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FCC plans to rein in “gateway” carriers that bring foreign robocalls to US

231 points by eysquared 5y ago

mmmeff 5y ago
But how will I continue to be notified of my expired car warranties?!
- i_like_apis 5y ago
  I got 7 "final notice warnings" on my expiring warranty just yesterday.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    There was a period of a week or two when I was "one of two daily winners" every day. I should have been in Vegas...
- Forge36 5y ago
  Good news! I have an opportunity for you.
- Taniwha 5y ago
  You still can .... but you can reliably block them
- duxup 5y ago
  The FBI and CIA are after me ... but for some reason can't find me. But they did know where to mail my checks.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  What about the legal enforcement actions from the social security agency?
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  What about all the car accidents that weren’t my fault I’ve apparently been involved with (yet apparently caused me total amnesia of the event)?
vmception 5y ago
I wish my phone or carrier would allow me to batch block phone numbers, and auto update with a shared list, just like I do with adblock. Although I understand that spammers can call with non-spammers numbers, I think that's tolerable because I don't know those people and likely never will!
- duskwuff 5y ago
  The vast majority of spam phone calls are made with false Caller ID information. Blocking these calls based on their Caller ID would at best be useless, as spammers can easily change what false Caller ID they're using, and would risk blocking legitimate calls from the real owners of those numbers. The obvious comparison is spam email. Nobody seriously recommends using "From" headers to block spammers. Caller ID is effectively the same thing, but for phone calls.
  - Taniwha 5y ago
    A large point of STIR/SHAKEN is that caller ID is now signed and shouldn't be able to be forged - STIR/SHAKEN is being rolled out across the US now the FCC is requiring foreign carriers who want to connect to the US to do the same Effectively the "from headers" will no longer be able to be forged
    - MiddleEndian 5y ago
      Just let me block foreign carriers entirely. I have some friends and family outside of the US, but we communicate on non-telephone platforms.
  - scotu 5y ago
    does somebody know why the hell caller id spoofing is a thing though? It must have served a purpose at some point, otherwise we could just fix it, right? I'm befuddled by the fact that we just don't make caller ids not spoofable... I cannot browse the web without leaving all the personal information ever imagined about me, but a phone call? Impossible to trace back, but please, report it on donotcall.gov thanks.
belval 5y ago
I find it astonishing that robocalls are still an issue in 2021, especially those coming from abroad. How can it be that hard to force authentication to use the phone network and permanently block malicious carriers?
- TheJoeMan 5y ago
  I cannot attest as an expert, but I learned something about your phone carrier would actually be punished by the FCC for not connecting the call of a scammer. It’s possible your carrier knows it’s fishy but has to let it through due to large government getting in it’s own way.
  - cma 5y ago
    Any source on this? I heard carriers let them through because their spam call filtering service was a cash cow (i.e. they didn't have to let them through, otherwise no anti spam service could exist from them, they maybe did have to by default, but could have offered the service free with opt-in and advertised it). https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls...
    - paulmd 5y ago
      guessing he's thinking about human-assisted text-to-voice services for disability, where there is indeed a requirement that your text be read aloud unaltered and thus they cannot warn you even if it is obviously a scam
- _jal 5y ago
  > How can it be that hard to force authentication Without partitioning world telephone connectivity? Easily. > and permanently block malicious carriers? By any reasonable definition involving unwanted traffic, ATT is a malicious carrier. Do you see the problem?
  - belval 5y ago
morpheuskafka 5y ago
> "apply STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication to, and perform robocall mitigation on, all foreign-originated calls with US numbers," This won't affect anything that is actually a foreign number (which wouldn't be used for robocalls anyway as people wouldn't answer it, with the exception of some Caribbean countries that have three digit area codes instead of the typical +CC format). It will just block foreign phone companies from pretending to have US phone numbers, which seems like it should have been done long ago.
- ridaj 5y ago
  > It will just block foreign phone companies from pretending to have US phone numbers, which seems like it should have been done long ago. That sounds potentially useful for legitimate business process outsourcing.
  - denkmoon 5y ago
    in which case they can properly identify themselves as a legitimate user of that US phone number? I'm not familiar with the STIR/SHAKEN stuff but surely it is possible to delegate authority to use a number.
  - morpheuskafka 5y ago
    I guess I assumed that the call center would just send the voice packets to over IP and a US carrier would actually introduce them onto the PTSN network. Do the foreign carriers actually own the US call center numbers themselves?
    - ridaj 5y ago
      Sure but then if they can do it a robocaller can do it?
      - rendaw 5y ago
        It would require some entity in the US to provide a number for them, and that entity could be held accountable... I think.
gregmac 5y ago
How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore? Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made). It's really rare I even get a call from someone in my contact list - even for something "urgent" most people just send a text ("call me - urgent!" is serious). Anything for work is scheduled, and even then it's been years since it was anything but zoom/teams/etc. Part of this I think is a shift in the way people operate with technology: texting is faster and better than voicemail. Slack, zoom, etc dominate workplaces. Part is it's been ruined by spam. I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you. Had the PSTN not existed and you were to try to launch "Telephone" as an app today, it would almost certainly fail. "You get a unique 10 digit number and if anyone types it in, it makes your device ring loudly, 24/7, no matter what else you're doing, and you're instantly placed in a two-way audio call with them!"
- irrational 5y ago
  The one problem with this is we still have a landline. All the time people will complain that we didn’t answer their text. They don’t seem to know how to respond when told it can’t receive texts. Then they promptly forget because the same people try texting us over and over again. I wish there was some way a number that can’t receive texts could immediately respond and let them know.
  - PKop 5y ago
    Why don't you get rid of the landline and give these people your cell phone number?
    - irrational 5y ago
      How does that solve the problem? Landlines will still continue to exist and people will still mistakenly believe they can receive texts. It seems like a doable solution to have non-mobile numbers auto return a message that it cannot receive text messages. Where do the text messages to landlines go? Into a black hole? I assume there is a service that at some point realized that the number cannot receive a text message and sends it to dev/nul. Instead, why can't that service ping back?
stefan_ 5y ago
I love that since the invention of the telephone the FCC has tried to "rein in" robocalls and failed at every step. Is there a more inept government agency? How many years of failure has it been, has no one ever told them it goes on since carriers profit from it? This is the agency that wants to regulate internet providers and they can't fix robocalls. It's an embarrassment, because we could use some of the former.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Not only that, this should be one of the most bipartisan causes for lawmakers to rally around.
- acdha 5y ago
  It’s not ineptitude but limited power: the major phone companies profit from spam and they’ve made it clear to their Congress members that they don’t want action – and the previous guy was famously a fan of any approach which involved hoping that they really meant it this time. Note also that this is not terribly different than email spam: Gmail is a bit better but they also have major false positive problems so to me this looks an awful lot like what happens when you have a smart adversary and limited will to change the system.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    > the major phone companies profit from spam Back in the day, but I assume most people have essentially unlimited voice and texts, so is this still the case?
    - nikanj 5y ago
      Yes. Look up termination fees: a carrier gets paid for every call that their customer answers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_rates
- paulv 5y ago
  FWIW, there was a multi-year period, just after the do not call list went in to effect, where the amount of spam phone calls I got dropped to zero.
i_like_apis 5y ago
For those that missed it there was a great article this morning that got smothered by the FB outage news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745121 About "scambaiters"; people who make entertainment out of scamming the scammers.
jordemort 5y ago
My strategy with robocalls has been to answer every single one of them if I am able, get a person on the line, and then waste as much of their time as possible while being extremely weird. I'm down to one every week or two now. Everyone needs a hobby.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Great until you realize some of them may later use your voice to create a voice profile and then blackmail you.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Are there documented cases of this happening?
    - thechao 5y ago
      My brother had a stressful afternoon in court a bit more than a decade ago with the same “yes” obviously spliced into a recording. The judge was pretty humored by the recording and kept asking the plaintiff (the scammer) to play it over & over again. After a while the plaintiff’s attorney left. This was a one-off scuzzball. However, to this day, myself, and all my acquaintances answer the question “Is this thechao?” with a “this is he/she”.
  - jordemort 5y ago
    Oh, I always do a funny voice. That's the best part!
- nikanj 5y ago
  This assumes 1) The scammers talk to other scammers buying the same list of phone numbers 2) The scammers bother to clean up the list of people to call. I keep getting the same "You have received a parcel in the mail that contains illegal drugs" call many times a day, talk to an "officer" every time, and they keep calling me again. Either there are multiple gangs running the same scam (including the same tape), or they just don't care that this mark has already been called a few times with little luck.
avsteele 5y ago
Though STIR/SHAKEN is now common on the IP networks of large phone companies, carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers still have until June 30, 2023, to deploy the technology. So... the major carrier already have this, and its still making no difference? Is this rule going to fix the situation when applied to smaller entities or not? The entire situation is such an utter failure of the FCC. Literally millions of people can no longer answer their phone, and its been this way for years.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  Perhaps they need to give us all the hops, and let us block calls based on that. I'd just filter out anything that has any non-US hops, that should eliminate most if not all of it.
- nikanj 5y ago
  STIR/SHAKEN reduced the number of spam calls originating from the US from zero to zero.
adrr 5y ago
Just make the gateways liable for any spam calls that they originate. It works in the credit card industry by holding the processors accountable so they have to vet all the merchants.
webinvest 5y ago
These spammers often spoof the phone numbers of people with the same 3 digit prefix as you in hopes that you’ll be more likely to pick up. I even get calls from people saying they got a missed call from me when I never called them. People shouldn’t be able to spoof outgoing phone numbers. It’s messed up.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- NickNameNick 5y ago
  I still think the carriers should just reject calls with obviously fraudulent caller-ids. Call coming from an external interface, but presenting an id owned by the carrier? Reject the connection. And tag the network partner for follow-up investigation.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    You just killed number portability when switching carriers.
    - diggernet 5y ago
      Number portability just means that the owner of the number can change. When an ownership change happens, the new owner knows they are the current owner, and can reject calls entering their network claiming to come from that number. Likewise, the former owner knows they no longer own it, and can accept calls from it.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Then we got nothing because it isn't hard to find a number from a different network to spoof.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >I still think the carriers should just reject calls with obviously fraudulent caller-ids. An excellent idea. In fact, that's exactly what the technology discussed (STIR/SHAKEN) in TFA is designed to enable.
encryptluks2 5y ago
I'll believe it when I see it. Seriously, just label robocallers terrorist already. Offer rewards to people willing to turn in the hedge honchos. Sanction the countries that refuse to prosecute them.
- speedybird 5y ago
  Drop a Hellfire R9X on the executives of any foreign carrier that allows their customers to spoof American residential phone numbers.
nikanj 5y ago
I'd pay extra for my carrier to just flat out block all phone calls not originating from a major domestic operator.
londons_explore 5y ago
This action seems too late to save the public telephone network. The usefulness of the network has already fallen below the threshold needed to be self sustaining for person to person communication, much like email has too. Both are now used mostly for person to organisation communication, and that too will fade in the coming decade.
Animats 5y ago
They didn't think of that for the first implementation round?
digitalpacman 5y ago
fucking please
nkssy 5y ago
I answer and make calls on a frequent basis. People expect me to be able to do both. Its not actually weird or old fashioned. That said, there are a few caveats. Unknown callers? I'd better have an appointment with you at that time. Otherwise off to voicemail with you! Junk calls? Spam calls? I'm on various lists. Some of thise lists have teeth. Others not so much. Either way, you'll end up on my list and you'll vanish from my future.
viraptor 5y ago
I find it weird that it's STIR/SHAKEN that's constantly being mentioned. It won't actually change anything apart from people getting a more accurate source displayed. The part that actually changes something is this: > When the FCC notifies a gateway provider about an ongoing robocall campaign, the provider would have to [...] and "promptly block all traffic associated with the traffic pattern identified in that notice." That's all that was needed for years. Make it the telco's problem to either point the finger at the next peer responsible, or block their customer. We didn't actually need the caller authentication for this - you can identify and flag calls without it. I'm happy this rule is coming, but I wish that was done earlier before the effort of fixing the callerid.
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  Why won't it change things? My team was responsible for implementing STIR/SHAKEN at a large Telco. Customers could, in the future, block calls for which the number is inaccurate (B/C attestation). If you get a call from a number, you should be able to know the number owner actually made the call. Then, robocall laws could be enforced, since you can actually find the responsible party from the number that dialed you.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    > block calls for which the number is inaccurate Numbers are relatively cheap. The scams will just get a bit more expensive to run, but getting a block of thousands of provably-correct numbers is trivial. Especially if you're going to return them in a month after they're burned for spam purposes.
dredmorbius 5y ago
If PSTN (public-switched telephone networks, a/k/a direct-dialed general telephony) doesn't get its act together very soon, my sense is that it will cease to be a viable communications channel simply because so many people will have abandoned it, and quite possibly sooner than anticipated. The disruption to general communications will be huge for people, businesses, governments, emergency providers, and others. I'm not referring merely to landline phones, but any predominantly voice-based communications system in which any user anywhere can presume to reach any other person without some additional requirement. I've asked this question a few times --- asking when people think PSTD might die, in 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32+ years. Results are of course nonscientific, though interesting, and have varied widely. (My pessimism isn't especially widely shared.) I did discover a while back though that telephone engineers share the same concern and for largely the same reasons: [S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-robocalls-with-stir-shaken.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-rob... When the telephone was first introduced, and as it expanded through the 1950s and 60s, it was, as Facebook in the aughts, an aspirational instrument. Truman beat Dewey, but pollsters, relying on wealthy- and Republican-skewed polling, got the race wrong. Service was expensive, long distance was insanely expensive. There was little automation, and if someone was calling, odds were quite good that you really wanted to talk to them. What killed the phone is the same thing that killed email, Usenet, and is killing the Web: it got too cheap. Good for those with legitmate business, but unfortunately, a far larger improvement to those with illegitimate business. Penny-ante schemes become viable when launched at scale and from low-overhead locations. A couple of instances of the poll (and discussions), here: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102357651020681668 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102357651020681668 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106869063626188801 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106869063626188801 For anyone keeping tabs on my accuracy, I'd suggested on 17 July 2019 that death of PSTN telephony was <5 years away. That's looking somewhat overambitious from here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20373645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20373645
Taniwha 5y ago
We have an Asterisk exchange at home, it supports a US number and a NZ number - we get maybe one spam call a year from either number ..... Why? .... because the home exchange answers every call and asks for a 1 digit extension number - that's enough to put off all those robo calls, the machines that call ahead for them treat this as an answering machine and move on. Back when the kids were still at home everyone had a 1 digit extension (and VM box), calls would ring in kids' bedrooms and then in the common space, everyone had their own ring cadence - my daughter got 90% of the phone calls so I gave her the short ring, we never had to answer the phone for her
dathinab 5y ago
How does it come that while the US is swamped with robocalls in many other countries (e.g. Germany) this is not just not a problem, it's complete unheard of.
- taejo 5y ago
  One factor is simply that there are many more people who speak English than German in the world, and the same is true among the fraction of people who operate scams. But I'd imagine there are also some regulatory factors that make a difference.
alecthomas 5y ago
I'm surprised some enterprising lawyer hasn't initiated a class action lawsuit against the telco's on behalf of those who have been scammed as a result of their inaction.

231 points by eysquared 5y ago

mmmeff 5y ago

But how will I continue to be notified of my expired car warranties?!

i_like_apis 5y ago
I got 7 "final notice warnings" on my expiring warranty just yesterday.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  There was a period of a week or two when I was "one of two daily winners" every day. I should have been in Vegas...
Forge36 5y ago
Good news! I have an opportunity for you.
Taniwha 5y ago
You still can .... but you can reliably block them
duxup 5y ago
The FBI and CIA are after me ... but for some reason can't find me. But they did know where to mail my checks.
encryptluks2 5y ago
What about the legal enforcement actions from the social security agency?
BoxOfRain 5y ago
What about all the car accidents that weren’t my fault I’ve apparently been involved with (yet apparently caused me total amnesia of the event)?

vmception 5y ago

I wish my phone or carrier would allow me to batch block phone numbers, and auto update with a shared list, just like I do with adblock. Although I understand that spammers can call with non-spammers numbers, I think that's tolerable because I don't know those people and likely never will!

duskwuff 5y ago
The vast majority of spam phone calls are made with false Caller ID information. Blocking these calls based on their Caller ID would at best be useless, as spammers can easily change what false Caller ID they're using, and would risk blocking legitimate calls from the real owners of those numbers. The obvious comparison is spam email. Nobody seriously recommends using "From" headers to block spammers. Caller ID is effectively the same thing, but for phone calls.
- Taniwha 5y ago
  A large point of STIR/SHAKEN is that caller ID is now signed and shouldn't be able to be forged - STIR/SHAKEN is being rolled out across the US now the FCC is requiring foreign carriers who want to connect to the US to do the same Effectively the "from headers" will no longer be able to be forged
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    Just let me block foreign carriers entirely. I have some friends and family outside of the US, but we communicate on non-telephone platforms.
- scotu 5y ago
  does somebody know why the hell caller id spoofing is a thing though? It must have served a purpose at some point, otherwise we could just fix it, right? I'm befuddled by the fact that we just don't make caller ids not spoofable... I cannot browse the web without leaving all the personal information ever imagined about me, but a phone call? Impossible to trace back, but please, report it on donotcall.gov thanks.

belval 5y ago

I find it astonishing that robocalls are still an issue in 2021, especially those coming from abroad. How can it be that hard to force authentication to use the phone network and permanently block malicious carriers?

TheJoeMan 5y ago
I cannot attest as an expert, but I learned something about your phone carrier would actually be punished by the FCC for not connecting the call of a scammer. It’s possible your carrier knows it’s fishy but has to let it through due to large government getting in it’s own way.
- cma 5y ago
  Any source on this? I heard carriers let them through because their spam call filtering service was a cash cow (i.e. they didn't have to let them through, otherwise no anti spam service could exist from them, they maybe did have to by default, but could have offered the service free with opt-in and advertised it). https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls...
  - paulmd 5y ago
    guessing he's thinking about human-assisted text-to-voice services for disability, where there is indeed a requirement that your text be read aloud unaltered and thus they cannot warn you even if it is obviously a scam
_jal 5y ago
> How can it be that hard to force authentication Without partitioning world telephone connectivity? Easily. > and permanently block malicious carriers? By any reasonable definition involving unwanted traffic, ATT is a malicious carrier. Do you see the problem?
- belval 5y ago

morpheuskafka 5y ago

> "apply STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication to, and perform robocall mitigation on, all foreign-originated calls with US numbers," This won't affect anything that is actually a foreign number (which wouldn't be used for robocalls anyway as people wouldn't answer it, with the exception of some Caribbean countries that have three digit area codes instead of the typical +CC format). It will just block foreign phone companies from pretending to have US phone numbers, which seems like it should have been done long ago.

ridaj 5y ago
> It will just block foreign phone companies from pretending to have US phone numbers, which seems like it should have been done long ago. That sounds potentially useful for legitimate business process outsourcing.
- denkmoon 5y ago
  in which case they can properly identify themselves as a legitimate user of that US phone number? I'm not familiar with the STIR/SHAKEN stuff but surely it is possible to delegate authority to use a number.
- morpheuskafka 5y ago
  I guess I assumed that the call center would just send the voice packets to over IP and a US carrier would actually introduce them onto the PTSN network. Do the foreign carriers actually own the US call center numbers themselves?
  - ridaj 5y ago
    Sure but then if they can do it a robocaller can do it?
    - rendaw 5y ago
      It would require some entity in the US to provide a number for them, and that entity could be held accountable... I think.

gregmac 5y ago

How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore? Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made). It's really rare I even get a call from someone in my contact list - even for something "urgent" most people just send a text ("call me - urgent!" is serious). Anything for work is scheduled, and even then it's been years since it was anything but zoom/teams/etc. Part of this I think is a shift in the way people operate with technology: texting is faster and better than voicemail. Slack, zoom, etc dominate workplaces. Part is it's been ruined by spam. I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you. Had the PSTN not existed and you were to try to launch "Telephone" as an app today, it would almost certainly fail. "You get a unique 10 digit number and if anyone types it in, it makes your device ring loudly, 24/7, no matter what else you're doing, and you're instantly placed in a two-way audio call with them!"

irrational 5y ago
The one problem with this is we still have a landline. All the time people will complain that we didn’t answer their text. They don’t seem to know how to respond when told it can’t receive texts. Then they promptly forget because the same people try texting us over and over again. I wish there was some way a number that can’t receive texts could immediately respond and let them know.
- PKop 5y ago
  Why don't you get rid of the landline and give these people your cell phone number?
  - irrational 5y ago
    How does that solve the problem? Landlines will still continue to exist and people will still mistakenly believe they can receive texts. It seems like a doable solution to have non-mobile numbers auto return a message that it cannot receive text messages. Where do the text messages to landlines go? Into a black hole? I assume there is a service that at some point realized that the number cannot receive a text message and sends it to dev/nul. Instead, why can't that service ping back?

stefan_ 5y ago

I love that since the invention of the telephone the FCC has tried to "rein in" robocalls and failed at every step. Is there a more inept government agency? How many years of failure has it been, has no one ever told them it goes on since carriers profit from it? This is the agency that wants to regulate internet providers and they can't fix robocalls. It's an embarrassment, because we could use some of the former.

dehrmann 5y ago
Not only that, this should be one of the most bipartisan causes for lawmakers to rally around.
acdha 5y ago
It’s not ineptitude but limited power: the major phone companies profit from spam and they’ve made it clear to their Congress members that they don’t want action – and the previous guy was famously a fan of any approach which involved hoping that they really meant it this time. Note also that this is not terribly different than email spam: Gmail is a bit better but they also have major false positive problems so to me this looks an awful lot like what happens when you have a smart adversary and limited will to change the system.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > the major phone companies profit from spam Back in the day, but I assume most people have essentially unlimited voice and texts, so is this still the case?
  - nikanj 5y ago
    Yes. Look up termination fees: a carrier gets paid for every call that their customer answers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_rates
paulv 5y ago
FWIW, there was a multi-year period, just after the do not call list went in to effect, where the amount of spam phone calls I got dropped to zero.

i_like_apis 5y ago

For those that missed it there was a great article this morning that got smothered by the FB outage news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745121 About "scambaiters"; people who make entertainment out of scamming the scammers.

jordemort 5y ago

My strategy with robocalls has been to answer every single one of them if I am able, get a person on the line, and then waste as much of their time as possible while being extremely weird. I'm down to one every week or two now. Everyone needs a hobby.

encryptluks2 5y ago
Great until you realize some of them may later use your voice to create a voice profile and then blackmail you.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Are there documented cases of this happening?
  - thechao 5y ago
    My brother had a stressful afternoon in court a bit more than a decade ago with the same “yes” obviously spliced into a recording. The judge was pretty humored by the recording and kept asking the plaintiff (the scammer) to play it over & over again. After a while the plaintiff’s attorney left. This was a one-off scuzzball. However, to this day, myself, and all my acquaintances answer the question “Is this thechao?” with a “this is he/she”.
- jordemort 5y ago
  Oh, I always do a funny voice. That's the best part!
nikanj 5y ago
This assumes 1) The scammers talk to other scammers buying the same list of phone numbers 2) The scammers bother to clean up the list of people to call. I keep getting the same "You have received a parcel in the mail that contains illegal drugs" call many times a day, talk to an "officer" every time, and they keep calling me again. Either there are multiple gangs running the same scam (including the same tape), or they just don't care that this mark has already been called a few times with little luck.

avsteele 5y ago

Though STIR/SHAKEN is now common on the IP networks of large phone companies, carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers still have until June 30, 2023, to deploy the technology. So... the major carrier already have this, and its still making no difference? Is this rule going to fix the situation when applied to smaller entities or not? The entire situation is such an utter failure of the FCC. Literally millions of people can no longer answer their phone, and its been this way for years.

MiddleEndian 5y ago
Perhaps they need to give us all the hops, and let us block calls based on that. I'd just filter out anything that has any non-US hops, that should eliminate most if not all of it.
nikanj 5y ago
STIR/SHAKEN reduced the number of spam calls originating from the US from zero to zero.

adrr 5y ago

Just make the gateways liable for any spam calls that they originate. It works in the credit card industry by holding the processors accountable so they have to vet all the merchants.

webinvest 5y ago

These spammers often spoof the phone numbers of people with the same 3 digit prefix as you in hopes that you’ll be more likely to pick up. I even get calls from people saying they got a missed call from me when I never called them. People shouldn’t be able to spoof outgoing phone numbers. It’s messed up.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
NickNameNick 5y ago
I still think the carriers should just reject calls with obviously fraudulent caller-ids. Call coming from an external interface, but presenting an id owned by the carrier? Reject the connection. And tag the network partner for follow-up investigation.
- bluGill 5y ago
  You just killed number portability when switching carriers.
  - diggernet 5y ago
    Number portability just means that the owner of the number can change. When an ownership change happens, the new owner knows they are the current owner, and can reject calls entering their network claiming to come from that number. Likewise, the former owner knows they no longer own it, and can accept calls from it.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Then we got nothing because it isn't hard to find a number from a different network to spoof.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >I still think the carriers should just reject calls with obviously fraudulent caller-ids. An excellent idea. In fact, that's exactly what the technology discussed (STIR/SHAKEN) in TFA is designed to enable.

encryptluks2 5y ago

I'll believe it when I see it. Seriously, just label robocallers terrorist already. Offer rewards to people willing to turn in the hedge honchos. Sanction the countries that refuse to prosecute them.

speedybird 5y ago
Drop a Hellfire R9X on the executives of any foreign carrier that allows their customers to spoof American residential phone numbers.

nikanj 5y ago

I'd pay extra for my carrier to just flat out block all phone calls not originating from a major domestic operator.

londons_explore 5y ago

This action seems too late to save the public telephone network. The usefulness of the network has already fallen below the threshold needed to be self sustaining for person to person communication, much like email has too. Both are now used mostly for person to organisation communication, and that too will fade in the coming decade.

Animats 5y ago

They didn't think of that for the first implementation round?

digitalpacman 5y ago

fucking please

nkssy 5y ago

I answer and make calls on a frequent basis. People expect me to be able to do both. Its not actually weird or old fashioned. That said, there are a few caveats. Unknown callers? I'd better have an appointment with you at that time. Otherwise off to voicemail with you! Junk calls? Spam calls? I'm on various lists. Some of thise lists have teeth. Others not so much. Either way, you'll end up on my list and you'll vanish from my future.

viraptor 5y ago

I find it weird that it's STIR/SHAKEN that's constantly being mentioned. It won't actually change anything apart from people getting a more accurate source displayed. The part that actually changes something is this: > When the FCC notifies a gateway provider about an ongoing robocall campaign, the provider would have to [...] and "promptly block all traffic associated with the traffic pattern identified in that notice." That's all that was needed for years. Make it the telco's problem to either point the finger at the next peer responsible, or block their customer. We didn't actually need the caller authentication for this - you can identify and flag calls without it. I'm happy this rule is coming, but I wish that was done earlier before the effort of fixing the callerid.

yellow_lead 5y ago
Why won't it change things? My team was responsible for implementing STIR/SHAKEN at a large Telco. Customers could, in the future, block calls for which the number is inaccurate (B/C attestation). If you get a call from a number, you should be able to know the number owner actually made the call. Then, robocall laws could be enforced, since you can actually find the responsible party from the number that dialed you.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > block calls for which the number is inaccurate Numbers are relatively cheap. The scams will just get a bit more expensive to run, but getting a block of thousands of provably-correct numbers is trivial. Especially if you're going to return them in a month after they're burned for spam purposes.

dredmorbius 5y ago

If PSTN (public-switched telephone networks, a/k/a direct-dialed general telephony) doesn't get its act together very soon, my sense is that it will cease to be a viable communications channel simply because so many people will have abandoned it, and quite possibly sooner than anticipated. The disruption to general communications will be huge for people, businesses, governments, emergency providers, and others. I'm not referring merely to landline phones, but any predominantly voice-based communications system in which any user anywhere can presume to reach any other person without some additional requirement. I've asked this question a few times --- asking when people think PSTD might die, in 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32+ years. Results are of course nonscientific, though interesting, and have varied widely. (My pessimism isn't especially widely shared.) I did discover a while back though that telephone engineers share the same concern and for largely the same reasons: [S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-robocalls-with-stir-shaken.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-rob... When the telephone was first introduced, and as it expanded through the 1950s and 60s, it was, as Facebook in the aughts, an aspirational instrument. Truman beat Dewey, but pollsters, relying on wealthy- and Republican-skewed polling, got the race wrong. Service was expensive, long distance was insanely expensive. There was little automation, and if someone was calling, odds were quite good that you really wanted to talk to them. What killed the phone is the same thing that killed email, Usenet, and is killing the Web: it got too cheap. Good for those with legitmate business, but unfortunately, a far larger improvement to those with illegitimate business. Penny-ante schemes become viable when launched at scale and from low-overhead locations. A couple of instances of the poll (and discussions), here: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102357651020681668 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102357651020681668 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106869063626188801 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106869063626188801 For anyone keeping tabs on my accuracy, I'd suggested on 17 July 2019 that death of PSTN telephony was <5 years away. That's looking somewhat overambitious from here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20373645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20373645

Taniwha 5y ago

We have an Asterisk exchange at home, it supports a US number and a NZ number - we get maybe one spam call a year from either number ..... Why? .... because the home exchange answers every call and asks for a 1 digit extension number - that's enough to put off all those robo calls, the machines that call ahead for them treat this as an answering machine and move on. Back when the kids were still at home everyone had a 1 digit extension (and VM box), calls would ring in kids' bedrooms and then in the common space, everyone had their own ring cadence - my daughter got 90% of the phone calls so I gave her the short ring, we never had to answer the phone for her

dathinab 5y ago

How does it come that while the US is swamped with robocalls in many other countries (e.g. Germany) this is not just not a problem, it's complete unheard of.

taejo 5y ago
One factor is simply that there are many more people who speak English than German in the world, and the same is true among the fraction of people who operate scams. But I'd imagine there are also some regulatory factors that make a difference.

alecthomas 5y ago

I'm surprised some enterprising lawyer hasn't initiated a class action lawsuit against the telco's on behalf of those who have been scammed as a result of their inaction.