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It’s not just robocalls, as it’s also spoofing numbers. I have received many phone calls from average joes who said they were returning a call from my number, b
by bmitc 6y ago
It’s not just robocalls, as it’s also spoofing numbers. I have received many phone calls from average joes who said they were returning a call from my number, but I had never called them.
I’d say 95% of the calls I receive are spam. It’s so bad that I rarely even answer my phone anymore, instead letting it go to voicemail if the number is not in my contacts.
Everything in life has turned to spam. My physical mailbox, my email, and my phone is bombarded by spam and there’s practically nothing I can do about it.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoRobocallers routinely spoof numbers.
- dylan604 6y agoIt's very meta when the caller ID shows you calling yourself
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI would at least get a giggle out of that
- dylan604 6y agoI had to grab a screen shot of it when it happened to me. Of course, that screen shot is only meaningful to me, as it just looks like a regular screen shot of an incoming call to anyone else.
- MiddleEndian 6y ago>instead letting it go to voicemail if the number is not in my contacts At some point I stopped checking my voicemail and it seems to have broken. I am better off for it, because now I no longer am notified about new voicemails.
- galangalalgol 6y agoI don't have this problem on my personal phone, but my work phone the voicemail is garbage and so are my text messages. I just look at exchange and skype, ignoring the rest. My personal phone shows as a landline if you look it up, maybe that is why?
- lumost 6y agomy text messages recently surpassed 5 spam messages per day. In the not too distant future my phone will cease to serve any useful function related to being a "phone".
- dylan604 6y agomy phone did that when the phone became just an app on a device in my pocket. the only reason i have a phone number is you can't get a cell signal to a phone like device without one.
- skinnymuch 6y agoI haven’t gotten spam sfuff on tablet SIM card numbers. Not sure if calls even work on those. You could try that. Don’t need to have the sim in a tablet of course.
- dylan604 6y agohmmmmm, now that is interesting. However, my luck, I'd get flagged as not abiding by some agreed to, by use, contract/ToS for using a tablet SIM in a non-tablet device as defined by some lawyer to avoid this very thing.
- skinnymuch 6y agoYeah it’s not supposed to be allowed. I’ve been told by a T-Mobile employee on Reddit and discord (big community for T-Mobile lol) that they aren’t going to do anything usually. My cousin in HS runs her family’s tablet SIM card in an old iPhone and runs ads to make a dollar a day. They end up using close to 100 GB a month. The other carriers could be stricter. Maybe something to check up on a bit. But not a big deal regardlsss hah. I get you about the bad luck
- Causality1 6y agoFrankly I'm amazed that spam doesn't fall under harassment laws.
- orev 6y agoThere are already laws to stop this, like the do not call registry. But the scammers don’t care about the laws.
- dylan604 6y agoToothless, unenforceable laws are not worth the paper they aren't written on. They are primarily so the politicians writing/voting for them can pat themselves on the back as they tell their sheeple that they have done something.
- cableclasper 6y ago> Everything in life has turned to spam. Why do we do this to ourselves?
- echelon 6y agoBecause we don't punish the spammers. And by spammers, I mean the big "nice" players too, like Google and Facebook. We tolerate them, and every year they grow a little more evil and audacious.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoGoogle and Facebook are surveillance capitalists but they don’t spam me...
- echelon 6y agoAMP links, search results with ads at higher placement, reordered news feeds to drive engagement of viral content, streamlined interfaces (goodbye URL) that belie a sinister purpose... Your filter is constantly being spammed.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoNot mine, I use duckduckgo. Might be slightly inferior results to google but it works 95% of the time for what I'm looking for
- InitialLastName 6y agoAll ddg ever gets me are hyper-SEO'ed content farms.
- zo1 6y agoI think we need to start considering ads as spam. It's just the medium is different.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoI agree with most of what you say, except for email. Because of such things like DKIM, I really don't have an email spam problem, or if I do, it is because I signed up for it myself. Because there is a record of who is transmitting the message, hosts and ISP's that transmit spam get punished by having their emails ignored. It is thus in their best interest to make sure they behave well, and deal quickly with any complaints. The big difference in phone spam is lack of accountability. I believe if you fix that, the problem can be solved pretty quickly
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI'm amazed at google's spam filters. They catch like 99% of the spam from an email I've probably had for 12 years or so. Every now and then something slips through but it's pretty good. When I look at the spam folder I see I probably get 20:1 spam:legit email.
- jjav 6y agoAnd gmail spam filters are very bad, in comparison. My own email server gets way less spam than my gmail account, and never any false positives, which are a huge problem on gmail.
- eythian 6y agoOn my own mailserver with spamassassin, I had my very first false positive in years just yesterday. It seemed that however the organisation emailing me does it, they're using mail hosts on blocklists.
- jjav 6y agoYes! It is interesting, and quite a twist, that spam in email is by far the least of spam problems these days. I get hardly any spam ever on email anymore (on my own email server). Was going to say once a month but no, it's way less than that. And yet, I'm getting a constant barrage of spam over SMS and voicemail, there's no stopping that.
- flyinghamster 6y ago
- lolthishuman 6y agoI don’t think I’ve picked up a phone call in 2 years. Text me or email me no exceptions. So much spam I see increased on voicemails the past year. Clearly all scam.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoYou aren’t an elderly person who isn’t technical. I watch the scam baiters on YouTube and on occasion you hear a victim crying while the perps laugh. Truly bad people to be executing scams against some of the most vulnerable.
- ipython 6y agoThis is exactly the point. I happen to have a landline which somehow is associated with a demographic profile of a senior citizen. I’ve had this number for over a decade now. The number of scam calls targeting seniors is staggering. Of the 200-300 spam robocalls I receive every month, about 50-80 are blocked by my cell phone (the landline rings to my cell) and I also subscribe to nomorobo on the landline, which I assume blocks even more. Still, that’s some 200 calls that make it through even with two levels of blocking. The scams are terrifying- serious sounding people on the line saying your social security number will be cancelled and you will be arrested unless you speak immediately to an officer; Medicare advantage scams; IRS and treasury scammers... and since my personal info is published by the phone company, many times the scammers have all my personal information as “proof”! It’s a sickening information asymmetry that can totally fool an unsuspecting older person who doesn’t entirely understand what’s going on. If you’re curious about what these scams look like and how vigilantes actively work to combat them, I’d recommend two videos to start: Jim browning at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvjjpzyiig4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvjjpzyiig4 and mark rober at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VrKW58MS12g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VrKW58MS12g.
- knodi123 6y agoI guess you don't schedule a lot of medical appointments or work with contractors. I wish I could block all unknown numbers, but I'll miss the rescheduling call from the roofer who had to borrow his wife's cell because his fell out of his pocket, or I'll miss the "please confirm you're coming to your appointment tomorrow" and now I've lost a doctor's appointment I scheduled weeks in advance, etc.
- hansvm 6y ago> My physical mailbox Definitely consider USPS form 1500 if you have any repeat offenders [0]. If it's possible to interpret the spam as trying to sell you something then courts have broadly upheld your right to personally decide what kinds of content are excessively offensive without any additional oversight. Credit card offer? Discount to buy a used car? Nah, it's sexually explicit advertising that won't make it into your mailbox again without a hefty windfall. Also, credit offers lately have been including fine print specifying how to opt out from all of them (the culprit there is credit rating agencies selling your data). That might be CA specific? Anywho, if you jump through a few hoops you can opt out from that particular source of spam for life. > my email If you don't need to receive inbound connections from unknown sources (e.g., recruiters) then switch your email to whitelist mode and just allow your contacts. Otherwise, at least create a few accounts to compartmentalize that part of your life. Logins and promotions go into a bucket you never read unless you're expecting an auth code or something, and you can keep your personal email filtered to a whitelist. Depending on your skillset this can be much easier to manage and customize if you host it yourself. > my phone I have no practical advice here; nothing I've tried yet has an appropriate balance of usability and effectiveness. Whitelist solutions aren't as great because it's uncommon for one phone to support multiple numbers simultaneously, and voip solutions can have prohibitive drawbacks depending on your use habits. As a partial solution, Google's dialer (disclosure, noogler, but I liked this product before starting too) is decent at detecting spam if you're using a new enough version of Android that you can install it. It still clutters up your call history till you manually mark calls as spam, but in the moment if you're expecting a new number to call you can have high confidence that if Google hasn't marked it as likely spam that it's probably the call you're expecting. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_Order https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_Order
- raverbashing 6y agoUSPS should make bank by raise the price for marketing mail, it seems disproportionately cheap (p. 18 here https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/Notice123.pdf https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/Notice123.pdf )
- bshep 6y agoFor my phone Robokiller works well, spammers have pretty much given up on me. Used to get 1-2 calls/week, now i get maybe 1 a month or less.
- zo1 6y agoDon't forget web ads - I would classify them in the same set as the examples you pointed to. They basically "blast" content at you to convince you of something.
- katbyte 6y agoThis baffles me as a Canadian, I get maybe 1 spam call a month, no flyers, pihole blocks most ads, and gmail seems to filter out most email I don’t want to see. How come robocalls and junk mail are so much worse for you?
- refurb 6y agoReally? I gave family in Canada and they get a ton of random spam calls on their phone and a ton of spam email. I'll give you the lack of flyers though.
- Frost1x 6y agoFrom what I've read about the research here, there is something around 1% of the population that regularly answers and interacts with spam calls. Obviously, there's a lower rate for which portion of those follow through and result in a transfer of money. Apparently, the cost of robocalling is less that that fraction of 1% penetration rate. Since almost every aspect of America is about money anymore, that's why we have so much robo call spam: there's enough money to be made doing it by those who do it that it's economically viable for them... so they do it, everything else be damned. Note, this was about 6 years ago. I don't know if the current market is the same.
- sumtechguy 6y agoWatch a few Jim Browning vids on YT or some of the other scammbaiter calls and you will understand better. People are mailing these guys 20k in cash in fedex boxes. Then mules here in the US pick it up at an airbnb/hotel/whatever (they hang around and wait for the truck to show up and claim it), take it home take a small cut and wire the rest along up the chain. You get a couple of those and it pays the whole call center for a few months... They estimate the straight out scams are around 20 billion a year. The quasi 'legal' 'cold call' stuff is probably much higher. They are targeting older people who maybe let their spouse take everything and that spouse is dead.
- jjav 6y agoWith some numbers it is absolutely unbearable. I have a landline I've had for a very long time and it gets the infamous "extend car warranty" spam call about every other week. On my ~15 year old cell phone# I get that same call also about every other week on average. But last year I got a new phone with a new number.. wow! It is completely unusable as a phone. Relentless nonstop spam calls every hour as well as continuous SMS spam. I've had to mute everything and send everything straight to spam except for a couple known numbers that I allow through. Nobody except family will ever be able to call me on the new phone because there's no way to enable unknown calls on it without having it ring nonstop.
- saalweachter 6y agoPersonally I am most offended by the calls offering website and SEO services for the domain I purchased a decade ago without masking the registration, because I've professionally worked on (a) making a website, (b) search ranking and (c) SEO. It's the one call that makes me want to shout, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?", but since there is no reason anyone would know who I am, I'd just feel silly, and I'm not the sort of person who shouts into telephones anyway.
- MivLives 6y agoThis is terrible especially when you're applying for jobs. All calls from unknown numbers have to be answered because you never know who's calling you back.
- crazygringo 6y agoFortunately people calling from companies almost always leave a voice mail, while robocalls almost never do. Blocking rings doesn't block voice mails, right?
- issamehh 6y agoI almost always get voicemails from the robots. Often enough they don't actually say anything but they stay on the line long enough for it to happen. I just get an empty voicemail with static. Fills up my voicemail too so I have to go clear it
- Black101 6y ago> It’s not just robocalls, as it’s also spoofing numbers. I get a phone number that is outside of my area code so if I get a phone call from that area code, I know 99.999% that it is spam (and probably spoofed).
- flyinghamster 6y ago> I have received many phone calls from average joes who said they were returning a call from my number, but I had never called them. I've run into that, and don't get me started about phone companies being unwilling to insure Caller ID is accurate, even when they charge you for it. I'm looking at you, AT&T. The VoIP service I ported my landline out to costs less per month than what AT&T wanted just for Caller ID. > Everything in life has turned to spam. My physical mailbox, my email, and my phone is bombarded by spam and there’s practically nothing I can do about it. Also add your cell phone (if you run Android) and your desktop OS (if you run Windows 10). I host my own email, and block a number of TLDs on sight simply because they've been nothing but spam cannons. More and more, I find myself forgoing consumer tech products in general, or looking before I leap. Consumer routers suck, consumer NASes suck [0], I sure as hell don't want my heating system connected to the network in any way, nor my car. Smart lighting? Only if it doesn't depend on someone else's computer to function (so, IKEA for me, and even there I'm considering firewalling it so it doesn't auto-update). [0] Cross-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26800062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26800062
- enominezerum 6y agoprotip is to get an area code far away from where you live. If you get a call from that area code, chances are you can ignore it. If it is serious enough, they will leave a message. Butm regarding spam, yea, it is pretty bad. My HOA piles on by sending letter about "canning spam" with links to spam removal sites and such that I just trash because I am not trying to fight that war.
- briffle 6y agoI used to live in another state, just over a line for a different area code then where my work and friend were. I know nobody in the 920 area code, but I get about 4-5 calls a day from random numbers in that area code. Makes filtering much easier. Plus the Pixel's automatic screening of suspicious numbers is pretty awesome.
- miohtama 6y agoWhy does this problem manifests in the US only? The rest of the world is close to zero spam calls and texts.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoLarge, mostly homogeneous population that speaks a single language.
- psychlops 6y agoThat hasn't stopped my weekly robocall in chinese.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoIt still applies. Those are robo-calls, which means they reach a large number of people. Similar to the Nigerian Prince email scams, the scammers are depending on most people dismissing them as scams because the scammers don't want to waste their time with people who they have no chance of extracting money from. In this case, if you speak Chinese and you reply, the scammers have a high chance of scamming money from you—you're probably a new immigrant, either elderly or an exchange student, and unfamiliar with local laws and the English language. The same scam would never work in China.
- throwaway894345 6y agoThe more troubling problem to me is that my government (United States) will drag their feet on just about any issue that matters to ordinary people--spam, climate change, overfishing, healthcare, etc--provided at least one corporate lobby of virtually any size at all advocates for the problem. Using this spam case to illustrate, it's taken a decade of multiple daily spam calls to virtually every single American for the government to budge on this issue (and still no solution is even on the table for snail mail spam); how are we ever supposed to tackle issues that only really affect a subset of Americans (e.g., healthcare), or which affect us all but invisibly/intangibly (e.g., overfishing, climate change, etc)? If I had one policy wish it would be to completely eliminate corporate lobbying. Concerned citizens can lobby individually or in groups, but corporate donations, perks, etc to such people/groups would be tightly regulated with steep fines for trespassers.
- amelius 6y agoDemocracy should be more direct when it can be. A referendum with the question "do you want spam?" would quickly solve the problem.
- mc32 6y agoHmmm. They’ll redefine it like when someone in the admin said the old definition of infrastructure needs to be redefined in order to accommodate their goals. Likewise they would redefine what spam is if there were a referendum.
- cma 6y agoVerizon lobbied against govt stopping spam calls because they sold an anti spam service at high profit margin.
- DennisP 6y agoA friend of mine is working on a book, arguing that the root problem is public votes by members of Congress. Prior to 1970 or so, Congress used secret ballots. You could lobby them but you wouldn't know whether they voted your way. A new law changed that in the name of "transparency" and corporate donations and lobbying took off in a big way after that. We insist on secret ballots for individual voters so they can't sell their votes, but for our legislators whose individual votes are far more consequential, we've given up on it. In exchange, we get to see how they voted and "hold them accountable." But we can't do that nearly so effectively as corporate donors. Most of us don't look at voting records at all; our information mostly comes from attack ads taking votes out of context.
- DennisP 6y agoWhat's a bit amazing about physical mail spam is that the post office gives it a discount.
- hooande 6y agothe underlying problem is that spam of any format is very cheap. if just 1% of people respond, it pays for sending out all of the robocalls/texts/emails. it's very difficult to legislate against economics like that what we need are better spam filters for calls, texts and physical mail. allow people to pay to blacklist numbers that have a high probability of being spam. I'd imagine that "real" numbers get an average level of incoming calls, messages and push notifications that a spam number wouldn't it might also make sense to allow private or government white listing. ie, prove that your phone number belongs to a "real" person potentially by paying a one time application fee. with enough adoption, that could change the spam economic equation
- bkandel 6y agoFWIW I get almost no spam on my email at all these days. I use disposable addresses (via Yahoo) for all stores and aggressively filter emails from listservs and stores, but after that I get next to no spam. What spam I do get is picked up nearly perfectly by Gmail's spam filter. Agreed about phone spam though, it's pretty terrible.
- devchix 6y agoEven your email? I feel like in this one domain, we have pretty much won the war against spam. Gmail does a great job of spam filtering, and I expend some effort to guard my email address against 1) other people's mistakes, and 2) real spam. Wrong/spammy things that come to me get an unsubscribe or a Gmail filter, or right into the spam bucket. Have you looked inside your spam folder lately? My God!! The only thing people want to sell is money and sex. I'm annoyed by McDonald's France, someone who presumably lives in France made a mistake and subscribed my email to their list, and when I tried unsubscribing using their link, I get a "you're not in our geographical service area" nonsense, so I can't unsubscribe truly. Right into the trash filter they go. On my shitlist are all companies that allow subscription or signup w/o an email verification. My phone is on answer-only-if-known. It makes me hard to find, true, but I like it that way. If someone really needs to find me, they will. Dentist, contractors, recruiters, applies to all. My mailbox is next to the paper recycling bin. Garbage gets sorted in there immediately. It hurts me to see resources get wasted this way, and I wish the USPS would raise the price for this garbage. I've read somewhere that first class mail subsidizes junk mail, I don't know if that's true. I'm all for the USPS making tons of money off commercial mailers. Do you ever see junk delivered by UPS/FedEx? Even one bulky envelope? Never!
- psychlops 6y agoI see Gmail as one part of Google. It's hides the ads from one part and displays them elsewhere. I minimize my contribution to the whole process whenever possible. My spamassassin filter doesn't have a junk mail folder, it all goes to /dev/null. The USPS is the source of your snail mail spam, not the solution.