7 ms·

Why is this problem unique to the USA? I'm not saying I never get spam calls, but I certainly have to scroll back quite a bit in my phone call history to see t

Why is this problem unique to the USA? I'm not saying I never get spam calls, but I certainly have to scroll back quite a bit in my phone call history to see the last one. Also, on the rare occasion I do get a spam call it's always from some random international country like South Sudan or Oman that I would never expect a phone call from. What makes this problem uniquely hard to solve for the USA as opposed to anywhere else?

devonbleak 7y ago
Embedded corporate interests and lobbies fighting against solutions because it'll cost them money to implement or lower their revenue once implemented. The usual.
- throwaway894345 7y ago
  What solutions does Europe, etc have that the US doesn't? Genuine question.
  - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
    A working legislature?
    - throwaway894345 7y ago
      Clever. What solutions has said legislature come up?
      - throwaway894345 7y ago
        *come up with? (apparently I missed the edit window)
  - thomasfortes 7y ago
    Don't know about Europe, in Brazil spam calls are common but you can register your number in a consumer protection organ to say that you do not want unwanted commercial calls and if you keep receiving them the companies can be fined, for me it works "ok", there still companies that don't give a shit but at least the amount of calls I receive was reduced a lot...
    - kube-system 7y ago
      The US did this before most countries, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry Most US spam calls originate outside of the US, though.
  - Elv13 7y ago
    * Not directly related to SPIT (phone SPAM), but one is https://www.wired.com/story/sim-swap-fix-carriers-banks/ https://www.wired.com/story/sim-swap-fix-carriers-banks/ . * Carrier maintainer blacklists and other tools have also been used by providers for a long time. * My provider, Voip.ms, enforces a provenance whitelist by default. This block all SPIT calls coming from unspoofed caller ids. That may not sound like a lot, but yes, many of those calls are just random poeple picking their phone or mobile apps using the real phone number. Having regulation to track internal sources of SPIT (and enforcing it) helps too. * In Canada, you can subscribe to a non-telemarketing list. That doesn't help for scammer, but it helps for unsolicited ads, political spam and private surveys. This works when enforced with actual penalties for all parties involved.
    - kube-system 7y ago
      Canada's non-telemarketing list that was implemented in 2004 is essentially a copy of the US legislation that was passed the year prior. It doesn't help though, as neither the US nor Canada have jurisdiction in India, et al.
mrlala 7y ago
If you were setting up a little scam operation.. who would you target? Would you decide to set it up to call over 40 different countries in europe? Each with their own way to show phone numbers.. each carrier attempting to block spam calls in different ways.. each country virtually speaking a different language.. most countries having some different banking/credit card systems.. Or would you target the united states which everyone in the country has the same phone prefix, pretty much all speak one language, banking/credit card system is the same, etc. It just makes sense for scammers to target the US. You can target hundreds of millions of people the exact same way.
- bdamm 7y ago
  As a bonus, the country has a high ratio of people desperate for services who also have enough money to successfully swindle. Many elderly Americans really believe that a stranger on the phone might be their ticket to improved conditions.
- morei 7y ago
  That argument just suggests that the US has more scam operations, not that it has all of them. Crowding out is still an effect, so scam operations are incentivized to target other countries as the US becomes fully 'supplied' with scammers.
bonestamp2 7y ago
It's not that the problem has been solved elsewhere, it's that other countries aren't as big of a target so it's not as big of a problem in most other countries (for a variety of reasons). That said, some area codes in Canada are getting bad too.
Florin_Andrei 7y ago
> Why is this problem unique to the USA? It's the price we have to pay for Freedom (TM).
floatingatoll 7y ago
Prior to the quarantine, I was getting 5-10 per day. The USA's implementation of caller ID does not require telephone providers to verify that the caller ID provided to them is real (prior to this order). It also lacks the regulatory structure to "trace" (prosecute/fine) calls through the various interlocking copper, cellular, and internet telephony networks, even when each provider in the chain has data. It also lacks the legal experience in knowing how (and the political will) to prosecute an individual who dials random phone numbers with an app on a cell phone using a prepaid SIM card and conferences whoever they're calling into a spam line to disguise the spam line's phone number. Finally, our regulatory system is captive to politicians who depend critically on spam calls for political purposes, and continue to fight to have those calls exempt, making it vastly more difficult to stop all robocalls because some are legal and others aren't.
- mulmen 7y ago
  During the last presidential election I got a spam call in an elevator. Like, the emergency phone in the elevator actually rang while I was inside. It picked up automatically and I had to suffer through 20 seconds of Donald Trump shouting about immigrants until the doors opened.
robert_foss 7y ago
In Sweden telephone operators can be forbidden from let spam categorized numbers reach you. That and you know.. breaking the law has actual consequences for both spammers and telcos.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Same in Greece, I think it's EU-wide. When you tell a spammer you're registered in our do-not-call registry, they get scared pretty quickly and swear they'll never call again. They usually don't.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    The US has had a do-not-call registry for 17 years. It still doesn't deter spammers who are not subject to US law. Back in the early 2000's I remember doing the same thing you're describing: startling spammers by telling them that I was on the list. But today, the people calling don't care because they aren't inside of the US.
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      This is what anti-spoofing is for - it's trivial to deny calls from India or Russia or whatever if you're not doing any business there, the problem is that currently they're spoofing a local number. If you're being called from a local number, then this should mean (and outside of USA actually means) that there's somebody who's subject to local law and fully responsible for ensuring that the spam laws are met. If you're a telecoms operator sending in calls to the nework, then you ensure that the fines get paid - the spammers are, naturally, liable, but if you enable access to scammers in an unreachable jurisdiction or insolvent shell companies, well, it's coming out of your pocket and it's your problem on how to recover these losses. In USA, however, telecoms who specialize in providing such access to phone spammers have a legal and profitable business model. This needs to change.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
kube-system 7y ago
The US just has a lot of VoIP providers, English speakers, and is a high income country. It is just an easy target.
reaperducer 7y ago
Why is this problem unique to the USA? Every time this topic comes up on HN, someone asks that same question. Then there's a bunch of responses that are lots of suppositions. Then several people from small European countries chime in saying they've never had a spam call. Then a bunch of Europeans from large countries show up saying they get spam calls, too, and it's not just an American thing. "Why is this problem unique to the USA?" is pretty much a meme at this point. Also... You start with "Why is this problem unique to the USA?" Then follow immediately with, "I'm not saying I never get spam calls" which means it's not unique to the USA. So your first sentence is invalid.
- octocop 7y ago
  Isn't FCC unique to USA? Well there you have it.
  - selectnull 7y ago
    Hmmm... no! I guess every country has an equivalent agency to FCC.
    - octocop 7y ago
      That has also passed something similar?
- hadrien01 7y ago
  I live in one of the largest countries in the EU and I receive one, maybe two, spam calls a month (and always coming from countries outside the EU). From what I understand from the never-ending list of articles about spam calls in the US, some receive tens, sometimes hundreds of spam calls every day! So yes, this problem is, from our EU perspective, unique to the USA.
  - lukevp 7y ago
    I get 5-10 per day in USA these days. I turned on silence unknown callers and it’s not terrible anymore but still ridiculous that it’s allowed to happen.
skissane 7y ago
> What makes this problem uniquely hard to solve for the USA as opposed to anywhere else? Starting back in 2018 or so there has been a big problem in Australia with scam robocalls claiming to be from the Australian Tax Office. The area code on the phone number said it came from Canberra (Australia's national capital) which made it look more legitimate–even though in reality the call was coming from an overseas call centre. The robocall started out by saying that you owe a tax debt and the government was about to commence legal action against you. I got several, most people would hang up realising that the tax office would never do that. (It is illegal for them to discuss your tax affairs without confirming your identity first, so they would never begin a call by saying you owed them money.) But, some people (many of whom were older/vulnerable people), stayed on the call until the live operator connected. The live operator would then pressure them to go to a store and buy thousands of dollars of gift cards (such as Apple iTunes gift cards) and then read the gift card details out over the phone. So this definitely is not a problem unique to the US. And other countries have been taking action, see e.g. in Australia – https://www.zdnet.com/article/acma-proposes-three-point-action-plan-to-crack-down-on-phone-scams/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/acma-proposes-three-point-acti... (Definitely the incidence of these fake calls appears to be falling, in my personal experience, so I think the Australian authorities'/industry's attempts are producing some results.)
liambates 7y ago
Having lived in the UK and now the US, the problem is definitely more pronounced over here. In the UK I was receiving a spam call maybe once a week at most. In the US I was getting about 2-3 a week on a pretty new number before blocking all unknown calls. I assume it's simply more worthwhile to create a fraudulent scheme aimed at a larger population with more potential marks.
tinus_hn 7y ago
It’s not, but the scale... in the Netherlands if your number is on the lists you get I’d say about 5 calls from ‘Microsoft’ each month, not multiple calls a day.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bscphil 7y ago
I guess I'll be the one to go against the grain here: I might have received 2-3 spam calls in the last year, here in the US. This implies that most spam callers aren't simply dialing random numbers, they're getting lists from somewhere, and by luck or by care my number hasn't ended up on their lists.
igammarays 7y ago
Free market problems.
amiga_500 7y ago
Because they are unable to organize themselves. See healthcare and schools for other examples.
toast0 7y ago
There's a bunch of reasons why the US is targetted by spam callers. a) it's a large market with a large penetration of internationally chargable credit cards. Several countries in the EU have their own payment systems including a bunch on a push model --- it's hard to scam germans over the phone because it's going to be hard to get them to send you funds without a german bank account; and if you have a german bank account, that's going to get you caught. Everywhere can process US visa and mastercard though. b) large community that can be addressed with a single language; yes, there's a lot of people who would prefer another language, but they can probably be scammed in English (Although, with a bay area number I do get a good amount of scam calls in Chinese). c) last, but probably most important; outbound calls to the US are incredibly cheap, as long as the number is not in Alaska. It's easy to find retail voip offers for less than 1 cent per minute to US numbers; and it doesn't matter if it's a landline or a cell phone. Calls to most EU mobile phones are at least 10 cents, but many countries are closer to 30 cents. That adds up quickly.
Humphrey 7y ago
Australian here. Until this HN post it never occurred to me that you could spoof phone calls. While landlines used to get lots of spam calls, perhaps I've had just two of these calls to my mobile in my life. Each time I typed the number into google and found reports of that number being spam. And maybe less than 20 spam sms's. Does this mean that other countries (such as Australia) do not allow spoofing of numbers?

devonbleak 7y ago

Embedded corporate interests and lobbies fighting against solutions because it'll cost them money to implement or lower their revenue once implemented. The usual.

throwaway894345 7y ago
What solutions does Europe, etc have that the US doesn't? Genuine question.
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  A working legislature?
  - throwaway894345 7y ago
    Clever. What solutions has said legislature come up?
    - throwaway894345 7y ago
      *come up with? (apparently I missed the edit window)
- thomasfortes 7y ago
  Don't know about Europe, in Brazil spam calls are common but you can register your number in a consumer protection organ to say that you do not want unwanted commercial calls and if you keep receiving them the companies can be fined, for me it works "ok", there still companies that don't give a shit but at least the amount of calls I receive was reduced a lot...
  - kube-system 7y ago
    The US did this before most countries, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry Most US spam calls originate outside of the US, though.
- Elv13 7y ago
  * Not directly related to SPIT (phone SPAM), but one is https://www.wired.com/story/sim-swap-fix-carriers-banks/ https://www.wired.com/story/sim-swap-fix-carriers-banks/ . * Carrier maintainer blacklists and other tools have also been used by providers for a long time. * My provider, Voip.ms, enforces a provenance whitelist by default. This block all SPIT calls coming from unspoofed caller ids. That may not sound like a lot, but yes, many of those calls are just random poeple picking their phone or mobile apps using the real phone number. Having regulation to track internal sources of SPIT (and enforcing it) helps too. * In Canada, you can subscribe to a non-telemarketing list. That doesn't help for scammer, but it helps for unsolicited ads, political spam and private surveys. This works when enforced with actual penalties for all parties involved.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    Canada's non-telemarketing list that was implemented in 2004 is essentially a copy of the US legislation that was passed the year prior. It doesn't help though, as neither the US nor Canada have jurisdiction in India, et al.

mrlala 7y ago

If you were setting up a little scam operation.. who would you target? Would you decide to set it up to call over 40 different countries in europe? Each with their own way to show phone numbers.. each carrier attempting to block spam calls in different ways.. each country virtually speaking a different language.. most countries having some different banking/credit card systems.. Or would you target the united states which everyone in the country has the same phone prefix, pretty much all speak one language, banking/credit card system is the same, etc. It just makes sense for scammers to target the US. You can target hundreds of millions of people the exact same way.

bdamm 7y ago
As a bonus, the country has a high ratio of people desperate for services who also have enough money to successfully swindle. Many elderly Americans really believe that a stranger on the phone might be their ticket to improved conditions.
morei 7y ago
That argument just suggests that the US has more scam operations, not that it has all of them. Crowding out is still an effect, so scam operations are incentivized to target other countries as the US becomes fully 'supplied' with scammers.

bonestamp2 7y ago

It's not that the problem has been solved elsewhere, it's that other countries aren't as big of a target so it's not as big of a problem in most other countries (for a variety of reasons). That said, some area codes in Canada are getting bad too.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago

> Why is this problem unique to the USA? It's the price we have to pay for Freedom (TM).

floatingatoll 7y ago

Prior to the quarantine, I was getting 5-10 per day. The USA's implementation of caller ID does not require telephone providers to verify that the caller ID provided to them is real (prior to this order). It also lacks the regulatory structure to "trace" (prosecute/fine) calls through the various interlocking copper, cellular, and internet telephony networks, even when each provider in the chain has data. It also lacks the legal experience in knowing how (and the political will) to prosecute an individual who dials random phone numbers with an app on a cell phone using a prepaid SIM card and conferences whoever they're calling into a spam line to disguise the spam line's phone number. Finally, our regulatory system is captive to politicians who depend critically on spam calls for political purposes, and continue to fight to have those calls exempt, making it vastly more difficult to stop all robocalls because some are legal and others aren't.

mulmen 7y ago
During the last presidential election I got a spam call in an elevator. Like, the emergency phone in the elevator actually rang while I was inside. It picked up automatically and I had to suffer through 20 seconds of Donald Trump shouting about immigrants until the doors opened.

robert_foss 7y ago

In Sweden telephone operators can be forbidden from let spam categorized numbers reach you. That and you know.. breaking the law has actual consequences for both spammers and telcos.

StavrosK 7y ago
Same in Greece, I think it's EU-wide. When you tell a spammer you're registered in our do-not-call registry, they get scared pretty quickly and swear they'll never call again. They usually don't.
- kube-system 7y ago
  The US has had a do-not-call registry for 17 years. It still doesn't deter spammers who are not subject to US law. Back in the early 2000's I remember doing the same thing you're describing: startling spammers by telling them that I was on the list. But today, the people calling don't care because they aren't inside of the US.
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    This is what anti-spoofing is for - it's trivial to deny calls from India or Russia or whatever if you're not doing any business there, the problem is that currently they're spoofing a local number. If you're being called from a local number, then this should mean (and outside of USA actually means) that there's somebody who's subject to local law and fully responsible for ensuring that the spam laws are met. If you're a telecoms operator sending in calls to the nework, then you ensure that the fines get paid - the spammers are, naturally, liable, but if you enable access to scammers in an unreachable jurisdiction or insolvent shell companies, well, it's coming out of your pocket and it's your problem on how to recover these losses. In USA, however, telecoms who specialize in providing such access to phone spammers have a legal and profitable business model. This needs to change.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

kube-system 7y ago

The US just has a lot of VoIP providers, English speakers, and is a high income country. It is just an easy target.

reaperducer 7y ago

Why is this problem unique to the USA? Every time this topic comes up on HN, someone asks that same question. Then there's a bunch of responses that are lots of suppositions. Then several people from small European countries chime in saying they've never had a spam call. Then a bunch of Europeans from large countries show up saying they get spam calls, too, and it's not just an American thing. "Why is this problem unique to the USA?" is pretty much a meme at this point. Also... You start with "Why is this problem unique to the USA?" Then follow immediately with, "I'm not saying I never get spam calls" which means it's not unique to the USA. So your first sentence is invalid.

octocop 7y ago
Isn't FCC unique to USA? Well there you have it.
- selectnull 7y ago
  Hmmm... no! I guess every country has an equivalent agency to FCC.
  - octocop 7y ago
    That has also passed something similar?
hadrien01 7y ago
I live in one of the largest countries in the EU and I receive one, maybe two, spam calls a month (and always coming from countries outside the EU). From what I understand from the never-ending list of articles about spam calls in the US, some receive tens, sometimes hundreds of spam calls every day! So yes, this problem is, from our EU perspective, unique to the USA.
- lukevp 7y ago
  I get 5-10 per day in USA these days. I turned on silence unknown callers and it’s not terrible anymore but still ridiculous that it’s allowed to happen.

skissane 7y ago

> What makes this problem uniquely hard to solve for the USA as opposed to anywhere else? Starting back in 2018 or so there has been a big problem in Australia with scam robocalls claiming to be from the Australian Tax Office. The area code on the phone number said it came from Canberra (Australia's national capital) which made it look more legitimate–even though in reality the call was coming from an overseas call centre. The robocall started out by saying that you owe a tax debt and the government was about to commence legal action against you. I got several, most people would hang up realising that the tax office would never do that. (It is illegal for them to discuss your tax affairs without confirming your identity first, so they would never begin a call by saying you owed them money.) But, some people (many of whom were older/vulnerable people), stayed on the call until the live operator connected. The live operator would then pressure them to go to a store and buy thousands of dollars of gift cards (such as Apple iTunes gift cards) and then read the gift card details out over the phone. So this definitely is not a problem unique to the US. And other countries have been taking action, see e.g. in Australia – https://www.zdnet.com/article/acma-proposes-three-point-action-plan-to-crack-down-on-phone-scams/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/acma-proposes-three-point-acti... (Definitely the incidence of these fake calls appears to be falling, in my personal experience, so I think the Australian authorities'/industry's attempts are producing some results.)

liambates 7y ago

Having lived in the UK and now the US, the problem is definitely more pronounced over here. In the UK I was receiving a spam call maybe once a week at most. In the US I was getting about 2-3 a week on a pretty new number before blocking all unknown calls. I assume it's simply more worthwhile to create a fraudulent scheme aimed at a larger population with more potential marks.

tinus_hn 7y ago

It’s not, but the scale... in the Netherlands if your number is on the lists you get I’d say about 5 calls from ‘Microsoft’ each month, not multiple calls a day.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bscphil 7y ago

I guess I'll be the one to go against the grain here: I might have received 2-3 spam calls in the last year, here in the US. This implies that most spam callers aren't simply dialing random numbers, they're getting lists from somewhere, and by luck or by care my number hasn't ended up on their lists.

igammarays 7y ago

Free market problems.

amiga_500 7y ago

Because they are unable to organize themselves. See healthcare and schools for other examples.

toast0 7y ago

There's a bunch of reasons why the US is targetted by spam callers. a) it's a large market with a large penetration of internationally chargable credit cards. Several countries in the EU have their own payment systems including a bunch on a push model --- it's hard to scam germans over the phone because it's going to be hard to get them to send you funds without a german bank account; and if you have a german bank account, that's going to get you caught. Everywhere can process US visa and mastercard though. b) large community that can be addressed with a single language; yes, there's a lot of people who would prefer another language, but they can probably be scammed in English (Although, with a bay area number I do get a good amount of scam calls in Chinese). c) last, but probably most important; outbound calls to the US are incredibly cheap, as long as the number is not in Alaska. It's easy to find retail voip offers for less than 1 cent per minute to US numbers; and it doesn't matter if it's a landline or a cell phone. Calls to most EU mobile phones are at least 10 cents, but many countries are closer to 30 cents. That adds up quickly.

Humphrey 7y ago

Australian here. Until this HN post it never occurred to me that you could spoof phone calls. While landlines used to get lots of spam calls, perhaps I've had just two of these calls to my mobile in my life. Each time I typed the number into google and found reports of that number being spam. And maybe less than 20 spam sms's. Does this mean that other countries (such as Australia) do not allow spoofing of numbers?