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Americans are drowning in spam

• afurculita 4y ago
  Elon should buy the US telecom companies and make their spam algorithm open source.
• doe88 4y ago
  What's the worst, are companies that behave as if they were above spam, e.g. Google (but far from being the sole offender) who send mail spam (e.g. every term of service update for a given product) without even providing a link to unsuscribe from these mails.
• devteambravo 4y ago
  Can confirm, my phone is essentially DDoSed by spam.
  • encryptluks2 4y ago
    That should be considered terrorism and the people spamming should be treated like terrorist and their countries sanctioned accordingly.
• parkingrift 4y ago
  Spam calls and texts have basically ruined the “phone” aspect of my iPhone. I now have my phone set to auto ignore anyone who is not in my contacts list. For SMS I enabled the filtered view so I only see messages from contacts. The end result is that the spam is mostly hidden away, but it’s still there. Full of garbage. I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.
  • warmwaffles 4y ago
    I wish I could do this, but I do field calls from people not in my contact list often.
    • giarc 4y ago
      My provider has 'Call Control'. If you call, it has a short prompt that says "This user has call control enabled, please enter <<some random digit>> to be connected." It ensures that only humans get through. However I have noticed some calls get through so I wonder if bots have already developed tech to listen to the message and enter the number. Wouldn't be hard I suspect.
  • geerlingguy 4y ago
    Ditto, but regarding email, it's surprisingly bad on some providers.
  • jetbalsa 4y ago
    It got so bad on my main emails, I just made a new one, started out with a custom domain and going to start doing per-website emails from now on to track where the hell its coming from
    • prepend 4y ago
      I’ve been doing this for a few years and find that the per website emails aren’t so bad and it’s whenever I use my old “legacy” emails that I’ve had with gmail for ages that gets the spam directed to it.
    • wlesieutre 4y ago
      Any good email services that offer unlimited aliases on custom domains at a reasonable price, or are you running that yourself?
      • drexlspivey 4y ago
        You can use a catchall, no need to set an alias for each address. Fastmail is very often recommended around here
        • wlesieutre 4y ago
          Does that not get you a bunch of extra spam that's been blasted at made up addresses?
          • ta988 4y ago
            I have my custom server for that. Yes it happens, the occasional mail on root@ etc but that's negligible compared to normal level of spam.
      • AhtiK 4y ago
        you can just add +myalias to most email services and get it delivered automatically. E.g. first.second+github@gmail.com delivers to firstsecond@gmail.com
  • carbocation 4y ago
    Same here but one aspect where MacOS is behind iOS is in Message filtering: there is no “filtered” setting for Messages on MacOS.
  • prepend 4y ago
    Same for me. I’ve missed some important calls from random numbers and it’s frustrating. There’s even a group of spammers that call twice back to back, I think to get around the setting that allows double calls to come through. My iPhone helps a bit in that it will ring if I’ve ever called that number before. It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages since calls can be easily falsified. I’m looking forward to the day that Apple will know if a device is actually originating the call and pass that info to me. I trust Apple more than any other org to actually care about eliminating spam calls. Sad state of affairs.
    • WorldMaker 4y ago
      > It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages Most of my iMessage spam seems to be from fly-by-night Apple accounts (often setup with @gmail.com and @outlook.com email addresses). It surprises me that Apple seems to make it really difficult to report these as spam accounts (it's like five taps in iMessages to even find the right profile page to do so) and at this point because I get so many of them I've gotten to just deleting the threads rather than reporting them as spam because it is too many steps to report and the spammers are just cycling through random email addresses anyway so you never see more than one message from the same "Apple account".
  • twobitshifter 4y ago
    Be careful using the silence unknown callers setting in iOS. I had an interview set up and the call silently went to voicemail. They had called through some Google service so calling back didn’t work.
    • muttled 4y ago
      I wish there was a setting to turn the silence unknown callers feature off for x hours. As it stands, I'll manually toggle it during periods where I know I might get an unknown call I actually want to answer. Leaving it on 99% of the time has dropped my spam calls significantly.
      • vmception 4y ago
        You can set the focus modes to do exactly that, but for all calls
    • willis936 4y ago
      I nearly missed a "next steps" call from a recruiter recently because of this. The solution to me seems clear: use video/voip apps for everything and ditch the phone number. I don't know how to reach that critical mass. It feels like we should already be there with zoom and teams, but apparently not.
    • chrisfinazzo 4y ago
      The only way I've found to get around this is to either temporarily disable the setting if I am expecting a particular call or make sure that I have contact info for every single person I interact with during these exchanges. Even if I know where the call is coming from, your experience shows it is still possible to mess up because you can't possibly account for all the kinds of weird phone systems people might be using.
    • MiddleEndian 4y ago
      I always keep my phone on if I'm interviewing (or dealing with mortgage or govt bullshit) because you have to answer unknown calls regularly. I also turn it on if I'm expecting to sync up with someone specific. But otherwise, I leave my phone on silent and have it set not to notify me about voicemails. My friends and family know how to reach me.
  • II2II 4y ago
    This is the main problem with spam: it is reducing the effectiveness of our communications systems. It doesn't matter whether we disregard a legitimate call/text since we do not know its source or whether legitimate calls/texts are blocked so we never see them (or even if we miss a call/text since it is buried in illegitimate ones).
    • encryptluks2 4y ago
      Sounds like terrorism yet it is treated like petty white collar crime.
      • rattlesnakedave 4y ago
        Entire call centers are setup in certain countries to prey on the elderly in the West (particularly the US). This should absolutely be treated more seriously than it is. Probably not terrorism, but whatever is between that and elder abuse.
        • saltminer 4y ago
          A couple years ago, I got people returning calls I never made for about a month. They were all elderly, and my phone number was being spoofed by people claiming to be Aetna (a health insurance company). None of them knew it was possible to spoof your phone number. Some thought I was lying and that I had been leaving voicemails as a prank. I'm sure most of them would have fallen for whatever scams these people were peddling. It's fun to imagine old cranks replying to Viagra spam and forwarding chain emails, but the reality is far darker.
      • pc86 4y ago
        Who is treating it like any sort of crime?
    • macNchz 4y ago
      Yeah this became apparent to me in the past month after a family emergency. I have gotten tons of spam calls and texts for a long time, which I usually just ignore. Now, I’ve started getting important, legitimate calls from unfamiliar numbers at any time of day and the weight of all the spam has become more apparent. The American telephone system is totally broken by this issue.
  • djbusby 4y ago
    TMobile has been blocking 2FA texts/calls so everytime I sign in to Twilio is a supreme hassle. But only a problem with Twilio - so maybe the issue is on their side
    • lloydatkinson 4y ago
      Probably a double irony because twilio is used for sending a lot of spam SMS.
    • death_syn 4y ago
      Twilio is often a source of the spam texts and calls, so it would make sense for a cellular service provider to block them.
      • 300bps 4y ago
        It isn't just Twilio. When I had T-Mobile, I was able to get 2FA SMS from about 1/3 of the companies that I use it with. Even financial companies like Vanguard and many others, never were let through with T-Mobile. I called T-Mobile and asked them to open it up completely. No improvement. I switched my same phone with same phone number to another provider and I get all texts that I am hoping to get now and get literally no spam texts.
    • dylan604 4y ago
      Maybe TMobile is doing you a favor is showing just how insecure 2FA via SMS really is.
    • zonethundery 4y ago
      They switched this off for everyone at some point. Call customer service and they'll turn it back on.
    • bluedevil2k 4y ago
      Use the Authy app then
      • 4y ago
  • everforward 4y ago
    Just your phone? Practically every means of contact I have is flooded with useless crap messages. My phone, email, and physical mail are all nearly useless. I barely bother to check them anymore, because for every 1 legitimate message I get, there are dozens of spam ones. > I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now. I would love an information-lock based system. Basically those "What's your mother's maiden name?" security questions, but repurpose them so other people have to answer them before they contact me. I'm pretty sure even a basic "What is my name?" security question would eliminate most spam. For those more infuriated by spam, you could set it to something random and effectively have a password to contact you.
    • ianai 4y ago
      Maybe it’s time for a firewall for the phone/text systems?
      • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        If I understand correctly, SHAKEN/STIR is supposed to be this.
    • Forricide 4y ago
      > email Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider). The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.
      • noasaservice 4y ago
        Even with siloing and owning your own domain... It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.
  • hammock 4y ago
    Google phones have a great system of filtering out spam calls and texts (for free). Not sure why iPhone doesn't have something similar
    • 86J8oyZv 4y ago
      It does: I've used RoboKiller (who provided the data from the article) since I switched to iPhone in 2020 and missed the Google Assistant stuff from my Pixel. It has a free and a $40/year tier both of which are good compared to the alternatives like Truecaller, and it does both call and SMS filtering.
    • notjustanymike 4y ago
      I'm surprised this doesn't get mentioned higher. On the Pixel you can screen a call with text to speech and reject any spam calls. Most robo-dialers are smart enough to understand you're doing this and hang up automatically. It's win-win.
      • hammock 4y ago
        Yes and that's not even what I'm talking about. I'm referring to when a call comes in the phone has some logic that will make it show up "suspected spam call" - and spam texts it silences the notification and moves it into a spam folder.
        • jjoonathan 4y ago
          That's exactly what google phones do. They are far ahead on this front. I bought an iPhone this time around because I wanted to play with lidar and because google defaulted hard on the "free picture storage" promise. There's a lot to like about the iPhone, but anti-spam is a glaring exception. Holy shit, I assumed that Apple would at least have made an effort, even if wasn't their core expertise and the result wasn't quite as good as google's, but it's like they didn't even try. Meanwhile google put this into production years ago and they have iterated and tuned it to the point that the spam problem is almost completely buttoned down.
  • personlurking 4y ago
    I'm in Brazil and right after I signed up for a new number, I was getting 15 spam calls per day, everyday. They recycle numbers here so some of those were "legit" but meant for previous owners. As an American with a US number too, the difference is night and day. My US number gets 1-2 spam calls per week or per two weeks. But yeah, I do the same. All set to auto ignore, even though it means one or two necessary calls are missed (ex. my cc company wanted to inform me they were cancelling their partnership and thus closing all cards).
    • ericbarrett 4y ago
      Hard to judge by region. My American number that I've had a while gets 4-5 spam calls a day and about five texts a week, and it's all trending up, despite whatever the phone companies say they're doing. The newest one seems to be group FaceTime calls (to about 20 numbers) that hang up after a couple seconds. Not sure what the angle is there; makes me wonder if there's an associated iPhone 0-day. Or maybe just probing phone type.
  • loudmax 4y ago
    I feel like there's an analogy with fake news and deliberate disinformation campaigns. Universally blocking access to information is difficult or impossible, but it's relatively easy to generate lies and nonsense in such quantities that people don't know who to believe.
  • dan-robertson 4y ago
    Email had similarly wide-open protocols to phone systems so it can be interesting to ask how spam was tackled. One thing with email is that big webmail providers got to be gatekeepers so could e.g. - require signatures/other things to prove which hostname the email came from - do wide-scale analysis of senders/email contents to filter out spam There are still issues (eg people typically will be more mad if they see spam emails than if unexpected legitimate emails get marked as spam because they won’t know if the latter is happening unless they frequently check their spam folder), and the popularity of some webmail systems means that it can be hard to tick all the boxes to not have your own legitimate emails binned. Similarly the ‘marked as spam’ signal is very strong so if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’. It seems the phone system is still at the stage where they don’t know who phone calls are actually coming from (except somehow they manage to bill these people).
    • ghaff 4y ago
      >if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’. My Gmail SPAM folder is filled with a ton of stuff that isn't really spam. There are newsletters I probably signed up for at some point or at least downloaded a document/watched a webinar where getting periodic emails was part of the deal. Because, yes, rather than clicking the unsubscribe button which legitimate marketers will honor, a lot of people just hit report spam which at some point puts it into the spam bucket for everyone.
      • eloisius 4y ago
        One of those people is me. I don’t take the time to determine whether it’s ‘legitimate marketing.’ I would never ever sign up for a marketing email, even if I am a customer of the company that sends them. Until companies stop dumping every single email address the get their hands on into their marketing list I will continue to mark every one of them as spam. I even use rules to flag emails including the word ‘unsubscribe’ so I can do it more easily.
  • CTDOCodebases 4y ago
    This could be achieved if the phones supported a whitelist that would redirect any unauthorised senders to a non existent number.
  • maram 4y ago
    >> Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now. I’ve been using Hey for two years now, and while it solved the spam problem, the UIUX makes it just so hard to use. I’m keeping for one reason, it’s the shortest email I have.
    • benhurmarcel 4y ago
      Out of curiosity, what bothers you with the UI/UX? I tested it for a while and liked it, but the price is too high for my low volume of personal email.
  • 86J8oyZv 4y ago
    I've paid $40/year for RoboKiller (the source of the data in this article) since 2020, and consider it worth every penny. For reference, I was a long-time Pixel user before then who enjoyed the Google Assistant call filter. It's not quite as good as Google Assistant (it's based on call forwarding) but by far the best solution on iPhone, and it filters SMS spam as well as calls.
  • elliekelly 4y ago
    Even setting your phone to auto-ignore anyone not in your contacts is infuriating... apparently my iPhone considers any number marked as Spam Risk a "known" number and allows it to ring right through. So if you're a spam caller then you're actually more likely to get me to answer the phone by spam calling enough people to get Apple(?)/AT&T(?) to mark you as a spam caller. It's craziness.
  • gjs278 4y ago
  • fallingknife 4y ago
    Email did solve the spam problem, but only for strict spam. I still am drowning in the pseudo-spam of constant promotions and inane notifications that are from companies who I do business with and legitimately do need to contact me from time to time. It's at the point where maybe 5% of my inbox is anything I would ever be interested in reading. And I have noticed an uptick in this kind of think in my text messages. I hope it doesn't become the next email.
  • Consultant32452 4y ago
    I never had this problem on my Android phone because it had a Google Voice related service where I could block known spammers. Almost no one got through. Since switching to iPhone I've noticed a significant uptick. This might be coincidental, maybe Android would have been letting more through also.
  • rambojazz 4y ago
    Time's ready for a phone firewall!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• toastal 4y ago
  It's not any better in Thailand. In fact, it's been worse. I wish there was a “no call” list. I wish the carriers couldn't spam you. While I still had a LINE account, if you spoke to tech support through the platform you were enrolled in their spam and could only mute it.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    I reduced my spam by answering everything...and letting them talk to nothing. I dont even listen. But, they have slowed up calling me.
    • mysterydip 4y ago
      This seems to me like one of the only ways to "level" the playing field, because it now slows their moving on and takes up human resources.
• prepend 4y ago
  I understand how email spam is hard to trace to its source, but phones should be possible. I’d like the FCC to impose a fine for spam messages that are paid for the company advertising with spam. I think the issue now is that the spam calls are lead generators that then collect info and forward to “legitimate” companies to sell warranties, insurance, whatever. The “legitimate” company should be fined and then let them sort out the scammy firms that are spamming to generate leads.
  • Workaccount2 4y ago
    You could assassinate companies by doing this.
    • lr4444lr 4y ago
      If we had the email and text and app equivalent of a Do Not Call list, we would have everything we need: after perhaps a first time slap on the wrist, companies that continue not to run their lead lists against that registry deserve everything that happens to them.
      • seoaeu 4y ago
        No, the problem is that a string of spam calls could be a false flag attack. If you wanted to drive your competition out of business, you’d just pay some spam callers to dial everyone on the do not call list and lie about who hired them
      • chrisfinazzo 4y ago
        That would be nice...if carriers had actually implemented STIR/SHAKEN with no exceptional conditions that political organizations could use. As currently done, the National DNC list is basically useless. Thanks, Ajit.
    • Vladimof 4y ago
      You would also create new ones (better ones).
    • 4y ago
• teeray 4y ago
  Hopefully spammers are spamming congress critters enough that we can get some spam text filtration legislation.
  • cube00 4y ago
    They have assistants to filter that for them.
    • rootusrootus 4y ago
      There's a business opportunity. Call centers for receiving calls and only passing along the legitimate ones. It's probably already been tried.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• marcodiego 4y ago
  In Brazil an interesting law was recently passed: calls from call centers must start with a 033 number. It is now much easier to block or know when you are being called, likely, by a robot.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  I’ve been very fortunate. My phone number is for an area code 2000 miles away, so I only answer the phone if a local number is calling. Everything else I just ignore.
  • bliteben 4y ago
    I have kept my old area code for just this reason.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    This has been working well for me but I notice the spam calls are starting to come from random area codes instead of always being from "my" area code. Eventually they'll hit on the correct one I suppose.
  • jabroni_salad 4y ago
    This used to work for me, but lately I have been getting spam from my current area and other areas that I previously lived. not sure what list they are using now, but it's a good one.
    • saalweachter 4y ago
      It's worth remembering that being despicable spammers doesn't make people bad developers. Someone, somewhere, is having a scrum right now on how they can tie physical location to phone numbers to spoof caller numbers more effectively. It's completely plausible to use eg social network leaks to spoof phone numbers you are likely to recognize. If they aren't doing it now, it's probably more that they don't need the extra spam-power at the moment rather than that they're too bumbling to think of arbitrarily clever ideas for ways to combine all of the public and leaked information about us.
• HidyBush 4y ago
  We are drowning in spam because the spammers use automatic systems while we don't or can't. When I receive a call from a number outside my contacts that has never called me before I want a dialog to pop up after I close the call that asks me if I want to block the caller or whitelist him. This way if I receive a spam call I can immediately hang up and block it without navigating through some baroque UI and manually blacklist it. I still have found no landline phone that offers a similar functionality and I'm stuck with manually blocking numbers from a horrible webUI
  • TimPC 4y ago
    Blocking spam calls is not very helpful because the numbers are inevitably spoofed and can be spoofed differently for the next call with near zero effort on behalf of the spammer. The problem is the phone system has inherent poor design that causes all sorts of issues and the major players aren't really interested in fixing it but at best are willing to apply mediocre patches.
    • Workaccount2 4y ago
      We had a lady calling our company (the hallway phone specifically) for a week demanding answers/threatening lawsuits about why we keep trying to sell her pills. We make commercial and government electronics. She refused to understand that the phone number on her screen is not the number calling her.
    • titzer 4y ago
      You're telling me that a connection-oriented system with a volume a billionth of the internet can't keep logs of who initiates a connection for 5 minutes? Oh, yeah.
      • seoaeu 4y ago
        It does keep a log… of caller IDs. The problem isn’t the volume of data, it is that the system isn’t setup to authenticate callers so you can’t tie a spam call to any persistent identity to block
• ttGpN5Nde3pK 4y ago
  We are still drowning in paper spam. This is yet another area that is ripe for *reducing emissions and impact on our environment* that can only help everyone involved _except_ for companies that spam(scam in many cases), yet it is allowed to just continue.
  • nullc 4y ago
    That won't change while the USPS continues to give massively preferential rates to spammers.
  • kube-system 4y ago
    I find paper spam much less problematic because it doesn’t interrupt me repeatedly throughout the day. And the senders are much less likely to be able to get away with sending malware
  • bogidon 4y ago
    In my experience lots of unwanted mail comes from credit card offers, insurance, etc. Turns out that unless you have an account with them, all these financial service companies get their prospective mailing data through the credit bureaus. However there is a 2003 law that required the bureaus to create an opt out mechanism, which is available here: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.
    • albrewer 4y ago
      One of the problems I have with websites for official interaction with US government stuff is that, a lot of times, it's some random .com website or a 3rd party with no direct integration with the government entity they're interfacing with. This site has all the potential hallmarks of being a scam, so if I just found this on my own I would have a hard time believing it would work after giving it my personal info.
• dfxm12 4y ago
  Treat this as a cautionary tale for what happens when you have industry insiders regulating themselves.
• deleted 4y ago
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• colpabar 4y ago
  Is anyone aware of any kind of spam campaign that involves creating a character with your phone number? I get calls and texts about florida real estate probably every day. I don't answer any calls from numbers I don't recognize, but the texts from "potential buyers" about "my listings" just keep coming. Every so often I will look up my number to see if it matches an agent, or look up the properties I'm asked about, but nothing ever makes sense. The listings are always off market, and I haven't found my number yet. I'm sure this is a big no-no, but I have responded to a couple of these messages, trying to tease out some more information, but I have never received a reply. It's most likely that people are just mistaking my number for some real estate agent's number, but you never know. Has anyone else experienced something like this?
  • dc-programmer 4y ago
    This happens to me as well. At first I thought maybe they are trying to contact my number’s previous owner. But I also regrettably replied to one message which ended the conversation. I think it’s spammers trying to see if a real, responsive person is behind the number. Recently I’ve been receiving phishing links based around another scenario
  • cronix 4y ago
    Yes, I get 10-20 calls/texts a day wanting to buy property I own in TN. I get the personalized texts too addressing me by name. I'm guessing they're just pulling property records and calling/texting whoever is listed as the owner, which is a public record. It's always for the property in TN, not the one I actually live in in a different state, so I'm assuming they're targeting certain cities. I'm assuming it's a company like Blackrock, trying to scoop up more residential houses. Most messages are identical and seem automated, even with a "text STOP to stop receiving messages." I get cash offers for as-is condition, sight unseen, or at least that's what they say. Wouldn't know, I never respond. Florida is a hot real estate market as well. Buy up the houses and all you're left with is sky high rentals.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
  I don't really get spam calls any more. Pixel 6 Pro on Google Fi, living in New York. Not sure which of these aspects has fixed it, or if it's something else. I get far more legitimate calls now than spam. At least in terms of what makes my phone ring.
  • Bhilai 4y ago
    +1, I have the same setup and Google is doing a great job saving me a bunch of annoyance. Oh and Google's call screening service is god sent. I usually make all unknown numbers go through screening before answering.
• blable2 4y ago
  Answer call - mute is my go-to for all non-contact calls. Let them pay in time.
  • selykg 4y ago
    This is what I do as well. I just mute and set the phone down. They usually give up after 30-45 seconds.
    • WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
      Did you know the DTMF tones still work if you're muted... wait about 10 seconds then mash the keys...
• IE6 4y ago
  Completely anecdotal and tangential but: the feature of the google pixel 6 where it screens my calls for me and offers up its own robo-voice interactive answering service is absolutely amazing. The phone visually shows a transcript of what is being said, what their response is (if any), and allows me to click options to respond. The main advantage is of the majority spam calls I get in a day I've already been able to "rescue" a few legitimate calls that I needed to respond to.
  • jrootabega 4y ago
    I think there are plenty of legitimate callers who will just hang up if they get the robo screener. "Must have been a wrong number." "Weird, I got the operator." "I'm not dealing with this."
    • darkstar999 4y ago
      If it's important they will leave a message or contact you a different way. No loss for me.
      • jrootabega 4y ago
        My post very deliberately meant to disagree with that. Hanging up is mutually exclusive with leaving a message. Important to you is unfortunately not the same as important to the caller. A car mechanic or doctor's office might make very little effort to contact you another way, and might wait hours or a day before even attempting to do so. And we have delivery drivers known for giving up on delivering your stuff even in ideal circumstances.
        • antiframe 4y ago
          My experience has been entirely positive. Every dentist, day care, plumber, doctor, car mechanic, etc whose call I was expecting has said a terse reason for calling like "Doctor So-and-so" or "X car mechanic your car is ready" or "day care please call". Of course I have no data for calls I wasn't expecting, but given that any call I am not expecting is usually a call to action to do business with them "hey, your car has X thousand miles, come for an oil change" or "your cleaning is coming up next week" or something like that. Basically, if I am expecting the call, I 100% get them. If I am not expecting the call, I got a lot of them or they use another method like text or email. I am not aware of any calls I am not expecting that I missed out on, but my fear of missing out unsolicited calls is pretty low. And I trust that for unsolicited calls, they are more about getting through than I care about getting through.
• dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  tmobile has pretty good spam filtering maybe one text and three calls have gotten through in the last 2 years
  • criddell 4y ago
    I have T-Mobile and plenty of spam calls get through. It’s often local realtors or insurance agents doing cold calls from their office.
• _ucvf 4y ago
  painfully ironic to cover the article with a prompt to sign up for a shitty email list
• Barrin92 4y ago
  Here in Germany commercial cold calling is illegal and carries a pretty heavy fine. (in the tens of thousands). In 20 years I've had one spam call. Literally just ban it and require explicit consent from customers, problem solved.
  • kall 4y ago
    I've never seen them before, but during the last couple of months have gotten multiple, from international numbers.
    • jeffbee 4y ago
      Yeah totally weird and for many Americans to get a call from a foreign country code is very unusual. I started getting spam with apparent chinese origin numbers within the past few months.
    • RedShift1 4y ago
      (Belgian here) After the facebook data leak in 2021 I got 2 or 3 spam calls a week from various numbers but mostly from the UK. I started reporting them as spam immediately and for the last couple of weeks it seems to have died down.
    • AnssiH 4y ago
      (Finland) Within the last year I've gotten two "ms support" scam calls, before that nothing. Hopefully the authorities and carriers can figure it out before it grows to US levels. At least they are working on it (English article from Dec 2021: https://www.traficom.fi/en/news/traficom-looks-ways-block-international-scam-calls https://www.traficom.fi/en/news/traficom-looks-ways-block-in..., latest Finnish technical recommendation PDF on call blocking from Feb 2022: https://www.traficom.fi/sites/default/files/media/regulation/Suositus%20teleyrityksille%20A-tilaajanumeron%20v%C3%A4%C3%A4rent%C3%A4misen%20havainnoinnista%20ja%20est%C3%A4misest%C3%A4.pdf https://www.traficom.fi/sites/default/files/media/regulation...).
      • ciropantera 4y ago
• cletus 4y ago
  Two lessons you should draw from this: 1. The successful communication platforms are ones that are opt-in, meaning you can't message or talk to someone unless you give their consent; and 2. This is why federated messaging systems have not worked and likely won't work in the future. Why? Just like with POTS, there is always going to be an incentive for bad actors to "launder" messages or calls. What I find particularly irksome about the spam situation is the exceptions carved out for charities and, worse yet, political fundraising to the "do not spam" laws. I mean these laws don't stop a huge amount of spam because it's illegal anyway and probably originates overseas. But I honestly don't want to be a part of the current phone system and just ignore any unknown numbers.
  • jeffbee 4y ago
    It's a big leap. The "successful" communications systems are post, phone, and email, none of which have the property you claim is essential to success. And none of the systems with that property are in fact successful.
    • evgen 4y ago
      And all three of them are no longer 'successful' at effectively delivering messages because users of those systems are drowning in spam. It completely blows my mind to return to the US and see how bad phone and SMS spam have become. The spammers have now become so effective at parasitising the transmission channels that they have caused them to go into decline. It is easy for spammers and scammers to exist and thrive as parasites in these systems for exactly the reasons stated.
  • Cynddl 4y ago
    > 1. The successful communication platforms are ones that are opt-in, meaning you can't message or talk to someone unless you give their consent; and Not particularly true in the rest of the world, for instance in Europe as many have pointed out in other threads. The SMS text messages work well here, and good data protection laws/regulations ensure that there is virtually no spam or phishing. This is not a problem with the platform, but with the lack of regulation in the industry.
• teddyh 4y ago
  I am not an American, and I think I can count on one hand the number of spam messages and calls I have gotten over, say, the last 10 years. Oh, all right, call it two hands. I have no filtering service of any kind. For Americans to suffer this so, there really seems to be something wrong somewhere, or possibly very right where I am.
  • elorant 4y ago
    Yeap, same here. I live in an EU country, and I receive like one spam call every quarter usually from an energy provider.
  • ailef 4y ago
    I'm not American as well, and I receive lots of spam calls (average of a couple per day I'd say). I now have developed a "feeling" on whether or not I have to pick up the call, based on if I'm expecting a call, country code, similarities with previous spam phone numbers, etc... It's really annoying.
  • frosted-flakes 4y ago
    It's because the US/Canada is a very large homogenous (single-language) a d relatively wealthy target. Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, etc. not so much.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    More likely it's just luck. I get a couple spam calls a day. My wife gets them almost never. We're both American.
• throwmeariver1 4y ago
  Why would no one regulate it? Right, because both political parties are spamming as well. At the height of the presidential campaign I got 52 emails from republicans and 47 from democrats and they are full of dark patterns and manipulative language on both sides. It’s insane.
  • chrisfinazzo 4y ago
    That particular loophole drives me up a wall. I routinely get upwards of a dozen political emails a day simply because I sent $20 to my district's US Representative once and only once. I understand why things like ActBlue exist to centralize this kind of stuff in terms of contributions, but the comms side of things is still completely backwards.
• weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  Not just Americans. My Thai phone number got slammed this week and I've had many friends here complain about all the scammers. Apparently they will have 1 person pretend they are the police and one of my friend's friend (not the brightest person) started crying thinking it was real From my observations, Thai people are very trusting and nice so unfortunately this is probably a very profitable operation
• NorwegianDude 4y ago
  Isn't US operators filtering spam and scams? I just checked my texts going back two years, and there is not a single unsolicited, spam or scam text. The same is true for phone calls.
• niklodeon 4y ago
  I really don't get this. I use eXpurgate which works by monitoring thousands of email addresses for incoming similar emails and rejecting emails during SMTP delivery. I have seen zero spam mails in 20 years and there have also been zero false positives that I know of. So it seems to me that spam is in principle a solved problem, it's just spam filters that try to classify individual emails by machine learning that to this day do not work reliably. Still most providers insist on using filters that work this way.
• alkonaut 4y ago
  I get zero spam texts, have gotten zero robocalls in my life, and my inbox correctly sorts spam to probably less than 1 in 10000 miscategorized, meaning I effectively see no spam email. This is in Europe, so is it just a regulatory difference that makes me feel that spam is a non-issue since for the last decade almost?
  • jackconsidine 4y ago
    Interesting... nearly 200 years ago de Tocqueville remarked that European newspapers were far less littered with low-quality advertisements than the American publications.
  • wutbrodo 4y ago
    I'm in the same boat, and I'm American. I don't really know how Gmail users manage to get non-negligible amounts of spam, given their filtering and the "Promotions" inbox auto-filter. And as far as phone calls: Do you happen to use Google Voice? I didn't even realize that robocalls had gotten so bad until a couple of years ago. I get maybe a call a month.
  • guitarbill 4y ago
    It is a non-issue. Unless your country doesn't regulate data-sharing, doesn't require personal information be protected, doesn't require breaches to be reported, and doesn't have real punishments in place for people who do. For example, I have gotten recruiter email spam to an email I used/gave to a company for HR communication only (luckily, it was a unique email address). Maybe a spam filter catches most of it, maybe not. It's a losing proposition to need throw-away information and spam filters for all types of information though. No filter is 100% accurate.
  • inglor_cz 4y ago
    Depends on the size of the language community you are in, too. Chinese or English spam centers have a lot more potential marks to exploit than Slovenian or Estonian ones.
• Ozzie_osman 4y ago
  I use T-mobile and a Pixel, and between the two of them, they do a pretty good job detecting and blocking spam calls and texts (I think t-mobile does the phone calls and the pixel does the texts). I'd say it's gone from big annoyance to very minor annoyance.
• skizm 4y ago
  I really do feel like there are two versions of the internet. One for people who aggressively use ad-blockers, pay for premium (non-ad) versions of things, manage their inboxes well, and generally are tech savvy enough to avoid 95% of unwanted advertising. Then there's everyone else who just accept the hundreds of ads washing over them at all times, that 60% of their screen real-estate is for ads, are completely comfortable with auto-playing videos, that are okay sitting through 30-second ads before watching a random funny video on youtube, etc. The second category can be sub-divided by motivations (some don't know there's a better way, some don't think it's worth the effort, etc.), but the resulting experience is the same no matter where you fall in group 2. Here's the (a?) kicker: advertisers are willing to pay orders of magnitude more to get ads in front of group 1. They'll pour so many resources into it that they'll make everything "worse"* for group 2. Group 1 adjusts their filters (both technical and mental), get back to neutral, but the rest of the internet is just a little worse off going forward because advertisers and publishers saw a very slight up tick in clicks after their scorched earth campaign to reach group 1. Rinse and repeat until we find ourselves where we are now. I used to think that over time group 2 members would trickle into group 1, sort of like how programmers and hackers were using Google before it was cool and slowly the world followed, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Personally I'm seeing the groups continuing to divide. Group 2 really just doesn't see the problems, doesn't care, or isn't willing to put in the slightest effort to improve their interactions with technology and the internet. My "favorite" outcome of all this is when a member of group 1 is forced to use a device owned by someone in group 2 and are horrified at what they see (favorite because it is equal parts sad and funny). * "worse" in quotes here because group 2 doesn't seem to notice or care about the slow decline into madness.
  • jackconsidine 4y ago
    I use Brave, Adblock, DDG etc, recently booted into my Windows partition to open a Macro-enabled Excel report. Had to look something up and used the default Edge browser without blockers etc. The experience felt like a sick joke- pop-ups everywhere, hijacked scrollbars, auto-playing ad videos galore, for a single web search. I feel guilty that many unaware internet users are subject to such a degraded browsing experience.
• reaperducer 4y ago
  The worst is politicians. You know an organization is corrupt when it exempts itself from the rules that apply to everyone else. In this case, politicians are exempt from spam rules. I get spam robocalls and spam text messages from politicians in states where I've never even lived. But it's all perfectly legal, because they make the rules. I've started keeping screenshots of the political spam I get. I'm not sure what I will eventually do with it. Maybe some name-and-shame web site once I get enough of them. Here's a text message I received just yesterday, from a politician in a state I don't even live in: This is Danielle Piper Chio, I'm running for Las Vegas Justice Court, Department 9. Since 2009, I have worked as a Special Prosecutor at the District Attorney's office. I have handled over 50 felony jury trials & brought justice to hundreds of victims. EVERY LAW ENFORCEMENT ORGANIZATION has endorsed my candidacy. My opponent, the current sitting judge, has had a history of low bail and letting violent offenders back on the street, to commit more crimes. We need a change this election, we need to bring back law and order to Dept. 9. Please let me know if I can count on your support for my campaign. If you would like you can email me at Danielle@Danielle4Judge.com ,visit my website at www.Danielle4Judge.com ,or call me at 702-706-7117. Thank you, Danielle No, screw you, Danielle. Even if I lived in Las Vegas, why would I vote for someone who sends me spam?
• nerdjon 4y ago
  I have for sure missed important emails and calls because of spam. I have started just leaving most things unread because I just can't deal with it anymore. If I look at my phone I have 420 unread texts and 152k emails. Even my work email has been largely spam and is sitting at over 7k unread emails. Every once in a while I go in and I try to finally wrangle it all together, setup filters. mark stuff as spam. Etc etc. But the number of "are you still considering x" emails after I never gave them my email, or other spam. It is just ridiculous.
• Someone 4y ago
  When I read things like this, I think “that’s yet another point on the ‘what has the EU done for us’ list”. A quick Google gave me https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52004DC0028&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL..., which says: “The Directive 2002/58/EC on Privacy and Electronic Communications (date of transposition 31 October 2003) requires Member States to prohibit the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail or other electronic messaging systems such as SMS and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) unless the prior consent of the subscriber to such electronic communications services has been obtained (Article 13(1) of the Directive). This is the 'opt-in' system, which was until now only applicable to faxes and automated calling machines” People often call out the EU as being government of the people, but not by the people, but IMO it often is more for the people than what the USA has.
• germinalphrase 4y ago
  A random tip - that may or may not work - when you need to answer a phone call from an unknown number: wait for exactly 4 seconds and then only say “hello”. Some automated call systems use this pattern to distinguish whether they are talking to another computer as a human will almost always follow up with another statement. If no other statement is made, the automated caller will hang up after another ten seconds. I have no direct information about what/which systems might work this way. Purely anecdotal. Hopefully, this flags your number as moon-human to reduce future spam calls.
• legrande 4y ago
  I have two numbers. One personal 'always on' number that I only give out to a few family members and friends, and never put it on the net. My other number is strictly for Internet activities and I'm signed up to roughly 20 services with that number (Twitter, Facebook, Patreon etc). This is the number that gets random robocalls and sketchy SMS messages with weird links in them. I have no doubt this is because Facebook & other services leak your number through some yet undiscovered bug. I also have voicemail turned off on both numbers so I don't have to worry about voicemail spam. As for email: spam is a fact of life, but can be managed by things like Simplelogin & Firefox Relay.
  • dan-robertson 4y ago
    All it takes is one of your family members to download some dodgy app and give it access to their contacts for the secret number to be revealed. I suspect this is more likely than eg Facebook leaking a number by mistake. You probably have gotten lucky by sharing your secret number only with a small number of people though I don’t know for sure.
  • Pierre910 4y ago
    Hey, member of Team Telios here! We're building a decentralized and encrypted email service. I thought you might want to hear about our solution to stop spam emails. We integrated an alias feature within our app allowing you to create aliases within your mailbox page. Every email sent to your aliases will be received in an independent folder named after your alias. It allows you to manage and organize everything in one place while keeping your main inbox free from spam!
• mc4ndr3 4y ago
  fcc: new phon who dis
• t-3 4y ago
  I've never received a spam call that I know of, but I never answer unknown numbers (I presume spam would leave voicemails though?). I get spam texts every few hours though. I just treat checking my phone and deleting the spam as a chore to do once every day or two like email.
• yu-carm-kror 4y ago
  My mobile phone’s voicemail is configured to accept zero recorded messages, and my no-answer/busy recording asks callers to text or email me. I’ve had no issues with this setup. Everyone’s in the same boat so I think people immediately understand.
• ilamont 4y ago
  Consider people like my aunt, who through decades of pre-2000 household conditioning, immediately stop whatever they are doing and rush to answer a ringing phone even though 98% of the calls are junk and the volume of incoming calls is 5-10x what they were in the 80s or 90s. No matter how many times I suggest not bothering to even look at the phone, she cannot resist. Further, this cohort is largely unable to use the tools we take for granted. Many seniors don't know how to block or screen calls, let along apply the phone's do not disturb features. She has been phished multiple times via email, and every time I check her Mac I have to uninstall scammy browser bars and search redirects. It's not just the spammers who are the problem. Technology platforms, telcos, and policy makers have failed people like her. Hardware and software designers are part of the problem, too. It seems like every device and app is made for techie/hipster types, not the rest of the population who have no clue what a "hamburger menu" does or where the downloads end up on their computer. I'm assuming many people on HN are their extended family's de facto IT support team. It's exhausting.
  • jrootabega 4y ago
    I have an elderly family member with dementia who is jolted awake several times a day by spam calls and left disoriented or even at risk of a fall as a result. Telling them they don't need to answer is met with anger and annoyance (and it's not their fault). Most of the discussion here centers on seeing who's calling and making decisions based on that. There's a large group of victims that never understood those concepts, or are no longer capable of processing them functionally. The lack of tools to help us help them is very frustrating, and this is with a clamshell dumb phone, which these days is probably close to 100% elderly users with special needs.
    • aviditas 4y ago
      I had my parents stay on a landline until very recently because services like nomorobo are free and trivial for me to set up and manage remotely as well as those landline phones have built-in block lists in a way that they already know how to use. Thankfully my mother has become tech savvy & is naturally suspicious and my dad doesn't answer any calls if there's not a contact for them as has been drilled into him. I wish that Voip service for the elderly and disabled was free (there are some limited discount programs but it is not the same) and would be set up with nomorobo or a similar free for landline product. ISPs have erroded the home phone line to a sad shadow of what it was. e911 service is a critical thing to have for people who are older and/or have medical problems. Cell phone 911 service is not the same quality and will not have the same response times for most in the US especially in rural areas.
• meroes 4y ago
  When those Chinese consulate calls were first going I got one my cell and a few minutes later on my hotel phone. Really weird.
• rexreed 4y ago
  "The average American received roughly 42 spam texts just in the month of March, according to new data from RoboKiller, an app that blocks spam calls and texts." Whenever I see a study, I immediately search out for who conducted the survey / study / report and see if they are motivated by a particular response. In this case, yes, RoboKiller of course has a story to peddle. Are they right? Perhaps, but would they communicate a story that would decrease the value of their spam-blocking app?
• ravenstine 4y ago
  When I recently logged in to my T-Mobile online account, I noticed there was a feature for blocking spam on their end that was turned off. I toggled it on, and the flood of spam calls and messages I got every day suddenly stopped entirely. Years ago when I asked them if they could do essentially this, they said they couldn't and that the only alternative was blocking on the phone. This would have sufficed if it weren't for Android's bizarre reluctance to make blocking spam straight forward and feasible. First of all, why no wildcard matching? I resorted to setting my phone to permanently be on "Do Not Disturb", making all text messages silent while still allowing numbers in my contact list to ring through. That approach mostly worked for me until this last year when spam calls became horrendous. Shouldn't DND take care of those? Well, for some reason beyond me, Android thinks that even if you have DND turned on that the calls should still block the screen and stop apps like Spotify from playing music until the call is dismissed. There is no way for the phone to completely ignore numbers that are not in your contacts. Even numbers that the phone knows are spam still do this. I mean, why the flip would I answer a call that the carrier and the phone itself agrees are spam? I don't know if it's STIR/SHAKEN, but whatever that T-Mobile is doing, it seems to have adequately addressed the spam problem for me. I encourage any fellow T-Mobile users to go turn this on in the account settings.
  • grendelt 4y ago
    I had no idea this was a thing. Thanks! For other T-Mobile customers, I found it here: https://www.t-mobile.com/account/profile/line-selector/blocking https://www.t-mobile.com/account/profile/line-selector/block...
• DamnYuppie 4y ago
  I guess I am on outlier in this regard. I get pretty much no spam calls or texts accept from recruiters. The only thing I can realistically fathom being the cause for this is that I never give out my phone number or zip code at stores when buying things. Also I rarely buy things online anymore preferring to go to the big box stores around me. This doesn't mean I don't do it but on average probably no more than 5-6 times a year.
• msluyter 4y ago
  These conversations remind me of the "why your spam solution won't work" checklist that used to go around slashdot: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt It's been a while though, so perhaps some of these are no longer relevant.
• MSVi 4y ago
  So I actually work in the tech telecom industry and can hopefully shed some knowledge on these topics! The SMS/MMS space is surprisingly "new" in the telecom sense. Many carriers and providers don't have all of the tools built out that you'd expect to handle spam at the scale they're seeing. From what I've experienced, AT&T has the best spam filtering among the carriers, but again they're all pretty hit-and-miss for now. When it comes to toll-free messaging all carriers seem to do pretty well (as it's easy to detect the same message being sent out 100k+ times from a singular number), but it becomes much more difficult as more companies move over to unregistered or "local" traffic. Businesses are able to send from local numbers using a technique called "Snowshoeing", or spreading the messages out across multiple numbers and dodge large message volumes from any singular number. While many of these messages are annoying (such as political messaging/marketing), it's not illegal. However, if you receive legitimate spam messages, all carriers allow you to forward the message to the number 7726. Be careful if the spammer is spoofing your number as the sender however, because carriers are not smart enough to determine the legitimate sender yet and it will result in your actual number being marked as spam. From what I've heard, being able to detect spoofed sms/mms messages will be coming some time in 2023 though.
  • beckingz 4y ago
    What individual action can we take to get the regulators to fix this?
    • MSVi 4y ago
      Great question, I can only give a qualified answer regarding text messages, as that's where my expertise lies. In 2018 the FCC moved away from regulating sms/mms messages as they classified them as "information services" vs. "telecommunications services", meaning that the carriers have been left to create their own rules and enforce them. Without the FCC legal backing, it's much more difficult to stop illegitimate businesses from scaling out their practices. Meanwhile legitimate businesses in this space have fallen back to the guidelines from the TCPA[1] when answering questions such as: "When should we send messages?" "What content is allowed?" "How should we handle users opting-out of our messages?" meaning that each business handles them differently, and pushes the envelope however they see fit. Some states have been passing their own mini-TCPAs[2], but these too are limited in their capacity and mostly focus on "telecommunications services". I'd say that if we want to get serious about stopping spam texts, the best solution would be to talk to your representatives and potentially try to convince the FCC to reclassify text messages as part of "telecommunications services". However, political sends are very large in this space, so I'm sure that large pushback would be expected. 1. https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/tcpa-rules.pdf https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/tcpa-rules.pdf 2. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2021/1120/BillText/er/PDF https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2021/1120/BillText/er/...
• unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Approximately half of this is self-inflicted: I have a client who doesn't seem to realize he can unsubscribe from junk. I'm ruthless about it, so perhaps 1 undesired message a day gets through to my inbox. It used to be 1 a week, but now Google seems to let through phishing "CostCo ConfirmationReceipt" patterns.
• OtomotO 4y ago
  Oh wow, that sounds extremely awful. My bank kept spamming me multiple times... I didn't know the number and was working on another project. Later I checked and blocked the number. Happened a few times, now they seem to have given up. But that's about the only occasion, apart from useless polls where they first ask me a lot of questions and then at the end, my age... And then tell me they can't use my answers, so just have wasted my time. (Happened once, I refuse to do them nowadays)
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  I wouldn't be shocked if at some point we end up with a small number of large ecosystems overlaying the Internet which largely solve the underlying problem. You might be in Apple's ecosystem, and everything you do filters through that -- your voice communication, email, instant message, etc. Or you can have the Google equivalent. Or some other very large provider. They will agree to some kind of interoperability at their interface points, and then all the individuals and tiny Internet participants will be pushed into irrelevancy because they have no way to communicate. If there are enough, maybe they get together and build another ecosystem so they have enough clout to negotiate access to the others. It's possible we'll figure out how to keep our idealized anyone-can-get-on-it Internet, but I'm not counting on it.
• CivBase 4y ago
  How (and how much) are these spammers profiting? I'd expect that with time the cost/risk would increase as governments and infrastructure providers intervene and the reward would decrease and people wise up to spam/scams. But the problem just keeps getting worse. Is the decreasing in technological cost/difficulty just out-pacing the decreasing ROI?
• Vladimof 4y ago
  I barely get any phone spam anymore and when I do they spoof the area code to my area code but since my area code is from somewhere I never lived, I know that I can ignore those calls.
• allochthon 4y ago
  My Gmail account is an early one, and several times a month, emails intended for other people with the same name end up in my inbox. Some of them are from actual people; a lot of them are from services that don't do a proper email verification step. It also seems one strategy of script kiddies is to add lists of emails they obtain to legitimate services that don't do an email verification step. I'll flag these messages as "spam" even if they're from some well-known company. In the past few months, things appear to have changed, and emails that are obviously spam, complete with the misspelled titles and funky case and punctuation, are now appearing in my Gmail inbox. It looks like the Gmail spam filter is becoming less effective. I would love for email to be opt-in on a per sender basis. If I haven't opted-in to receive email from someone, perhaps a request is added to a queue that I can check from time to time (with its own spam filter), and until the request has been accepted, no email will arrive from them.
  • tenuousemphasis 4y ago
    >In the past few months, things appear to have changed, and emails that are obviously spam, complete with the misspelled titles and funky case and punctuation, are now appearing in my Gmail inbox. It looks like the Gmail spam filter is becoming less effective. Yes, I've noticed the same thing. Emails that are quite obviously spam (multiple recipients, complete gibberish, PDF attachments) are getting through the Gmail spam filter.
  • illamint 4y ago
    I empathize with this so hard. I have an early first-initial-last-name Gmail account as well. It's both very generic in the United States, and when combined, a common first name in Brazil. It's nearly unusable at this point, but I've had it since 2004 and it'd be very difficult to migrate away from it. I have a filter to delete any email from a .br domain, but just the amount of Brazilian spam that makes it through is torrential.
• tlogan 4y ago
  This is a big problem. But one problem which prevents implementing correct solution is that even very educated people (like ones posting comments here) cannot classify 3 different “spam”: fraud/phising SMS/calls/emails, spam sms/calls/emails, and legitimate marketing and messages (like call from Grubhub delivery). Why do we need this? Because each of these classes of unwanted communication require a different solution. And all these network providers are just not capable or not willing to spend any effort to solve this problem. For example, T-Mobile is so bad that even a valid 2fa SMS messages are blocked. On the other hand, AT&T allows even so obvious scam goes thru.
  • tomrod 4y ago
    > legitimate marketing We don't typically worry about pathological NULL sets
• domh 4y ago
  Sample size of 1 here but I recently (a month ago) moved from the USA to the UK. I got a UK number and I have not received one spam call or text since. In the USA I used to get at least 4/5 calls a week and it rendered the phone portion of my phone completely useless, to the point where I would miss important phone calls. I would also never make "real" phone calls and opt to call via Signal/Whatsapp instead. What is it about the US telecoms system that makes it so susceptible to spam? Is it just the size of the market that makes it attractive to robocallers anywhere in the world? 99% of the time when I'd answer a spam call (typically whilst expecting an important phone call) it would just be a dead line anyway - are they just verifying if the phone number is valid, potentially to resell it later?
  • junon 4y ago
    USA to Germany, same thing. Lots of scammer calls throughout the week until my US phone provider told me they wouldn't support me in Europe anymore and I had to switch over. I actually miss trolling "Jeff from the IRS" every few days.
  • aubergene 4y ago
    When I moved from the UK to USA it was the same in reverse. I had just got a new phone and number and immediately started getting spam calls and texts. I asked my colleagues how I could report or block these and they didn't really have an answer. OFCOM in the UK largely deals with spam and when I've had spam it's usually been that it comes from outside the UK but will still eventually get blocked
    • ljm 4y ago
      If I get spam in the UK it's often just a one-off tax scam doing the rounds (which stops once you forward it to, say, HMRC), but mainly recruiters. Once one recruiter has your email and phone number you can bet that every other recruiter in the country also has it.
    • domh 4y ago
      I'm fairly certain I was told to sign up to the Do Not Call Registry (https://www.donotcall.gov/ https://www.donotcall.gov/) which did absolutely nothing.
• skeeter2020 4y ago
  * I get a lot of spam calls on my mobile, but they're easy to avoid because I rarely talk to anybody on the phone to begin with. * I get the odd text spam message which is annoying * I get very little spam email all the way into my inbox, and rarely see false positives (and then typically marginal messages) Overall my spam situation is better than ever, but I'm super-aware of the risk and impact on people like my elderly parents who still have a land line and are not as familiar with the standard scams as others.
• erickhill 4y ago
  Ironically, the instant I loaded that article I was confronted with an e-mail newsletter subscription pop-up.
• mithr 4y ago
  I had never gotten a spam text, and only a handful of spam calls, until a couple of months ago. Then, it was like a switch had been flipped -- all of a sudden, I started getting multiple calls a day, every day. I started getting spam texts every few days. I ended up installing and starting to use TMobile's Scam Shield app (on iOS), which uses some algorithm/data to block suspected spam calls before they get to your phone, and that's basically solved the call problem (it seems to do a good job, and hasn't yet blocked any legitimate calls. On the other hand, I don't get a lot of legitimate calls from random numbers in general, so I'm probably not a representative sample). I started forwarding any spam texts to 7726, and that at least seems to have slowed down that aspect as well, though I still get them once in a while. Recently, I received a few spam iMessage group texts, with ~18 numbers in a group. It's happened 4 times over the past month, and each time I've blocked every number on that list. I presume that iMessage spam is some cutting-edge development and will only get worse as more spammers figure it out.
• deltaonefour 4y ago
  The way forward isn't filtering spam. It's stopping it at the source. Severe punishments for instigators and technology to catch these people. I would happily sign up for a communication system on top of email, texts and phones that require identity to be transferred with texts. Some system that unfortunately allows big brother to track all activities. That will effectively stop spammers and scammers. I get the big brother aspect is bad. So that's why I want this to exist on top of standard communication systems. Though the bad thing is... If it gets to popular people might end up eventually fully switching.
• yosito 4y ago
  I've been getting those spam calls lately from Consumer Insurance Bureau, or something like that. But I also expect to get a lot of important calls from unfamiliar numbers, so I have to pick up. I also figured out that if I call back these random numbers, they pick up. At first I thought it was a human on the line, but pretty soon I realized it's a bot that is pretty good at asking for and collecting your information, but not at getting off script. Of course, I fed it lots of BS information, but I also experimented with Turing tests and seeing if I could get connected to a real human. I got through to a real human twice. Once they hung up on me until I told them my name was Mike Wazowski, and another time they hung up on me when I started asking questions about who they work for. I haven't gotten calls from that bot since then.
• flerchin 4y ago
  The legislative fix I can see is putting a price floor on sending SMS and connecting phone calls. Require the carriers to charge for them. If it cost me a penny to make a phone call or send a text message, it would not impact me at all. However, all the bulk garbage would stop overnight, because the carriers would want their money, and at that price, spam won't scale.
• cupofpython 4y ago
  A related hill I will die on it that the US needs a government backed email addressing system for anyone with a government ID. The current option of going "paperless" by way of providing a privately owned email address is a huge risk factor. Gmail should not have access to view my government related emails. They aren't accountable for network issues either that may result in personal damages. The email itself is commingled with spam streams, related filters, and other things. We need a dedicated, government protected, digital communication line. Sending mail through it would be tied to your government identity. Behavior is then open to regulation and accountability. Which is a good thing for the specific need of two known identities talking to each other. Google can be the contract vendor for the service, that's fine. But there needs to be a contract setup where they are simply providing the service and not owning the data / contents. Maybe Microsoft outbids them the following year, and the underlying provider changes to no observable effect to the users. that kind of thing. As a bonus, it would be immensely helpful for people dealing with permanent housing issues and the host of problems that are associated with requiring a mailing address for things. A government regulated email address would be sufficient for a lot of those things.
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  • mihaic 4y ago
    I totally agree with you, although I'd imagine for the US your first uphill battle would be to convince people that a central government ID is a good idea. I've been mentioning this idea in private conversations in Europe for many years, even here people react almost violently against it. I'm always surprised at people saying that "government can't tech", without ever demanding competence from the thing that takes a good chunk of their income.
    • cupofpython 4y ago
      In the US we each have a Social Security Number, which is a central government ID. I think that would be sufficient for user assignment SSN alone shouldnt be sufficient for account creation so you'd probably have to jump through the usual 2-3 forms of ID to get access to your account, but then the email itself could act as another form of ID. Which would be super useful in lots of situations, especially if you lose one of your other forms. Also there is a lot of digital user verification workaround right now that would be solved by this. I would much rather interact with a government controlled email address than scan and send a copy of my drivers license to online services
• mihaic 4y ago
  This is one of those rare situations where the solution really is regulation, but unfortunately it's dropped out of the US Overton window. The FCC or some other regulatory body could drop the hammer on telcos and implement whatever is being done in the EU/UK that seems to work. In an oligopoly it's really the only way to fix this, and every single time I mention this an American friend will say that the government can't be trusted with anything. If you have such a low opinion of your government's capabilities, why not ask it to get better instead of abandoning all hope?
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• ScoobleDoodle 4y ago
  I want a law / rule for an unsubscribe button that traverses the graph of my contact info being shared and any org in that graph has to remove me unless a one on one direct relationship exists. Then any organization sharing or receiving any contact info will have to be careful who they share it with lest they share it with someone who causes me to be unsubscribed from the group.
• Slackwise 4y ago
  The irony of having a gigantic banner plastered over the article saying "SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER" before I can read a single word of the article.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  This is only tangentially related but I subscribed to the physical Sunday delivery of a large local newspaper a few years ago. It came with the normal amount of additional pages (easily separated) of ads and basically spam mail (nothing crazy). I contacted the papers support people multiple times trying to see if I could opt out of this additional spam and nobody there was able to even comprehend what I was talking about - they just kept referring to "popup ads" and how I should check my browser settings. Gave me a good laugh. Physical mail spam though is a huge problem - we are destroying tons of trees for shit that nobody wants. At least with phone calls it does not result in a ton of paper waste.
• rsanek 4y ago
  You know it's a sad state of affairs when you assume the article will be about physical mail spam but it's actually about phone spam. Could have just as easily been about email newsletter spam you somehow get auto signed up for all the time.
• istillwritecode 4y ago
  If you live in New York or Washington DC you can drop your junk mail off at the DMA headquarters. Imagine what it would be like if 1000 people a day delivered their junk mail there. They wouldn't be able to get in the door.
• ThinkBeat 4y ago
  I concider TV ads spam as well. One of the meain resons I have watched regular tv for nearly two decades. I dont miss it at all. Personally I think tv ads and spam in general to make people dumber.