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A few years ago my parents were getting a lot of spam calls on their landline. Basically all of them were automated calls, either a recorded message or you were
by fyfy18 8y ago
A few years ago my parents were getting a lot of spam calls on their landline. Basically all of them were automated calls, either a recorded message or you were connected to a person shortly after the call was connected. I bought an OBi100 [0], which is a small device designed to be a VOIP adapter, but you can setup rules on how calls (incoming or outgoing) are handled.
I setup a rule that if the call was from a withheld or foreign number, it would play an automated message asking the user to press the number 1 to be connected. This alone stopped basically all the spam calls. I'm surprised how well it actually works, I assume the caller detects it as a voicemail message so just hang up.
I imagine most carriers could implement something like this relatively easy. Sorry Google, no AI needed here.
[0] https://www.callcentric.com/support/device/obihai/obi100 https://www.callcentric.com/support/device/obihai/obi100
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nmstoker 8y agoCool idea, but you're talking about a landline though aren't you? The implication from the OP is that it's a question about mobiles. It's not 100% clear, but in my experience people rarely bother to have contact lists on landlines, which themselves are increasingly less popular.
- StavrosK 8y agoThis is the kind of solution that only works because basically nobody is doing it. If a big provider deployed it, it would take five seconds for it to be defeated.
- Fnoord 8y agoThe OP didn't exhaust their solutions. They found a simple solution which works (for them), and shares it. Once the solution gets widely adopted, it will also get more attack surface. In the meantime, the solution works well because the risk (getting spam calls once more) is worth the small investment. Its essentially a no-brainer to implement this, if you suffer from this issue (I don't, I'm eagerly waiting for a fun phone call with Miclosoft customer support despite owning no such products).
- humanbeinc 8y agoI just love the thought of identifying a CAPTCHA-like obscured audio everytime I am calling someone.. :D
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago"Laurel" "Sorry, the expected answer was Yannie."
- InitialLastName 8y agoI love the idea of using that to train my new speech-to-text AI.
- skykooler 8y agoGoogle Voice offers this as an option; they're fairly big.
- StavrosK 8y agoThey have a "Press 1 to be connected" option? Where?
- chooseaname 8y agoNot who you're replying to, but I just looked and the only option I see is you can turn on screening and so when you pick up, you hear the person's name and can decide to take the call or not.
- leowoo91 8y agoFirst time I heard about a voice captcha.
- moron4hire 8y agoAll the captcha systems I know about have a voice option for the blind. I end up using it fairly often because the image obfuscation techniques a lot of them use now makes the text nigh unreadable for humans.
- crtasm 8y agoGreat workaround. "Please press 1" reminds me of the recent CCC talk on automating hacking mobile voicemail to get access to online account recovery codes. Some websites required a key press before speaking the code so he simply recorded the DTMF tone on the voicemail greeting message. https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9383-compromising_online_accounts_by_cracking_voicemail_systems https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9383-compromising_online_account...
- Syzygies 8y agoI do exactly this today, using Phone.com as my home VoIP provider. One "universal" number rings both my cell and the VoIP land line determined by my travel schedule. Not on my whitelist? A prompt asks the caller to dial 7. No robocall has gotten through since. Of course if this were widely available for people who can't write five lines of code, it would be defeated. For HN readers, some of whom scripted checking into Continental flights right at the 24 hour window to game the upgrade list, this is child's play that works.
- snarfy 8y agoWhen I had a landline, I set my voice mail message to the 'we're sorry, your number cannot be completed as dialed' message. Worked great.
- CPLX 8y agoHard to see any downsides to that plan.
- toss1 8y agoMy brother used a nice addition to this that worked quite well -- the message started with the obnoxious three-tone sound that usually precedes a failed call ("beeep-boooop-beeep this call cannot be completed as dialed..."), then just went into the "please press 3 to be connected to ..." Seemed to automatically take them off most lists pretty quickly.
- scirocco 8y agoTruecaller is a spam blocking service that may help https://www.truecaller.com/ https://www.truecaller.com/
- linsomniac 8y agoI did something similar for myself nearly 20 years ago with Asterisk, and it was amazingly effective for my home phone. I'd whitelist numbers of friends and family, everyone else had to dial a number to get the phones in the house to ring. I stopped doing it when I basically switched over to a cell phone as my only phone. For a while 5 years ago I was getting a ton of spam calls, mostly the "Rachel from Credit Card Services" ones. One to two a day. After trying the "Press 1 to be put on our do not call" and speaking to a person and asking to be put on their do not call, filing those FTC complaints, and still getting a few a day, I started using a "fake person generator" and just stringing them along. After a couple weeks of this I got one that went along with me for a few minutes and then said "Thank you for playing <my phone number>, you will continue to get calls." and hung up. This was fantastic, because at the time I had 3 phone numbers associated with my cell phone, and I didn't know which one was getting the calls. I shortly after switched to Google Fi, and ditched the number that they had been calling, and the calls dropped way off.
- fyfy18 8y agoYeah I got the OBi device as I intended to use it as a VOIP gateway to connect to Asterisk, but in the end I was able to do everything I needed on the device.
- Lio 8y agoMany landline handsets sold in the UK now have this as a feature. What I've found is that whist it does stop a lot of spam calls they now fake local numbers. Worse they fake them with a missing digit. The phone companies could definitely spot that. I've wondered previously if international telecoms treaties stop the phone companies from acting to block these calls.
- fyfy18 8y agoThe whole reason why I did this was because I was playing around with Asterisk and VOIP, and wanted to connect a PTSN line to it (which the OBi device was marketed as), but it turned out I could do everything on the device. Anyway, at the time I was traveling a lot so had my VOIP number forward to whatever local number I had in that country. That worked great, except on my phone it just displayed my VOIP number as the caller ID, so I had no idea who was calling. In Asterisk I saw you could set the caller ID, but it didn't work for outgoing calls via my SIP trunk, so I assumed it was disabled by my provider (makes sense). I contacted them, and they said they had unlocked that feature, after which I could make a phone call with any caller ID. I expect there is something fundamental about how the telecom system works that prevents them from blocking these calls, but I'm really surprised at how easy they gave me access to it.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoWhat do you mean by foreign number? Most spam calls I get are from the same area code as my phone number?
- fyfy18 8y agoSome of the spam calls I received were from US phone numbers (I'm in the UK), but when I answered I ended up connected with someone with a Southern Asian accent speaking rather bad English.