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I actually would like a regulatory solution for this. Mandate a way for me to say whether incoming calls were spam. Require my phone company to pay me money e
by btilly 8y ago
I actually would like a regulatory solution for this.
Mandate a way for me to say whether incoming calls were spam. Require my phone company to pay me money every time I get spammed. Allow my phone company to, at their option, proactively block calls from specific upstreams and/or pass the charge to the specific upstreams.
Now from those incentives, the fines will naturally follow the upstreams to the source of the spam, and provide motivation for them to clean their acts up. Voila! (And if telephone companies decide that they need a more secure protocol to make spamming harder, that's up to them.)
- mortenjorck 8y agoThis really is the only way to root out the problem. The carrier networks have to hold the upstream VOIP providers accountable, so the VOIP providers hold their customers who create random spoofed phone numbers accountable.
- elliekelly 8y agoThis is a really good idea in theory but my understanding is that a lot of these calls come in from spoofed numbers. So if you're the unlucky person whose number the spammers choose to spoof that day you're already in for a giant headache - getting your phone number blocked would add insult to injury.
- fxj 8y agoWhen the client of the robocaller who wants to sell something is fined then there are soon no more orders for robocaller.
- btilly 8y agoAnd if you implement that, then you'll get the blackhat approach of paying the robocaller to advertise your competitor's product.
- btilly 8y agoThe point is to target the spoofing process directly. The incentives should cause VoIP solutions that generate spoofed calls to get kicked out of the phone system. Yes, this would cause false positives. However it is my belief that the general harm from false positives would be less than from current negatives, and that, given incentives, the phone companies should be able to figure it out.
- Reason077 8y ago”I actually would like a regulatory solution for this.” The UK has a solution. It does actually work, mostly: https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/index.html https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/index.html
- sofaofthedamned 8y agoIt doesn't work, and i'm in the UK too. Bad actors simply ditch their LTD Co when they eventually get a small fine and some use it as a whitelist of active numbers to use. IIRC there was an idea about making directors of companies who flout this personally responsible, I wonder if this happened?
- btilly 8y agoThe USA has a similar solution. See https://www.donotcall.gov/ https://www.donotcall.gov/ for details. Until fairly recently, it also worked pretty well. And still does for legitimate companies doing phone solicitation. (Excepting political parties, because they are exempt from the law.) However spoofers who know that they won't be tracked back to the source don't care about do not call lists.
- Rjevski 8y agoIt doesn’t work. Only honest callers would follow this. In addition, looking up a number in there is paid which is less than ideal. The service itself is already an inconvenience to its “target market” (aka telemarketers or robocallers) so at least you should make it as easy as possible to use it. I actually worked on a lawful telemarketing operation a few years back (don’t ask - desperate times called for desperate measures) and paying for TPS lookups was both a surprise and a huge problem. The only reason it seems like it works is because the US is a much juicier market for the scammers so most don’t bother with the UK, but I still see people occasionally getting tech support scams or similar so clearly there’s nothing actually preventing them from spamming the UK - for now it’s just that the US is a bigger fish.
- fxj 8y agoIn germany robocalls are illegal and the caller can get a huge fine.
- rock_hard 8y agoAnother terrible solution from German lawmakers that stifles innovation! Instead of figuring out a more measured approach they just made them all illegal :(
- redisman 8y agoSounds like a 100x better solution than the US where I literally receive spam multiple times per day as phone calls. Why don't you go innovate on something useful?
- rock_hard 8y agoThe US situation is also not ideal...but there is also solution in the middle
- sho 8y agoIn your first sentence I thought you were being sarcastic. A little weird, I didn't know German government jokes were a thing, but OK. In your second sentence I realised you weren't. Wow. If this is "innovation", then let it be stifled with all speed.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
- mrweasel 8y ago> I actually would like a regulatory solution for this. That's actually the only way to go. Adding support for apps to screen your calls, block unknown number or some other feature that requires an action from the user only benefits those who understand the technology and know that it's available. It leaves those most susceptible to fraudulent calls as the only target for scammers. People often forget that those with limited technological understanding, such as the elderly, may need society to step in an actually solve the problems, rather than plastering over them with even more tech.
- notatcomputer68 8y agoBusybody morality police would abuse this to deprive people of their freedom of telephone. Hard no
- Quanttek 8y agoHere in Germany - and I believe most of Europe - these calls are illegal and that works perfectly. I have never gotten a robocall on my life and am still free to phone around as much as I want. (Not sure how exactly they are regulated. If they're illegal by themselves or if it's a side-effect from the ban on signing contracts via phone)