9 ms·

I would argue that the legality of this doesn't matter; there's a huge technical problem in that there's no authenticity guarantees at all when it comes to call

• londons_explore 7y ago
  The solution doesn't have to be at the phone network level either. It would be easy enough for a regulator to simply fine any company whose products are advertised or sold through telemarketing. Make it the companies problem that some of their marketing contractors or affiliate schemes lead to illegal calling.
  • rahimnathwani 7y ago
    How would that work? Specifically: - which regulator has the power to fine a company when it didn't do anything wrong? - how would you prevent abuse, e.g. if I want to destroy your small business, I can just spend a few thousand dollars on a robocall campaign selling your products (not even claiming to be you)
    • paulie_a 7y ago
      How would that work for you? You would end up in prison.
      • rahimnathwani 7y ago
        The solution proposed (fine the product manufacturer) is a response to the difficulty of identifying those behind robocalling/telemarketing. That same difficulty would arise when trying to identify those abusing the process in the way I described.
        • paulie_a 7y ago
          There is no difficulty in detection There is a lack of will
          • rahimnathwani 7y ago
            If there is no difficulty in detection, then there is no need to go after a proxy (the product manufacturers) instead of the perpetrators (the telemarketing companies).
            • paulie_a 7y ago
              Everyone knowingly involved should go to prison. I thought I made that clear
  • paulie_a 7y ago
    Forget fines. Everyone in the company needs to be charged with felonies under Rico Spoofing numbers could be considered a criminal organization Take down every single person
    • gruez 7y ago
      >Take down every single person Management/c-suite? Sure. Your typical telemarketer working at minimum wage? No.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • ceejayoz 7y ago
        > Your typical telemarketer working at minimum wage? If they're claiming to be the IRS so they can scam you out of iTunes gift cards, why not? They know what they're a part of.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • paulie_a 7y ago
        Yes absolutely everyone. Everyone that is on the phone. They get 10 years. They absolutely know what they are doing is illegal. Fuck those people.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      That's a little excessive. The janitor was told that they were a legitimate marketing org, and it's completely unreasonable to expect them to investigate enough to find otherwise.
      • paulie_a 7y ago
        No I stand by that statement. You knew you were in a scammer company. Actions need to have consequences. But they currently have none
  • JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > It would be easy enough for a regulator to simply fine any company whose products are advertised or sold through telemarketing Small fines, for the issuer of the number used to make calls reported by more than N consumers, should do the trick. Small to accommodate false positives. Fine to create an incentive to vet before issuing numbers. Number issuers because they’re less numerous and clearly in the FCC’s jurisdiction. If one wanted larger fines, N could be lowered but only count complaints with a recording of the call and proof it came from that number (e.g. a telephone bill). Harder to make a complaint, but also harder to turn the mechanism into a home for general grievances.
    • closeparen 7y ago
      In business telephony, issued numbers have nothing to do with outbound transit. You just have a bundle of circuits/capacity that signal source and destination numbers on a per call basis, inbound and outbound. There’s no requirement that the caller ID you send is one of the numbers routed to your trunk by that provider. A branch office could accept calls only through an extension on the enterprise VoIP network, while still placing outbound calls on a local provider and sending the main headquarters number as caller ID.
      • markovbot 7y ago
        I believe this discussion referral to a theoretical world after STIR/SHAKEN has been implemented globally
  • MichaelApproved 7y ago
    Stop distributibg enforcement, it creates unnecessary redundancy. Enforcement should be concentrated.
  • LorenPechtel 7y ago
    Telemarket your competition.
  • pixelbath 7y ago
    How would this curb the scam calls that aren't interested in selling you a product?
  • msla 7y ago
    It would also be easy enough for the organization to budget for fines or to have numerous front/shell organizations which get started, do the calls and take the money, and then don't exist when the regulators come around. We need jail time for the executives.
  • cestith 7y ago
    You know those people who say they're with Microsoft and they want to use RDP to troubleshoot your Windows installation proactively? They're not actually affiliated with Microsoft, as shocking as that may sound. Neither are the 0% credit card folks who call repeatedly from "Visamastercard" affiliated with any bank or credit card company.
• paulie_a 7y ago
  It seems that phone companies won't do anything about it. Nor the FCC There's a bunch of solutions. I received 19 spam calls spoofing cell numbers. That's a felony I suggest everyone that get an illeagl robo call to call your rep Everytime. Ask them to block India entirely. The problem would be solved very quickly. Or block all calls from Florida and Texas. The nuclear option The basic one is just waste their time. Ask a lot of questions. And then tell them you were doing that
  • linsomniac 7y ago
    I started doing that once. After 2 or 3 of those time wasting calls, I got one that the person said "Thank you for playing <my phone number>, you will continue to receive calls" and they hung up. IOW: They have so many resources available, and it is so cheap for them to make the calls, that even after they knew I was going to waste their time, they continued the calls. This was after I had tried their options for "press 1 to be removed" and talking to someone and saying "please remove me from your list". The thing they may not have been anticipating: I had 3 numbers forwarding to my cell phone. Up until this call I didn't know which of them was on their list. I cancelled that phone number, and the calls dropped to almost 0.
    • 420codebro 7y ago
      > I started doing that once. After 2 or 3 of those time wasting calls, I got one that the person said "Thank you for playing <my phone number>, you will continue to receive calls" and they hung up. Should have shot back real quick "enjoy shitting into an open hole, Hindu bro".
    • ceejayoz 7y ago
      I've taken to pressing one and just shouting at max volume "LAAAAAAAAAAAAA" into the phone until they disconnect. Seems to work; they tend to taper off fairly rapidly. No one wants the hearing damage, I suspect.
      • Scoundreller 7y ago
• mschuster91 7y ago
  > I would argue that the legality of this doesn't matter; there's a huge technical problem in that there's no authenticity guarantees at all when it comes to caller ID and the entire feature is badly designed and has always been open to abuse. There is, at least for foreign calls: assuming US provider A gets an incoming call from the country B's operator C, then A has to verify if the phone number supplied by C is in the country phone number range of country B. If there's a mis-match, deny the connection.
  • viraptor 7y ago
    It's not that easy. You can get a call from X with a prefix from B and it's just how routing sometimes works. In the same way an internet connection from Germany to the UK may actually arrive from an interconnect in Amsterdam. But it doesn't matter. What matters is the responsibility of each party to point out who sent the call to them. (And that's not even mentioning the issue of how you'd map providers to prefixes. It's somewhere between non-trivial and impossible in practice.)
    • TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
      It should really be more like how the internet works with IP addresses. Its easy to send an IP packet with a source address that is whatever you want, but if you do that the receiver is going to reply to someone else and you won't be able to establish two way communication.
      • musicale 7y ago
        Ideally the ISP does basic ingress policing and doesn't accept packets from source addresses outside its range. Yes, I know most ISPs don't do this. But they could if they wanted to.
• viraptor 7y ago
  It's not a real answer though. Imagine everybody adopted it (pretend everyone is using sip/VoIP). The only thing that would change is you'd get same amount of calls from the actual numbers - what are you going to do about it then? If the callers (who LE can get to already with enough questions) are safe now, they'd be safe after the change. Sure, the hn crowd will easily set up appropriate filtering, but we were never a viable target to begin with, so that's actually helping the spam calls reach better targets quicker. It would maybe reduce the number of scam calls though. Spam, not do much.
  • MichaelApproved 7y ago
    Sure, it would help. If the caller ID number was related to the true owner, phone companies would stop the scammers and citizens could log spam calls then sue the owners. The law allows you to collect cash penalties from anyone spam calling.
    • BonesJustice 7y ago
      Good luck suing a call center in Bangalore when you live in the U.S.
      • MichaelApproved 7y ago
        Suing is for spamming. Spamming is an unsolicited legitimate marketing call. Most of those calls originate in the US or are selling the products of US companies who hired them.
      • viraptor 7y ago
        If appropriate laws existed, you could still put pressure on them. Something like "if your international partner sends more than X spam calls, you're responsible for them". The telco would have a choice of getting fined or dropping the interconnect / filtering that source. On the other side, the telco in Bangalore doesn't want to lose the ability to handle calls to the US, so starts monitoring itself.