8 ms·

The DOJ Is Finally Suing US Telecom Providers for Robocalls

76 points by ecliptik 7y ago

MockObject 7y ago
I look forward to a future when I can answer my phone when it rings.
- gambiting 7y ago
  It seems to me like such a uniquely American problem for some reason. I've gotten maybe a single spam call in my life in the UK, most people I asked also say they either never got one or got very few. But you go on HN and it seems like people get a deluge of spam calls all the time.
  - codegeek 7y ago
    It is a major problem in America for the past 4-5 years. It wasn't this bad before then but nowadays, you get like 2-3 spam calls a day at the minimum. The worst part is that the spammers use your local area code and sometimes even matching up to the first 6 digits which creates more doubt if it is coming from someone local or not. Absolutely hate this. I don't ever pick up an unknown number anymore. If is it really important/urgent, they will leave a voicemail and I check that immediately to ensure it was not a genuine/emergency call.
    - jschwartzi 7y ago
      The best part of having an area code from when I was a kid is that if someone calls me from that area code I immediately know it's spam.
  - MarioMan 7y ago
    I have to wonder why. I would expect that the technology and mitigations are fundamentally the same. Perhaps the difference is cultural.
    - metaphor 7y ago
      Occam's razor would appear to suggest otherwise. US population is ~5x greater than the UK, while UK GDP per capita is less than the US. More generally, the per capita economic posture of the US is strong compared to the top 10 most populous countries in the world. If you were an opportunist robocalling scammer operating on a purely probabilistic model, the UK would be a pragmatically irrelevant target. The situation in the US isn't helped by regulatory capture either.
      - frosted-flakes 7y ago
        Sounds similar to the reason MacOS has much less malicious software than Windows.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    It seems to me like such a uniquely American problem Only if by "uniquely American" you mean also British: https://www.verdict.co.uk/robocalls-malicious/ https://www.verdict.co.uk/robocalls-malicious/ And Canadian: https://globalnews.ca/news/6136318/canada-telecom-robocalls-solution/ https://globalnews.ca/news/6136318/canada-telecom-robocalls-... And German: https://hiya.com/blog/2017/12/01/one-ring-scam-makes-way-to-germany/ https://hiya.com/blog/2017/12/01/one-ring-scam-makes-way-to-... And any other high-value target. No matter the scam, scammers go where the money and the people are.
    - Tenoke 7y ago
      I've lived, worked and have numbers in the UĶ and Germany and the main spam I've had has been from LinkedIn. Robocalls happen maybe 10 times total per year for me in Germany, maybe a bit more in the UK and at least on a mobile number. Still annoying but hardly a dont-answer-phonecalls kind of thing.
  - laegooose 7y ago
    I'm getting multiple spam calls per day in Russia
  - tbyehl 7y ago
    Terminating a call in the US can be dramatically cheaper than the rest of the western world.
mifreewil 7y ago
I got pretty fed up with robocalls and none of the existing iPhone apps that use a blacklist approach really worked since robocallers and spam callers can just fake their number or use recycled numbers. I created an iPhone app called MyHumans that takes the opposite approach with a whitelist using your phone contacts. Other callers are sent to voicemail without ringing your phone. It has an easy to access switch where you can temporarily disable any blocking for a time period, like an hour, if you're expecting a one-off call from a recruiter or whatever. It works really well for me. Spammers rarely bother leaving a voicemail and legitimate businesses leave a voicemail that I can follow-up on later. https://www.myhumansapp.com https://www.myhumansapp.com
- davio 7y ago
  Is that different from Silence Unknown Callers in IOS 13?
  - mifreewil 7y ago
    I honestly would use that instead if there was a quick way to disable without digging through the settings app.
    - davio 7y ago
      Maybe through shortcuts? I foiled myself and missed an important call the first time I used that setting. It was a call I expected, but not a contact.
      - CharlesW 7y ago
        > Maybe through shortcuts? Kinda! You can make an iOS shortcut to take you right to the Phone settings, at which point turning "Silence Unknown Callers" on/off is a one-tap operation. To do this, create a shortcut to open the URL "prefs:root=Phone". You can find more detail and a bunch more interesting options here: https://www.macstories.net/ios/a-comprehensive-guide-to-all-120-settings-urls-supported-by-ios-and-ipados-13-1/ https://www.macstories.net/ios/a-comprehensive-guide-to-all-...
msla 7y ago
I predict a lot of people calling the DOJ telling them to leave the poor telecom providers alone. /s From the article: > The US Department of Justice has filed lawsuits (PDF and PDF) against two small telecommunications providers that have allegedly connected hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls from Indian call centers to US residents. I wonder if this could be used as precedent to sue ISPs that deliver spam from foreigners.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
These days, my voicemail greeter is quite literally a CAPTCHA: "Hello! Due to the number of robocalls that have been spamming my phone, I will not answer any call I receive if I do not recognize the number. Please prove to me that you are a human by leaving a voicemail, and I will call you back!" Surprisingly, I have missed very few important calls. Real people are more than happy to leave a message.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Recent discussion of DoJ cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019
codegeek 7y ago
What if we built an app in Twilio that is like the "firewall or Cloudflare for phones". Unless you are whitelisted or in the contacts, the call will be routed to voicemail automatically. You can get creative with that and may be even add things like voice captcha. "Thanks for reaching out. Since I don't know you, please press 1 to proceed further". This will weed out the auto callers/robots ?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sarora27 7y ago
  I just met a founder in StartupSchool who is building this exact thing. Here is their product: https://www.callstop.com/ https://www.callstop.com/
gwbas1c 7y ago
Reminds me of the time I went to career night at my high school. I went to the seminar on running your own business, and the speaker was a guy who ran a telemarketing shop. This was the 1990s when telemarketing was new, and there were still a lot of people in the US who tolerated it. The speaker had absolutely no shame about what he did. Anyway, halfway through his session he went around the room soliciting business ideas. My idea was a telemarketer blocker. He quickly interrupted me to move on to the next kid. If I was a little older I would have raised a huge stink.
ConcernedCoder 7y ago
+1 for trying to do something about it If anyone from DOJ is reading this, could you sue the broadcasters next for continuing to present TV advertising at a higher decible level than the content it is embedded in - even after AFAIK law(s) were passed to try to combat this... what did they do to get around the legislation ( that you probably let them "help" you write ), say they were "decreasing" the decible level of the content instead of "increasing" the decible level of the advertising?
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
DOJ afraid to go after big telecom
grzm 7y ago
From 2 days ago, over 300 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jerkstate 7y ago
I have a phone with an area code far away from where I live. If I get a call from my phone's area code or one in the surrounding area not in my address book, it's spam. If I get a call from an area code where I actually live, it's usually not spam.
davidajackson 7y ago
Based on the research I've done over the past year, the solution here is a few different features: - Whitelisting, with the ability to request to join someone's whitelist, which sends a push notification within the app to the recipient. - The ability to toggle filtering off and have it automatically resume - Easy usage of PINs you can share with loved ones or groups. - The ability to send via email call invites, where the recipient can only call you starting 5 minutes before and up until 5 minutes after the meeting time is over. This is why I built CallStop, which is Superhuman for your phone number: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callstop/id1455892856 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callstop/id1455892856

76 points by ecliptik 7y ago

MockObject 7y ago

I look forward to a future when I can answer my phone when it rings.

gambiting 7y ago
It seems to me like such a uniquely American problem for some reason. I've gotten maybe a single spam call in my life in the UK, most people I asked also say they either never got one or got very few. But you go on HN and it seems like people get a deluge of spam calls all the time.
- codegeek 7y ago
  It is a major problem in America for the past 4-5 years. It wasn't this bad before then but nowadays, you get like 2-3 spam calls a day at the minimum. The worst part is that the spammers use your local area code and sometimes even matching up to the first 6 digits which creates more doubt if it is coming from someone local or not. Absolutely hate this. I don't ever pick up an unknown number anymore. If is it really important/urgent, they will leave a voicemail and I check that immediately to ensure it was not a genuine/emergency call.
  - jschwartzi 7y ago
    The best part of having an area code from when I was a kid is that if someone calls me from that area code I immediately know it's spam.
- MarioMan 7y ago
  I have to wonder why. I would expect that the technology and mitigations are fundamentally the same. Perhaps the difference is cultural.
  - metaphor 7y ago
    Occam's razor would appear to suggest otherwise. US population is ~5x greater than the UK, while UK GDP per capita is less than the US. More generally, the per capita economic posture of the US is strong compared to the top 10 most populous countries in the world. If you were an opportunist robocalling scammer operating on a purely probabilistic model, the UK would be a pragmatically irrelevant target. The situation in the US isn't helped by regulatory capture either.
    - frosted-flakes 7y ago
      Sounds similar to the reason MacOS has much less malicious software than Windows.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  It seems to me like such a uniquely American problem Only if by "uniquely American" you mean also British: https://www.verdict.co.uk/robocalls-malicious/ https://www.verdict.co.uk/robocalls-malicious/ And Canadian: https://globalnews.ca/news/6136318/canada-telecom-robocalls-solution/ https://globalnews.ca/news/6136318/canada-telecom-robocalls-... And German: https://hiya.com/blog/2017/12/01/one-ring-scam-makes-way-to-germany/ https://hiya.com/blog/2017/12/01/one-ring-scam-makes-way-to-... And any other high-value target. No matter the scam, scammers go where the money and the people are.
  - Tenoke 7y ago
    I've lived, worked and have numbers in the UĶ and Germany and the main spam I've had has been from LinkedIn. Robocalls happen maybe 10 times total per year for me in Germany, maybe a bit more in the UK and at least on a mobile number. Still annoying but hardly a dont-answer-phonecalls kind of thing.
- laegooose 7y ago
  I'm getting multiple spam calls per day in Russia
- tbyehl 7y ago
  Terminating a call in the US can be dramatically cheaper than the rest of the western world.

mifreewil 7y ago

I got pretty fed up with robocalls and none of the existing iPhone apps that use a blacklist approach really worked since robocallers and spam callers can just fake their number or use recycled numbers. I created an iPhone app called MyHumans that takes the opposite approach with a whitelist using your phone contacts. Other callers are sent to voicemail without ringing your phone. It has an easy to access switch where you can temporarily disable any blocking for a time period, like an hour, if you're expecting a one-off call from a recruiter or whatever. It works really well for me. Spammers rarely bother leaving a voicemail and legitimate businesses leave a voicemail that I can follow-up on later. https://www.myhumansapp.com https://www.myhumansapp.com

davio 7y ago
Is that different from Silence Unknown Callers in IOS 13?
- mifreewil 7y ago
  I honestly would use that instead if there was a quick way to disable without digging through the settings app.
  - davio 7y ago
    Maybe through shortcuts? I foiled myself and missed an important call the first time I used that setting. It was a call I expected, but not a contact.
    - CharlesW 7y ago
      > Maybe through shortcuts? Kinda! You can make an iOS shortcut to take you right to the Phone settings, at which point turning "Silence Unknown Callers" on/off is a one-tap operation. To do this, create a shortcut to open the URL "prefs:root=Phone". You can find more detail and a bunch more interesting options here: https://www.macstories.net/ios/a-comprehensive-guide-to-all-120-settings-urls-supported-by-ios-and-ipados-13-1/ https://www.macstories.net/ios/a-comprehensive-guide-to-all-...

msla 7y ago

I predict a lot of people calling the DOJ telling them to leave the poor telecom providers alone. /s From the article: > The US Department of Justice has filed lawsuits (PDF and PDF) against two small telecommunications providers that have allegedly connected hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls from Indian call centers to US residents. I wonder if this could be used as precedent to sue ISPs that deliver spam from foreigners.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

These days, my voicemail greeter is quite literally a CAPTCHA: "Hello! Due to the number of robocalls that have been spamming my phone, I will not answer any call I receive if I do not recognize the number. Please prove to me that you are a human by leaving a voicemail, and I will call you back!" Surprisingly, I have missed very few important calls. Real people are more than happy to leave a message.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Recent discussion of DoJ cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019

codegeek 7y ago

What if we built an app in Twilio that is like the "firewall or Cloudflare for phones". Unless you are whitelisted or in the contacts, the call will be routed to voicemail automatically. You can get creative with that and may be even add things like voice captcha. "Thanks for reaching out. Since I don't know you, please press 1 to proceed further". This will weed out the auto callers/robots ?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sarora27 7y ago
I just met a founder in StartupSchool who is building this exact thing. Here is their product: https://www.callstop.com/ https://www.callstop.com/

gwbas1c 7y ago

Reminds me of the time I went to career night at my high school. I went to the seminar on running your own business, and the speaker was a guy who ran a telemarketing shop. This was the 1990s when telemarketing was new, and there were still a lot of people in the US who tolerated it. The speaker had absolutely no shame about what he did. Anyway, halfway through his session he went around the room soliciting business ideas. My idea was a telemarketer blocker. He quickly interrupted me to move on to the next kid. If I was a little older I would have raised a huge stink.

ConcernedCoder 7y ago

+1 for trying to do something about it If anyone from DOJ is reading this, could you sue the broadcasters next for continuing to present TV advertising at a higher decible level than the content it is embedded in - even after AFAIK law(s) were passed to try to combat this... what did they do to get around the legislation ( that you probably let them "help" you write ), say they were "decreasing" the decible level of the content instead of "increasing" the decible level of the advertising?

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

DOJ afraid to go after big telecom

grzm 7y ago

From 2 days ago, over 300 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175019

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jerkstate 7y ago

I have a phone with an area code far away from where I live. If I get a call from my phone's area code or one in the surrounding area not in my address book, it's spam. If I get a call from an area code where I actually live, it's usually not spam.

davidajackson 7y ago

Based on the research I've done over the past year, the solution here is a few different features: - Whitelisting, with the ability to request to join someone's whitelist, which sends a push notification within the app to the recipient. - The ability to toggle filtering off and have it automatically resume - Easy usage of PINs you can share with loved ones or groups. - The ability to send via email call invites, where the recipient can only call you starting 5 minutes before and up until 5 minutes after the meeting time is over. This is why I built CallStop, which is Superhuman for your phone number: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callstop/id1455892856 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callstop/id1455892856