11 ms·
America is losing the battle against robocalls
- bcheung 8y agoEven ignoring unknown numbers got too distracting. My phone never comes out of Do not Disturb mode unless I'm expecting an important call. I don't know why we have such crappy cell phone audio quality and such an outdated convention. Why not have an opt-in protocol similar to a friend request on social networks before you can call someone?
- nopassrecover 8y agoI appreciate the US has 10x the population, but Australia’s Do Not Call Register (https://www.donotcall.gov.au https://www.donotcall.gov.au) has been fairly effective at reducing these calls (with a domestic origin at least). It works as a central government register with a threat and imposition of large penalties for companies who disregard it.
- haimez 8y agoIt's international scammers that are the problem, not internal corporations. An internal registry hurts more than it helps because it provides a list of callable numbers, and chasing down scammers is way, way, way too expensive to enforce by any practical measure. Australia doesn't have this problem for the same reason OSX didn't have viruses in the early naughts. Not a big enough target.
- circa 8y agoYeah it’s getting worse too. I’ve had the same number for about 18 years and I definitely get about 5-12 calls per day. Usually weekdays and during work hours. Our business line is awful. Constant calls all day long. About 25% robocalls
- Zamicol 8y agoIsn't the problem the FCC regulation prohibits carriers from taking serious action like blocking robocallers? How can this not be taken care of with gmail style spam rules?
- olliej 8y agoThe fcc literally had a competition to identify to robocalls. It’s not trivial - gmail identifies spam by bayesian filtering coupled with the amount of duplicate spam sent to numerous different addresses. Identifying spam/robocalls requires being able to parse arbitrary spoken word. People keep thinking its a matter of blocking a number, but the reality is that the security of phone networks is laughably broken with respect to number and identity spoofing. It essentially renders the id useless for identifying spam
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoFor me it started this year. Once every few days I get a spam call, sometimes in languages I don't understand (chinese, etc). It's always during business hours. I'm pretty sure my phone is in some do not call database, but that doesn't seem to help much recently. Our phones need a "this is spam" button, and that data needs to go to the telecom, and they need to do something with it.
- dorfsmay 8y agoBut isn't the incoming number easy to spoof?
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoIt is. But I'd imagine the telecom has lower level information about that connection.
- jonathankoren 8y agoYou can sometimes enroll in spam detection from your cell phone provider. For some, but not all, calls T-Mobile will tag the call "Scam Likely". The call still goes through. It's not much at all really, because I already don't answer calls from numbers I don't recognize. Still it might be useful for some marks^H^H^H^H^H folks.
- vishnugupta 8y agoThis used to be a huge problem for me as well until TrueCaller came along. Spam calls have reduced to close to zero. Maybe one or two a month. The perceived downside is that one has to share their contact list with truecaller. For me personally it's a perfectly reasonable price to pay for what I'm getting in return.
- olivermarks 8y agoAmerica has never been a position to be 'winning' the battle against robocalls. I'm in California and currently typically get well over 10 calls a day, many with Chinese language voicemail messages. Hard to see how there is any way to stop this...
- jvagner 8y agoThe laws changed a while ago, I hadn't gotten a single spam call in 10+ years of cell phone ownership. In the last 6 months, it's gotten apocalyptic. Mostly from calls from from the first 6 digits of my current phone number, and most of them calling to extend my car warranty. 8-15 calls each day. I've tried ignoring them, I've answered them, I've spoken to the calling humans (English speakers, the minute you ask for a manager or to be removed, they hang-up... often, the next call comes within 10 minutes, same people, robodialing engaged). I called AT&T to see what options I had to minimize teh pain. Can I turn off calling entirely? No. Can I have ringing go straight through to voicemail? No, but I can make it happen after 5 seconds. I've installed robonomo, AT&T's anti-spam calling app, Hiya, TrueCaller, etc. They don't work well enough. I'm on an iPhone 7. I like the 8, but not enough to upgrade. I don't like FaceID, and I don't like the notch, and I have an iPad Pro, and so I leave my iPhone on silent all the time, automatically deny any incoming calls that I notice, and have a voicemail greeting that says I don't check voicemail nor accept calls on this line. It's that bad and annoying. I do have a Google Voice number that I give out, and which gets almost no spam calls for now. I changed that setting to announce that it's a Google Voice number, so I take the occasional business call. But if the new iPhones continue to be engineered around FaceID, and if FaceID isn't better (and work with sunglasses and goggles and helmets) and if the notch persists, when this contract is up, I'm pretty sure I'll nix the iPhone contract and live with Google Voice on my desktop, and the iPad for mobile texting/connecting.
- bigtex 8y agoI hate how when they use your cell phone number as the robo call caller id and then you get text messages from strangers saying I can't take your call right now. Has happened a few times now.
- 8y ago
- elvirs 8y agothe solution is easy: end unlimited calling. make unlimited plans $10/mo cheaper but start charging 1 cent for every call. legitimate companies and regular people with normal usage will have no complaints but these charges will put robocallers out of business real quick
- jvagner 8y agoThe robocallers aren't calling from cell phones.
- elvirs 8y agodoesnt have to be a cellphone. they are connecting to the rest of the telephone lines somehow and do have get account to do it. Im pretty sure technicality of implementation is not that hard. Its the enforcement of something like this that people desperately need is close to impossible with the dysfunctional shit show called the government we have.
- jvagner 8y agooh, you're suggesting all calls are per-minute, including landlines and VOIP. realistically, wouldn't that logic extend to all the internet, we should all pay for traffic, to and from servers? i think "phones" are a dying tech, and proper legal constraints and controls on the tech we pay for would be easier. i don't see why i can't pre-approve callers, or limit inbound calls to my Favorites/VIP list. Treating phones like "telephones" is one of the problems, treating phones like tech would make solutions easier to implement.
- naringas 8y agomy smartphone already blocks some numbers (but I block every one of them), so... shared block lists? just like in adblocking software
- Zamicol 8y agoWhat are you using for blocking?
- ryan-c 8y agoBlock lists don't work when they can just spoof arbitrary numbers.
- comex 8y ago> so... shared block lists? just like in adblocking software Already exists :) For iOS, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207099 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207099
- overcast 8y ago'Lenny' shattered the previous record of 8:37 in our office today. Had a spammer on the phone for 13:47 trying to send him one of four white papers. As you can imagine, he was very indecisive.
- bognition 8y agogah, if only I had enough spare time to troll spammers for a quarter of an hour
- NickBusey 8y agoI'm pretty sure they're referring to Lenny the telemarketer bot. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lenny+telemarketer+bot https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lenny+telemarke...
- atonse 8y agoThis is amazing hahahahaha. I love it. Although I still feel bad for the telemarketer operator. I don't think anyone chooses that kind of job. I'd rather just not answer the phone.
- krageon 8y agoTheir job is actively harmful, because they exist to prey on the class of people that can't see through their bullshit. I agree that they are the low-level operators (and therefore perhaps not worth the effort to punish), but I do think it is high time we start viewing predatory sales as exactly what it is: predatory.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- atonse 8y agoI am simply saying that many of the people that work as telemarketers are in that job because it was the only job available. Would you take that job? No. Would I? No. But if it were the only job available, you bet your ass I will take it and put up with the humiliation of 90% of angry callers to support my family. Yes, I agree that it's a scummy tactic, but I still make a distinction between their customer (the company paying them to do the job) and the actual operator.
- wilkystyle 8y agoA simple solution for me would be if my phone allowed me to send all calls that are not in my contacts list to voicemail directly, without ringing the phone at all. Seems like very easy functionality to implement, and yet it's just not possible at all (at least not on iOS).
- christophilus 8y agoI just leave my phone on silent and listen to my voicemail once a day. Works great. Friends and family know to text me if they need a quick response.
- wilkystyle 8y agoThat's fine, and I do the same thing for the most part, but I don't want the call interrupting my music or popping up an "incoming call" screen over top of what I'm doing at the moment.
- elahd 8y agoThis is doable on iOS. Settings > Do Not Disturb with the following settings: - Do Not Disturb: On - Scheduled: Off - Silence: Always - Allow Calls From: All Contacts You'd lose the ability to use Do Not Disturb to silence your phone, say, overnight, but this would do what you're describing. Personally, I've opted in to T-Mobile's spam block feature. I don't get any robocalls.
- NickBusey 8y agoThanks for this, just set this up.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wilkystyle 8y agoYes, but this also silences your notifications...
- corysama 8y agoThere’s something I clearly don’t understand that hopefully someone can explain: If some customer of a phone company is making tens of thousands of ID-altered calls every day, shouldn’t that be glaringly obvious to said phone company that the customer is abusing their system?
- doingmything 8y agoI always thought this was VOIP calls, no phone company required.
- crag 8y agoThey are VOIP calls. And many are outside the US. And it's not just the robocalls- but I can't tell you how many calls I get a week about extending the maintenance plan on my car. And frankly, someone is buying this shit. Else they wouldn't call. I mean if 1 sale is made for every 5,000 calls they've made their money. Same with scammers. Who the hell is going to fall for a robocall from the IRS? A call that's barely in English, and comes from a local number? Obviously, somebody does.
- WalterBright 8y ago> Who the hell is going to fall for a robocall from the IRS? Old folks.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- roywiggins 8y agoAnd, I imagine, recent immigrants who are from countries where being shaken down for cash by governmental figures is not so unusual.
- WalterBright 8y ago> 1 sale is made for every 5,000 calls they've made their money To stop this, the phone company should charge 10 cents to place a call. That would destroy the economics of spamming. The same goes for email. Charge a penny to the originator to receive an email.
- jawns 8y agoHere's the solution that works for me: Numbers that aren't already in my contacts list or outgoing calls list get sent straight to voicemail. I use Google Voice, so when people leave legit messages, I get a transcription and don't have to waste time listening to the messages themselves. I get about 10-12 spam calls a day but this system works well.
- wilkystyle 8y agoIs this a feature built into Android? I also have a Google Voice number, but can't send calls that come to my cell phone number straight to voicemail (iOS).
- pishpash 8y agoIt is a feature of Google Voice. On Android you can block individual numbers though, or there are apps to filter calls through a ratings database.
- smokey_the_bear 8y agoThere's a Do Not Disturb option on ios, that has a sub-option to still allow calls from people in your contacts list.
- mceachen 8y agoBoth iOS and Android have a "do not disturb" mode where, when enabled, only phone numbers in your contact book will ring your phone. I just leave it on all the time. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204321 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204321 https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/6111295 https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/6111295 (see "Option 3: Priority notifications only", and pick Contacts Only.)
- pishpash 8y agoGoogle Voice itself does pretty good spam filtering.
- nonbel 8y ago
- ghaff 8y agoFortunately, it's still at a tolerable level on my cell. Though it does force me to use Do Not Disturb so I don't get awakened when traveling. Landline is mostly a lost cause. I still keep one for various reasons but I mostly ignore it for inbound calls. If things get much worse I may just shut off all the ringers.
- awat 8y agoThe powers that be are not properly incentivized to battle against robocalls and in many cases are simply looking the other way.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThis will be the death of general telephony. There's no highly-evident replacement, but I suspect that what does supplant it 1. will emerge from a socioeconomic elite (as telephony, email, and mobile did, or letter-writing in an earlier era), 2. will have very cheap unwanted-contact rejection, from a cognitive-load standpoint (by the time my phone's rung or a voicemail's been left, it's too late), and 3. will probably intrinsically include multimedia -- text, likely image & video. I'd like to see robust crypto in authentication, identity, integrity, and encryption of both data and metadata. Multople independeent peersistent, though at least partially repudiable, identities would be very nice-to-have. I have at best modest hopes. Both elements may be undermined by an ease-of-use dynamic, though that's short-term gain for long-term cost. In the near term, expect to see a proliferation of conflicting standards and systems.
- greggman 8y agorather than complain I'm curious what a solution would be. It seems pretty clear we need to get rid of the current phone system to fix this.
- originalsimba 8y agoMr. Number on Android is a free app with crowd-sourced data. It blocks spam callers. This is only one example, but smart phones and apps like Mr. Number are going to kill the phone-spam industry. And apps like "Record My Calls" are going to put more nails into the phone scam industry because now these criminals won't be able to escape the sound of their own voices.
- WalterBright 8y agoI try to sell them a compiler.
- hedora 8y agoFine the telcos per call that gets through, and ramp the fine up in a predictable way, so that it becomes an existential threat after a few years. This would immediately put an end to caller id spoofing.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bcheung 8y agoIt would be hard to fine them since they did nothing to encourage this behavior, nor do they have very much control in preventing it.
- toasterlovin 8y agoYeah, but of all the actors in the system, they’re the ones in a position to do something. It’s like making banks responsible for fraudulent credit card purchases.
- sureaboutthis 8y agoI wonder if I sent out 3.4 billion robo-emails how quickly the law would come knocking on my door. From what I've read, the issue lies in the amount of money telco is making from all these calls and, if their income would drop to zero from them, robocalls would stop immediately.
- jacksmith21006 8y agoWait until https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08 Google Duplex Demo from Google IO 2018 - YouTube Is launched.
- philca 8y agoHow many business answer the phone by saying "How can I help you?", are they lying? Are they not even close to have a system like that?
- jacksmith21006 8y agoGoogle shared they removed personal information from the calls like the names of the locations. They already have the TTS aspect out in beta. It uses something called WaveNet. Here this might help. https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/ https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio... and "Introducing Cloud Text-to-Speech powered by DeepMind WaveNet technology" https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Cloud-Text-to-Speech-powered-by-Deepmind-WaveNet-technology.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Clo... Testing will start on the rest later this summer. https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur... On the link some more examples of calls. Pretty cool stuff. Really just shows how far ahead Google is in the AI space at every layer of the stack. The TTS at scale required the TPUs. Doing 16k cycles through a DNN in real-time is a really intensive compute task but then to offer at a competitive price to using the old way needs custom silicon.
- philca 8y agoI missed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17094231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17094231 Ah I was not the only one finding it suspicious, Thank you for your links, pretty interesting research quite far away from a real product though. This Weekend was the bay area makerfaire, where the Google stand was in front of the one of Nintendo, they were showing the exact same tech, but the Google one was really underwhelming, it was actually interesting to compare it. I don't trust Google, ok let's wait for a product I guess.
- cameldrv 8y agoWe need people to post a bond to make a call. Maybe $1. You can't call without posting the bond. If, within 10 minutes of the end of the call, I send a text to my phone company that I didn't like the call, the bond goes to charity. You could even set something like this up as a smart contract on ethereum.
- jawns 8y agoSimilar ideas were once floated to stop email spam problems. But it's untenable. First, think of the impact it would have on lower-income people. Second, think of how people might "game" the system. Anytime anyone is unhappy with a caller for any reason, they can falsely report the caller for spam. Third, think of what position this puts phone companies in. They then have to be the arbiter of whether every reported call is actually spam. They'd probably have to set up an appeals process. It would be a nightmare, logistically. Fourth, who would get to decide which charity the bond goes to? That decision alone is a hornet's nest.
- voidmain 8y agoI've always wished for this in every communication medium. Charging someone for calling you would also block them permanently, so almost no one is going to do this to their friends just to mess with them. There should be no appeal: if someone wants to charge every caller, that's totally fine. People will stop calling them pretty fast. Likewise I would let the callee choose the charity, or even keep the money. All that matters is that if you are calling someone who wants your calls you won't be charged, and if you aren't, you should be. If you aren't sure, you pay your money and take your chances that you are in fact imposing on someone else. I can't see how this would hurt anyone of any socio economic level other than spammers. If you are calling someone who doesn't want your calls, you are a spammer.
- cameldrv 8y agoIt's perfectly tenable. The phone company can pick a list of broadly acceptable charities, but hell, it's fine with me if the phone company just keeps the money. The main thing is that the caller pays. The phone company is not the arbiter, whoever receives the call is, and their decision is final. This shouldn't have any impact on low-income people unless they're calling a bunch of people who don't want to hear from them. There's no need for an appeals process, it's only $1, and it has to be reported within 10 minutes. The caller would receive a text message that they had been charged for the call, and either has to stop calling people who don't want to hear from them or pay for each call.
- StephenConnell 8y agoI was getting 1-5 three second voicemails a day. Robots being detected and sent to voicemail, then detecting and hanging up on my voicemail. I added 30 seconds of music to the end of my "please text or email me" message the voicemails have all stopped.
- drdeadringer 8y ago> I added 30 seconds of music to the end of my "please text or email me" message the voicemails have all stopped. Everybody has different musical tastes and particularly about what one shares via a VM message, and I'm curious about what you selected. If you don't mind sharing, what segment did you cherry-pick?
- StephenConnell 8y agoInstrumental portion of a Lindsey Stirling song.
- dgudkov 8y agoLetting anybody in the world call you any time without any restrictions is absurd. It should be possible to enforce a mode that requires the caller to send you a request for permission to call first (like contact request in Skype). And unless you explicitly granted such permission all calls from that number should be automatically rejected.
- orev 8y agoYou’re talking about a system that’s over 100 years old and has been in the hands of monopoly companies for most of that time. Ajit Pai has said (surprisingly astutely) that you can solve this problem by requiring some kind of authentication for calls. Even getting that in place seems like an impossible task (though for some reason he doesn’t see how someone in his position could force that to happen). What your talking about is more difficult than that.
- millzlane 8y agoShould I answer Is a Bazooka in this battle. https://www.shouldianswer.com/ https://www.shouldianswer.com/