doing.
nikanj 9y ago
The money is in selling the robocalls. People peddling junk over robot calls might not be the savviest entrepreneurs, and are easily convinced that riches await as soon as their campaign reaches millions

fiatjaf 9y ago

My life was awful until I started blocking numbers on my phone. But the "spam is dead" message is totally misleading. Email spam is still pretty much alive and well. Try running an email server yourself or even publishing an address handled by Mailgun online. Or, if you want some laughs, look at https://spa.mnesty.com/ https://spa.mnesty.com/

emodendroket 9y ago
Perhaps a better way of stating the thesis is that spam felt like a largely solved problem.
agumonkey 9y ago
Since I recently changed isp I get lots of calls, apparently isp exchange migration lists, then the fun starts... I'm gonna start to block too.
StavrosK 9y ago
There's so much spam that Spamnesty can't keep up :/ It regularly gets rate-limited by MailGun for some reason.

bearbearbear 9y ago

This is a longform ad for a book.

petercooper 9y ago

On the flipside, junk calls provide more opportunities to deploy "Lenny": https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/ https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

Sniffnoy 9y ago
I've never once been able to successfully deploy Lenny (or other equivalents such as the Jolly Roger Telephone Company) against a spam call. The calls are always from a recording, not a person, and after I put them through to Lenny (which is an annoyingly long process on an Android phone -- press add call, unlock phone, select Lenny, hit "call", wait, hit "merge", then mute myself) they always just hang up pretty quickly. Anyone have any idea if there's some way I could be using it better? Press a key to get through to a person, maybe, and then deploy Lenny?
- roganp 9y ago
  This. I get a bunch of robo calls that appear to be for no purpose - there is no way to get a human on the other end of the phone (they just disconnect when you express interest in what they are selling). It's almost like the call itself is a scam, but not on me - like the call centers that offer this service are getting paid to make the call and not the conversion, so they dial my number and play a recording but have no facility to do more than that. Super frustrating.
  - rwbcxrz 9y ago
    They could also be checking to see if a human answers so they can sell your number or target you later.
Splines 9y ago
Are there any easy to use self-hosting packages for this kind of thing? There's also http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/ http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/ that is this thing turned into a service. I'd like to use these things but would like something I have more control over.

bpicolo 9y ago

I've been getting spam google calendar invites. It's insanely annoying - no idea how to stop it.

spondyl 9y ago
Oh yeah, I logged into my old Gmail account recently on my phone and my calendar was suddenly destroyed with a spam event for every day of the year. I take it that Google Calendar must've automatically imported them? Ah well, I nuked that account anyway in my annual data spring cleaning
Leftium 9y ago
https://www.labnol.org/internet/prevent-google-calendar-spam-inserting-new-events/2900/ https://www.labnol.org/internet/prevent-google-calendar-spam...
- bpicolo 9y ago
  Not a great solution tbh. I do want to see events I haven't responded to in almost all circumstances - colleagues etc

RyanShook 9y ago

Spam never went away. I’ve had good success flagging calls using Hiya app. Most carriers have partnered with Hiya to provide a free version of the app in the App Store. AT&T’s is called Call Protect.

paulie_a 9y ago

I recently got a call about my student loan debt, which I have zero. The script these people follow is incredibly terrible. I played along with the person asking questions, "oh, so which student loan, with what bank?" "chase?" no, "wells fargo?", no, "bank of america?" no and then the person hung up on me.

tonyquart 9y ago
I think you need to consult this matter to lawyers or law firms. I just read an article that talks about similar fake debt collectors problem at https://www.lemberglaw.com/monitronics-tcpa-lawsuit-settlement/ https://www.lemberglaw.com/monitronics-tcpa-lawsuit-settleme.... There are so many complaints about them in these past few weeks. Hope this helps.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

microcolonel 9y ago

Phew, I thought they were talking about email spam coming back. This article is a bit clickbaity, and sorta tricks you into continuing to read until you figure out it's talking about social media, telephone, and SMS spam (by giving examples of people making progress against email spam, talking about email spam being a thing of the past). As a small email system operator, I have seen spam fluctuate greatly. In my case it accounts for around 99% of connections, and 95% of successful connections (valid reverse dns, working STARTTLS), but today it only accounted for about 10% of successful connections. Miraculously, I have seen penny stock spam in 2017.

PakG1 9y ago

Ironically, the problem of spam has created another weird problem. I'm not sure what's the right kind of thing to describe them, so I'll call them the ambulance chasers of the email world. But that doesn't sound right. Some kind of leech, patent troll, and mafia rolled into one? Last week, one of my organization's user email accounts was hacked. It started getting used to send out spam. We caught it pretty quickly and updated the password so that the spammers couldn't use it anymore. But it was too late, we got listed on several spam blacklists. As such, all emails from our mail server started going into recipient mailbox spam folders. OK, we just get ourselves off of the spam blacklists, right? Most of the spam blacklists gave us one of two options. First option was to manually request removal, some of them required sending an email to confirm what had happened and why we're confident the problem didn't exist anymore. Easy. Second option was to wait as their service monitored our email services to confirm if we were still sending out spam. If after a few days they confirmed that the spammy behaviour had stopped, we'd be automatically removed from their blacklist. Annoying wait, but reasonable methodology. Then the annoying ones. One spam blacklist would not remove us for a week, though we could expedite the process by paying them $106 USD. Otherwise, we have a week of going into people's spam folders. It's a friggin racket. Dare I say even extortion? The other annoying spam blacklist said that we could not get removed from their list because we were on several other spam blacklists, including the blacklists that required us to wait a few days for them to monitor our email behaviour, AND the spam blacklist that wanted us to wait a week if we didn't pay $106 USD. So we're on one spam blacklist for a week due to not willing to pay extortion fees, and on the other spam blacklist for a week because they're too meta to develop their own spam blacklisting mechanisms and just follow what other blacklists are doing. The meta blacklist annoys me more than the extortioner. Why are they checking whether we're on other spam blacklists? They should be depending purely on their own capability to identify spammers, not the capability of other organizations. Why do they even exist? There's no value added by being meta here. It really annoys me.

kijin 9y ago
Just like DDoS attacks are forcing websites to hide behind a small number of major services like Cloudflare, spam is forcing email users to consolidate into a small number of well-known platforms like Gmail and Outlook. It's just too much hassle otherwise. But unlike in the case of a website using Cloudflare's DDoS protection to fend off attacks, someone who gives up running their own mail server and signs up for Gmail isn't doing so in order to get any direct benefit from Gmail's spam filter. (Open-source spam filters have gotten good enough that they often do just as good a job as Gmail, if not better.) It's almost entirely because of the insane hassle of dealing with third-party blacklists as you said. Google and Microsoft should give them a medal or something. Many of the blacklist operators are highly moralistic, too. You'd think they were on some sort of holy crusade against the ultimate evil. Of course you are partly at fault for e.g. not enforcing strict password policies on your users, but a small percentage of users are going to get hacked no matter what. I wish the blacklists would redirect at least 10% of their moral outrage at the danger of centralization that they're so willingly facilitating.

King-Aaron 9y ago

I don't really know if spam ever left, for it to be 'back'. Though I do want to make a comment on the advertising in this site - I really, really like it. They're big graphics for those Macallan Rare Cask ads, but they are designed nicely and aren't "in your face", even though they are extremely prominent. I like this.

chrismorgan 9y ago

That constantly animated squiggly line is surprisingly annoying. Please: do not animate things like that. Animation can be good when triggered by user interactions, to signify state transitions, but simple gratuitous animations can be quite annoying.

toomim 9y ago
I liked it.

chrisz42 9y ago

You know why spam is back? Because it works! I didn't get my head around this until late when I started my own company. Mass contacting people is one of the easiest and successful ways. Of course, if you have the time and resources to do targeted marketing it's better, but what happens when you don't and you are an engineer who sees one or two opportunities to mass contact people?

amelius 9y ago
Perhaps we should spam people asking them to ignore spam, until it stops.

jarnix 9y ago

There is also a new form of spam in 2017 (and even before), that's the notifications that we get from apps on our mobile phones. Does every app ask our permission before pushing notifications (for example at night when you try to sleep) ? And every other website asking to push notifications on the desktop ? And every Messenger bot ?

revmoo 9y ago

It's so bad that I literally no longer take calls on my cell phone. Silent mode forever. The crime angle is important too; a while back I signed up to "refresh" my number on donotcall.gov and was suddenly inundated with calls. Turns out that criminals really appreciate having a live database with known-good phone numbers to call.

milesvp 9y ago

I'm surprised no one here is talking solutions. The fundamental problem is someone can connect to me and I have no way to trace it back to an organization who I can charge/sue. The first step is to start adopting standards that aren't free either in cost or in compute. For email, this could be as simple as requiring proof of work before accepting an email. For private telcos requiring the ability to charge the company connecting to my number would solve most of these problems too. I'd love spam if I had the equivalent of an 80's era 976 number.

tomjen3 9y ago
The solution is to not allow connections from unknown numbers, that is numbers which are not in my contacts. You can do other things like add CAPTCHAs, etc but really if I don't know you, I probably don't want to hear from you, in any capacity.

jftuga 9y ago

I can't press the space bar to page down on this article. I am using Chrome on a Macbook. :-(