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It's often a round-about crap that causes it. It's not that the legit companies are hiring sleezy companies, but that they have promotional programs that other

It's often a round-about crap that causes it. It's not that the legit companies are hiring sleezy companies, but that they have promotional programs that other companies "sign up" and join to be a partner. The partners are really unknown entities and there's not much in the way of checking. But then these partners start contributing and getting people signed up. It's impossible for the legit companies (if you can really call any major conglomerate a legit company) to know whether those signups were obtained through spammers or what have you. So maybe it's these promotional networks that need to be banned. Problem is, almost all of the advertising and lead generation in the world happens through networks like that. Some of it is legit, some is not. So I do think it's correct to go after robocalling and make it stop. Now one thing I don't agree on is the WAY in which we're doing it via tracing or whatever. Instead if I was the FCC I would simply require, starting today, that all calls made in the US must be signed to be completed. I would rather have no phone calls in the US for a month than let this shit go on indefinitely. Something like that would force all carriers to immediately figure out a way to get every phone call signed. Then once we have calls signed, the spammers would lose their right to call pretty much after a few calls are made and reported. I think the current strategy is pretty hand-wavy and doesn't have any end in sight.

chris_st 6y ago
> Problem is, almost all of the advertising and lead generation in the world happens through networks like that. Some of it is legit, some is not. At the risk of being draconian, okay, fine, you don't know who "ultimately" signed Fred up for your service, but HEY, Fred was signed up illegally, so it's still your fault. I'd like to think that suddenly, companies would get a LOT more careful about who they let sign up to be partners, if they're now at risk. Don't we already do this kind of things with banks, in other words KYC ("Know Your Customer")? A long term business relationship is worth a bit of hassle.
- aqme28 6y ago
  This would work, but there are all sort of secondary problems with forcing service providers to take on the role of policing their networks. There are more than a few detractors of KYC laws, for example.
  - brewdad 6y ago
    Besides the banks and financial services themselves? I would expect them to lobby against KYC since it internalizes the costs. No business wants to take on costs that could otherwise be passed on to others. That is the core of why regulations are needed.
- etrabroline 6y ago
  It's not just that Fred was signed up using illegal tactics. The culpability comes from the fact that these US companies are paying the scammers to do this. The number or complexity of intermediaries is morally immaterial. That's why industries where these kinds of scams happen get special regulations. Advertising for some reason has just escaped oversight for now.
- btilly 6y ago
  The problem is that this opens up dark patterns. If you meaningfully punish the company who paid for it, then robocallers can blackmail any customer-centric company that they want. They start robocalling on behalf of the company then tell the company that they will have to pay to stop. As long as the payment is enough below the legal penalty for continuing, the company will pay the blackmail and the robocaller moves on to their next target.
  - etrabroline 6y ago
    Except these are huge publicly traded companies. They money flow could easily be tracked from the advertiser to the scammer if efforts weren't being made to hide it. So this is a moot point.
    - btilly 6y ago
      OK, so you apparently believe that big companies perform magic. Meanwhile back in reality, a big company may have tens of thousands of affiliates or more. The affiliates all maintain that they are on the up and up, but any of them could be scammers. The company gets leads and doesn't know how they were generated. To see how easy it is, you can create a blog, register yourself as an affiliate for Amazon, and put a link on your blog. Boom. Now have your friend click on your link, and go buy something. Guess what? Amazon will pay you money! Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? Our sites look the same. We're both sending real customers who will pay real money. In this scenario if Amazon could catch me, they would. I'd be straight up cheating them, making them pay for traffic that I didn't generate.
      - rhizome 6y ago
        > Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? How about: affiliate links are constructed to incorporate the affiliate tag so that they can't be rewritten. Yes, each link on your blog is different than the links on my blog for the same items, not just slapping a tag in a URL field. Of course, this would have engineering and hardware overhead on Amazon's side, but without something like this they're just retreading telco history in giving the world untraceable Caller ID, as you aptly illustrate.

chris_st 6y ago

> Problem is, almost all of the advertising and lead generation in the world happens through networks like that. Some of it is legit, some is not. At the risk of being draconian, okay, fine, you don't know who "ultimately" signed Fred up for your service, but HEY, Fred was signed up illegally, so it's still your fault. I'd like to think that suddenly, companies would get a LOT more careful about who they let sign up to be partners, if they're now at risk. Don't we already do this kind of things with banks, in other words KYC ("Know Your Customer")? A long term business relationship is worth a bit of hassle.

aqme28 6y ago
This would work, but there are all sort of secondary problems with forcing service providers to take on the role of policing their networks. There are more than a few detractors of KYC laws, for example.
- brewdad 6y ago
  Besides the banks and financial services themselves? I would expect them to lobby against KYC since it internalizes the costs. No business wants to take on costs that could otherwise be passed on to others. That is the core of why regulations are needed.
etrabroline 6y ago
It's not just that Fred was signed up using illegal tactics. The culpability comes from the fact that these US companies are paying the scammers to do this. The number or complexity of intermediaries is morally immaterial. That's why industries where these kinds of scams happen get special regulations. Advertising for some reason has just escaped oversight for now.
btilly 6y ago
The problem is that this opens up dark patterns. If you meaningfully punish the company who paid for it, then robocallers can blackmail any customer-centric company that they want. They start robocalling on behalf of the company then tell the company that they will have to pay to stop. As long as the payment is enough below the legal penalty for continuing, the company will pay the blackmail and the robocaller moves on to their next target.
- etrabroline 6y ago
  Except these are huge publicly traded companies. They money flow could easily be tracked from the advertiser to the scammer if efforts weren't being made to hide it. So this is a moot point.
  - btilly 6y ago
    OK, so you apparently believe that big companies perform magic. Meanwhile back in reality, a big company may have tens of thousands of affiliates or more. The affiliates all maintain that they are on the up and up, but any of them could be scammers. The company gets leads and doesn't know how they were generated. To see how easy it is, you can create a blog, register yourself as an affiliate for Amazon, and put a link on your blog. Boom. Now have your friend click on your link, and go buy something. Guess what? Amazon will pay you money! Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? Our sites look the same. We're both sending real customers who will pay real money. In this scenario if Amazon could catch me, they would. I'd be straight up cheating them, making them pay for traffic that I didn't generate.
    - rhizome 6y ago
      > Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? How about: affiliate links are constructed to incorporate the affiliate tag so that they can't be rewritten. Yes, each link on your blog is different than the links on my blog for the same items, not just slapping a tag in a URL field. Of course, this would have engineering and hardware overhead on Amazon's side, but without something like this they're just retreading telco history in giving the world untraceable Caller ID, as you aptly illustrate.