9 ms·

I built telecommunications systems / software for some time. The unfortunate truth here is that telecom carriers absolutely already have everything they need to

I built telecommunications systems / software for some time. The unfortunate truth here is that telecom carriers absolutely already have everything they need to largely put a stop to it but they knowingly ignore it. It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing. It's expensive to run outbound campaigns in almost any other country, and very cheap in the US (fractions of a penny per minute compared to 5-10c per minute in some EU locations). Scammers need volume to make money. The reason carriers -- from the local exchange carriers and up -- ignore it is because just a single scam operation can mean 10s of thousands of dollars in volume a month, and sometimes more. Since they have to self-report for the most part they're not very incentivized to stop it. There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it, but carriers push back hard on those regulations and they never stick. I know from experience dealing with this that it's absolutely not ignorance that's at play on the regulatory and commercial side. It's disgusting, and as fueled with greed and red tape as you'd fear.

jesuscript 4y ago
That’s kind of sad that they won’t just fix it if they can. I over hear my elderly parents give each other tips like “don’t open that email, it’s fake” and things like that.
javajosh 4y ago
So, I realize this is a big ask - but can you please write this up as a story and sent it to a major news outlet? My cynicism is already high, but I would not have suspected this of all things, that telcos would allow the elderly to be victimized to the tune of $10B to make a few pennies. Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  >Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal And when scammers go back to using Western Union are you going to ban that as well? When they ask a person to send them cash are you going to ban cash as well? Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this.
  - zinclozenge 4y ago
    > Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this. You might be on to something here.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    I want gift cards banned not because of scammers. Like pay-day loan services, gift cards are based on the fraud of profound information asymmetry. Gift cards make liquid cash worse in almost every dimension. It's tied to one supplier. It can be lost. I forgot the stats, but I'm positive billions spent on gift cards are never redeemed. Gift cards are just slightly less evil than payday loan services. They take advantage of a (positive) human need to give, and a (negative) human need to not work hard, picking out a gift, and a (negative) need to appear to have purchased a gift when one, in fact, has not. What makes it even more evil is that because it's a gift the loss is not seen as important for the giver (they gave it away after all) or the receiver (they weren't expecting to have this thing). The burden on the receiver, to carry around this extra piece of plastic, having to remember to use it, possibly even altering your behavior to use it, makes it even more nefarious. I don't think my position is particularly common. Certainly gift card industry fraud is low on the list of societies pressing problems. But it is a problem and one that I wish was better understood .
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      Perhaps the solution is to (further) stigmatize gift cards. The Chinese seem to have figured it out with their red envelopes full of money.
      - javajosh 4y ago
        Yeah, how about this: when I get a gift card, I a) discount the gift about 50% based on EV and b) consider the giver kind of stupid for wasting money like this. It's like the opposite of being impressed with someone for getting a good deal. "You spent $5 and this is worth $100 to me, awesome!" versus, "You spent $25 on this and it's worth $10 to me. Yay." Everyone just fucking loses. (Like you, I am surprised at my vehemence - perhaps pg is right that writing and thinking are one and the same, and I'm just late to the epiphany that I absolutely loath gift cards. So much so I wouldn't even mind being known as "that guy who hates gift cards so much".)
- bbbbb5 4y ago
  >Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal Most of the losses (in $ terms) from these scams do not involve gift cards. They involve the scammers convincing you to install some remote desktop software and emptying your bank account. It's already illegal to send people to open bank accounts with fake IDs, but the scammers have no problem cashing out the bulk of their profits like that.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    How do they get the big bucks out of the last bank?
    - bbbbb5 4y ago
      Sometimes they transfer to a cryptocurrency exchange, sometimes they go to a branch to withdraw everything. Banks don't really like either of those, so issuing checks and cashing them somewhere else is a common scheme. Some may bounce the money through a few accounts and eventually into a business account that'll send it overseas, it depends. The people on the ground are random replaceable idiots.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  "Make a way you can use money without being tracked by everybody illegal" is not a good thing
- saxonww 4y ago
  My grandmother got talked into mailing cash between the pages of a magazine. I don't really know what to say other than the format of the money doesn't matter too much, someone is going to try to scam people out of it, and the scams are going to work.
jyu 4y ago
How many broken systems are the result of perverse incentives?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Absolutely everything: car dependency, affordable housing and healthcare, hard drugs, the environment, corporate tax evasion, energy, money laundering, immigration, good pay for nursing and teaching staff, etc. "We can't fix X because then sector Y would suffer trillions in losses and jobs so it's best to keep the status quo and kick the can down the road."
zackmorris 4y ago
This is a classic example of an unintended consequence of deregulation. Normally we could petition our elected officials and get something done about it. But lobbyists have come to so completely dominate our legislative process that whole industries have effectively coopted the government through regulatory capture. On top of that, they've hoodwinked half the population into thinking that regulation bad. At this point, we can all remain hypervigilant and snoop on our grandparents and get sucked into various private industry scams like identity insurance. We can play games with switching carriers within the duopolies in our areas when they let scammers steal from us. We can project loudly on social media when someone across the world steals right from out of our bank accounts, and haggle with our credit card companies to charge it back and rip off some merchant so that we don't have to pay. This is how scams metastasize into protection rackets and authoritarianism. Or we could like, make this all illegal and charge carriers directly when it happens. But that would cost rich people money. So rich people run propaganda campaigns to convince us that fines just get passed on to consumers. Which doesn't make any sense in a free market, where we could switch to a cheaper carrier that didn't get fined. Once we see this from that meta level (that political controversy is rooted in misdirection and lies) it just gets so tiring to watch the same debates over and over. Maybe we need some rich people to step up and call out this nonsense (dragons give up their loot so easily). Maybe we need to organize and start some consumer unions that dictate to vendors how much we'll pay for their services until they shape up. Maybe we should get back to our geek roots and start a free peer to peer wireless network. Huh, writing out this rant, I just had a thought. Where's the keystone in this? Political progress can't be hacked, so none of our instincts around quick fixes work. In other words, the half of the population that has the working solution has to somehow convince the other half to go along with it. That can be a long and painful process spanning decades. So what does the other half want? What concession to them would result in getting legislation passed to solve this?
- Diesel555 4y ago
  Anyone claiming “deregulation” for the names sake is speaking rhetoric without knowledge. Both conservative and liberal economists agree with regulation. The most conservative of economists understand the concept of externalities. Call centers bear a clear externality. The business transaction between the telecom Company and the caller bears a negative externality on the callee who is not a member of that transaction. Conservative economists would also agree with regulation to at least impose a cost on the transaction to reflect that externality. The problem is with policy and lobbying as you stated - write your member of congress. To comment on a now deleted post to this comment: I’m not arguing that bad regulation doesn’t exist which can perpetuate and help continue market failures. I’m arguing that good regulation is the fix to known market failures and economists on both sides recognize that.
nojs 4y ago
It may also be that they see this as a slippery slope of being responsible for moderating the content of phone calls, which is not a road I imagine carriers want to go down.
baron816 4y ago
Can you please tell this to congress?
- supertrope 4y ago
  Congress already passed the TRACED Act. The FCC is moving relatively quickly in issuing government orders (as fast as a federal agency can move). It will take years for phone companies to upgrade to signing calls with level A attestation. Right now 20% of calls are signed and that includes level B attestation (we know the number is not spoofed but not who is using it) and level C (we only know the upstream phone company). If signing is implemented it will take more time to finally cut off non-signed calls. Tracing abuse takes time. Then robocallers can not pay fines and open another LLC. Hopefully this will reach an equilibrium like email where 99% of raw email traffic is spam but spam filters make it reasonable for individuals.
bbbbb5 4y ago
[flagged]
- psnehanshu 4y ago
  Maybe Americans should abandon English.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    wasn't there a language created/designed specifically to be an international replacement, but was universally laughed at as a response?
    - psnehanshu 4y ago
      Esperanto
      - dylan604 4y ago
        yes, that's the one. i remember the first time reading about it and thought Klingon or Elvish would have been a better choice, but alas, i'm not a linguist
- shockeychap 4y ago
  > You might have telco experience, but you have no clue whatsoever about the economics of these scams. Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence is more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the merit of what they said. Furthermore, saying "it makes no difference to the scammers if they're paying 10c per minute or calling for free" shows an equally clear failure to understand the economics of these scams. The vast majority of calls made by a scammer will yield nothing. They have to make numerous calls to find the one sucker who can be convinced to turn over their financial information or mail cash or do whatever needs to be done. I don't know the exact per-minute cost at which most scams become cost prohibitive, but I'm pretty sure you'd be shocked at how little it is. If it takes 2,000 calls to find one victim, and you're paying 10 cents per call, you'll spend $200 per victim. Will you make that much back, and will it be enough to offset all of the other costs involved in trolling? It depends. But it definitely makes it less appetizing than when the calls are free.
smachiz 4y ago
Are you referring to STIR/SHAKEN that is a requirement and has been/is being rolled out? I'm not sure how much was commercial benefit vs lazyness/no incentive to solve the issue directly - the telcos aren't making a lot of money on inbound calling. It's just a problem that didn't impact them directly - only their customers.
- PaybackTony 4y ago
  Have to touch on this as it's a common theme to my response. There absolutely are regulations. However, regulations being in place, and the enforcement of these regulations are different. STIR/SHAKEN is a requirement, however it's an easy requirement for scammers to meet. (Numbers are super cheap to buy in bulk, pennies per month typically). Sooner or later they'll run out. The second side of the regulation miss is that carriers have to self-report much of the time. These centers pay into the 6 figures monthly to their carriers. The carriers know exactly what kind of traffic is being sent through and many times aide these scammers in shaping the traffic to look more legit. Auto-warranty scams in the past? Huge amounts of that traffic were routed through the likes of Y-Tel and a couple others. Regulators knew this but enforcement took years to happen. It's the same right now. Lastly is the issue of what happens once enforcement occurs? The answer is not great: The scammers change numbers and keep going. They aren't local and it's not cut and dry when it comes to continuous enforcement against foreign entities. Their carriers still support them and the fines are typically less than a month's revenue from the larger outfits (think Uber). Better meta-data helps aide robo / scam / spam blockers. IMO, we should just shut down these carriers who knowingly aide these scammers. We know who they are, they aren't hard to find.
  - smachiz 4y ago
    Isn't that basically what they did? I think the FCC authorized the disconnection of a handful of service providers, and has been aggressively sending notices to others. https://www.engadget.com/robocall-company-may-receive-the-largest-fine-ever-from-the-fcc-110759522.html https://www.engadget.com/robocall-company-may-receive-the-la...
- pards 4y ago
nostromo 4y ago
You've missed the legal / regulatory side of things. Apparently this has just recently changed, but telcos are highly regulated in the US and they are legally required to execute calls placed by their customers. This means that they have to be very very sure the call should be blocked before doing so, otherwise they face legal liability. This regulatory structure means that call spamming in the US is all but legally protected. Compare this to less-regulated email, where Gmail and other providers are free to block spam based on any reason: source ip, domain, content of the email, etc.
ligerzer0 4y ago
What blows my mind is scammers can spoof real people's phone numbers... Like shouldn't that be a top priority to shut down ?
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  That sounds like it might cost money, though. It's free to just do nothing about it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  Yes, I've even had them spoof law enforcement phone numbers, we should have the technology to shut that down
- EchoReflection 4y ago
  Someone very close to me recently got scammed by someone calling from a fake Wells Fargo fraud prevention phone number
nurettin 4y ago
> There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it What are these easy few regulatory/technical mechanisms?
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  PaybackTony, I would also love to hear your suggestions (not sarcastically).

jesuscript 4y ago

That’s kind of sad that they won’t just fix it if they can. I over hear my elderly parents give each other tips like “don’t open that email, it’s fake” and things like that.

javajosh 4y ago

So, I realize this is a big ask - but can you please write this up as a story and sent it to a major news outlet? My cynicism is already high, but I would not have suspected this of all things, that telcos would allow the elderly to be victimized to the tune of $10B to make a few pennies. Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal

_-david-_ 4y ago
>Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal And when scammers go back to using Western Union are you going to ban that as well? When they ask a person to send them cash are you going to ban cash as well? Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this.
- zinclozenge 4y ago
  > Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this. You might be on to something here.
- javajosh 4y ago
  I want gift cards banned not because of scammers. Like pay-day loan services, gift cards are based on the fraud of profound information asymmetry. Gift cards make liquid cash worse in almost every dimension. It's tied to one supplier. It can be lost. I forgot the stats, but I'm positive billions spent on gift cards are never redeemed. Gift cards are just slightly less evil than payday loan services. They take advantage of a (positive) human need to give, and a (negative) human need to not work hard, picking out a gift, and a (negative) need to appear to have purchased a gift when one, in fact, has not. What makes it even more evil is that because it's a gift the loss is not seen as important for the giver (they gave it away after all) or the receiver (they weren't expecting to have this thing). The burden on the receiver, to carry around this extra piece of plastic, having to remember to use it, possibly even altering your behavior to use it, makes it even more nefarious. I don't think my position is particularly common. Certainly gift card industry fraud is low on the list of societies pressing problems. But it is a problem and one that I wish was better understood .
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Perhaps the solution is to (further) stigmatize gift cards. The Chinese seem to have figured it out with their red envelopes full of money.
    - javajosh 4y ago
      Yeah, how about this: when I get a gift card, I a) discount the gift about 50% based on EV and b) consider the giver kind of stupid for wasting money like this. It's like the opposite of being impressed with someone for getting a good deal. "You spent $5 and this is worth $100 to me, awesome!" versus, "You spent $25 on this and it's worth $10 to me. Yay." Everyone just fucking loses. (Like you, I am surprised at my vehemence - perhaps pg is right that writing and thinking are one and the same, and I'm just late to the epiphany that I absolutely loath gift cards. So much so I wouldn't even mind being known as "that guy who hates gift cards so much".)
bbbbb5 4y ago
>Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal Most of the losses (in $ terms) from these scams do not involve gift cards. They involve the scammers convincing you to install some remote desktop software and emptying your bank account. It's already illegal to send people to open bank accounts with fake IDs, but the scammers have no problem cashing out the bulk of their profits like that.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  How do they get the big bucks out of the last bank?
  - bbbbb5 4y ago
    Sometimes they transfer to a cryptocurrency exchange, sometimes they go to a branch to withdraw everything. Banks don't really like either of those, so issuing checks and cashing them somewhere else is a common scheme. Some may bounce the money through a few accounts and eventually into a business account that'll send it overseas, it depends. The people on the ground are random replaceable idiots.
alexb_ 4y ago
"Make a way you can use money without being tracked by everybody illegal" is not a good thing
saxonww 4y ago
My grandmother got talked into mailing cash between the pages of a magazine. I don't really know what to say other than the format of the money doesn't matter too much, someone is going to try to scam people out of it, and the scams are going to work.

jyu 4y ago

How many broken systems are the result of perverse incentives?

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Absolutely everything: car dependency, affordable housing and healthcare, hard drugs, the environment, corporate tax evasion, energy, money laundering, immigration, good pay for nursing and teaching staff, etc. "We can't fix X because then sector Y would suffer trillions in losses and jobs so it's best to keep the status quo and kick the can down the road."

zackmorris 4y ago

This is a classic example of an unintended consequence of deregulation. Normally we could petition our elected officials and get something done about it. But lobbyists have come to so completely dominate our legislative process that whole industries have effectively coopted the government through regulatory capture. On top of that, they've hoodwinked half the population into thinking that regulation bad. At this point, we can all remain hypervigilant and snoop on our grandparents and get sucked into various private industry scams like identity insurance. We can play games with switching carriers within the duopolies in our areas when they let scammers steal from us. We can project loudly on social media when someone across the world steals right from out of our bank accounts, and haggle with our credit card companies to charge it back and rip off some merchant so that we don't have to pay. This is how scams metastasize into protection rackets and authoritarianism. Or we could like, make this all illegal and charge carriers directly when it happens. But that would cost rich people money. So rich people run propaganda campaigns to convince us that fines just get passed on to consumers. Which doesn't make any sense in a free market, where we could switch to a cheaper carrier that didn't get fined. Once we see this from that meta level (that political controversy is rooted in misdirection and lies) it just gets so tiring to watch the same debates over and over. Maybe we need some rich people to step up and call out this nonsense (dragons give up their loot so easily). Maybe we need to organize and start some consumer unions that dictate to vendors how much we'll pay for their services until they shape up. Maybe we should get back to our geek roots and start a free peer to peer wireless network. Huh, writing out this rant, I just had a thought. Where's the keystone in this? Political progress can't be hacked, so none of our instincts around quick fixes work. In other words, the half of the population that has the working solution has to somehow convince the other half to go along with it. That can be a long and painful process spanning decades. So what does the other half want? What concession to them would result in getting legislation passed to solve this?

Diesel555 4y ago
Anyone claiming “deregulation” for the names sake is speaking rhetoric without knowledge. Both conservative and liberal economists agree with regulation. The most conservative of economists understand the concept of externalities. Call centers bear a clear externality. The business transaction between the telecom Company and the caller bears a negative externality on the callee who is not a member of that transaction. Conservative economists would also agree with regulation to at least impose a cost on the transaction to reflect that externality. The problem is with policy and lobbying as you stated - write your member of congress. To comment on a now deleted post to this comment: I’m not arguing that bad regulation doesn’t exist which can perpetuate and help continue market failures. I’m arguing that good regulation is the fix to known market failures and economists on both sides recognize that.

nojs 4y ago

It may also be that they see this as a slippery slope of being responsible for moderating the content of phone calls, which is not a road I imagine carriers want to go down.

baron816 4y ago

Can you please tell this to congress?

supertrope 4y ago
Congress already passed the TRACED Act. The FCC is moving relatively quickly in issuing government orders (as fast as a federal agency can move). It will take years for phone companies to upgrade to signing calls with level A attestation. Right now 20% of calls are signed and that includes level B attestation (we know the number is not spoofed but not who is using it) and level C (we only know the upstream phone company). If signing is implemented it will take more time to finally cut off non-signed calls. Tracing abuse takes time. Then robocallers can not pay fines and open another LLC. Hopefully this will reach an equilibrium like email where 99% of raw email traffic is spam but spam filters make it reasonable for individuals.

bbbbb5 4y ago

[flagged]

psnehanshu 4y ago
Maybe Americans should abandon English.
- dylan604 4y ago
  wasn't there a language created/designed specifically to be an international replacement, but was universally laughed at as a response?
  - psnehanshu 4y ago
    Esperanto
    - dylan604 4y ago
      yes, that's the one. i remember the first time reading about it and thought Klingon or Elvish would have been a better choice, but alas, i'm not a linguist
shockeychap 4y ago
> You might have telco experience, but you have no clue whatsoever about the economics of these scams. Please watch your tone and choice of words. That sentence is more focused on defaming the OP than addressing the merit of what they said. Furthermore, saying "it makes no difference to the scammers if they're paying 10c per minute or calling for free" shows an equally clear failure to understand the economics of these scams. The vast majority of calls made by a scammer will yield nothing. They have to make numerous calls to find the one sucker who can be convinced to turn over their financial information or mail cash or do whatever needs to be done. I don't know the exact per-minute cost at which most scams become cost prohibitive, but I'm pretty sure you'd be shocked at how little it is. If it takes 2,000 calls to find one victim, and you're paying 10 cents per call, you'll spend $200 per victim. Will you make that much back, and will it be enough to offset all of the other costs involved in trolling? It depends. But it definitely makes it less appetizing than when the calls are free.

smachiz 4y ago

Are you referring to STIR/SHAKEN that is a requirement and has been/is being rolled out? I'm not sure how much was commercial benefit vs lazyness/no incentive to solve the issue directly - the telcos aren't making a lot of money on inbound calling. It's just a problem that didn't impact them directly - only their customers.

PaybackTony 4y ago
Have to touch on this as it's a common theme to my response. There absolutely are regulations. However, regulations being in place, and the enforcement of these regulations are different. STIR/SHAKEN is a requirement, however it's an easy requirement for scammers to meet. (Numbers are super cheap to buy in bulk, pennies per month typically). Sooner or later they'll run out. The second side of the regulation miss is that carriers have to self-report much of the time. These centers pay into the 6 figures monthly to their carriers. The carriers know exactly what kind of traffic is being sent through and many times aide these scammers in shaping the traffic to look more legit. Auto-warranty scams in the past? Huge amounts of that traffic were routed through the likes of Y-Tel and a couple others. Regulators knew this but enforcement took years to happen. It's the same right now. Lastly is the issue of what happens once enforcement occurs? The answer is not great: The scammers change numbers and keep going. They aren't local and it's not cut and dry when it comes to continuous enforcement against foreign entities. Their carriers still support them and the fines are typically less than a month's revenue from the larger outfits (think Uber). Better meta-data helps aide robo / scam / spam blockers. IMO, we should just shut down these carriers who knowingly aide these scammers. We know who they are, they aren't hard to find.
- smachiz 4y ago
  Isn't that basically what they did? I think the FCC authorized the disconnection of a handful of service providers, and has been aggressively sending notices to others. https://www.engadget.com/robocall-company-may-receive-the-largest-fine-ever-from-the-fcc-110759522.html https://www.engadget.com/robocall-company-may-receive-the-la...
pards 4y ago

nostromo 4y ago

You've missed the legal / regulatory side of things. Apparently this has just recently changed, but telcos are highly regulated in the US and they are legally required to execute calls placed by their customers. This means that they have to be very very sure the call should be blocked before doing so, otherwise they face legal liability. This regulatory structure means that call spamming in the US is all but legally protected. Compare this to less-regulated email, where Gmail and other providers are free to block spam based on any reason: source ip, domain, content of the email, etc.

ligerzer0 4y ago

What blows my mind is scammers can spoof real people's phone numbers... Like shouldn't that be a top priority to shut down ?

heavyset_go 4y ago
That sounds like it might cost money, though. It's free to just do nothing about it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
iancmceachern 4y ago
Yes, I've even had them spoof law enforcement phone numbers, we should have the technology to shut that down
EchoReflection 4y ago
Someone very close to me recently got scammed by someone calling from a fake Wells Fargo fraud prevention phone number

nurettin 4y ago

> There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it What are these easy few regulatory/technical mechanisms?

ericbarrett 4y ago
PaybackTony, I would also love to hear your suggestions (not sarcastically).