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I remember when the pandemic happened all of a sudden robo spam calls suddenly completely stopped for me. So even the pandemic hit cyber criminals! Also for wha
by subsubzero 4y ago
I remember when the pandemic happened all of a sudden robo spam calls suddenly completely stopped for me. So even the pandemic hit cyber criminals! Also for whatever reason spam calls for me have greatly decreased in the past 6 months, for a while I was getting 3-4 spam calls a day and now its 1-2 a week.
- echelon 4y agoOnce they learn LLM+SST+TTS, though... Only strong legislation will stop it.
- scrame 4y agolol, how? The calls aren't coming from places that respect laws, they way that CAN-spam didn't stop spam mails.
- nawgz 4y agoBecause the calls are being enabled by absurdly weak security on the part of the telecoms. You think they can't stop spoofed numbers? They're making money allowing it is all
- WalterSear 4y agoAnd when they aren't, they don't want to spend the money to stop them.
- flangola7 4y agoRequire phone carriers to block networks that consistently send spam calls. This puts pressure on foreign networks to clamp down on the practice.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoThis is true, but they’re a lot more email servers that there are telco carriers. So it’s not entirely unwinnable.
- acdha 4y agoThought exercise: a law is passed personally charging the CEO of your phone company $20. How many hours would it take before they’d magically announce that it is in fact technically feasible to block spoofed phone numbers and de-peer the shady VoIP providers who originate most spam? They don’t do this now because it’s more work and they aren’t legally required to do so. The money they get from the spam outfits is greater than the cost, so the phone companies didn’t have an incentive to stop it. Make it uneconomical and that can change very quickly.
- ungamedplayer 4y agoThere are also wiretap laws that sometimes take effect.
- roywashere 4y agoIn NL, almost zero calls. What is the difference?
- throwaway049 4y agoNot enough scammers speak Dutch? One day they'll realise they can robo call people in NL in English and be understood most of the time.
- Nextgrid 4y agoEnglish is a great language for scammers because it scales well worldwide - that one language covers the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and others, so an English-based scam operation has a much larger addressable market than other languages which would usually be limited to a single country.
- organsnyder 4y agoMost people in NL speak English, though. They could definitely be targeted by English payloads.
- Nextgrid 4y agoIs it common for the services typically impersonated by those scammers (local tax authority/government department, bank or major retailer such as Amazon)? If not, it would still be a potential red flag for the victim.
- Symbiote 4y agoIt would fit for a call "from Microsoft", but not much else. Britain also isn't plagued by spam calls though, so it's not only a language barrier.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoHrr. I once got such a call in Germany while reconfiguring my Voip, so my usual filters were down. But I've never heard of Microsoft germany calling endusers, nor doing that in english. Was funny btw. I picked up, asked 'Wer stört?/Who is disturbing(me)?' and got an Indian accent bubbling something about calling from MS customer service, that they had to clean a virus. Me in a mix between giggling and sighing: 'Could you stop your fucking script, PLEASE?!' ...You want me to open some page which tries to download some remote access tool, camouflaged as something else, hoping that would fly because my explorer doesn't show real file endings? While there is nothing from MS running here at all? Not even in a virtual machine? He bubbling 'What is your name, what is this company?' Me: 'I'm just the facility manager, doing house keeping stuff, and you don't need to know.' He bubbling something about me being impolite. Me countering with something about no need to be polite to fraudsters. He flustered. Me telling him about criminal acts, and our 'Bundesnetzagentur' where one can report such attempts, which leads to termination of such faked numbers, fines, and on occassion seized equipment, which makes the rounds in such circles, which leads to less and less acceptance of such 'businesses', because it's bad for their business. Too much hassle to be worth it. About 10 minutes of hilarity ensued, where I asked why they are even trying it(in Germany), who would fall for it, if ever? In the end, enraged gibberish, which I countered with 'Ja. Ja. Du mich auch, Arschloch!/Yes, Yes, the same to you, asshole!' Clack...
- rootusrootus 4y agoThey stopped calling you and started calling me. You're welcome ;-). I get 5-10 a day now, up significantly in the last couple years.
- richardw 4y agoThat sounds like a hell hole. I’d throw my sim away.
- matthewfcarlson 4y agoI set my voicemail to be 2 minutes long (the max AT&T allows). It's just me telling jokes I found on the internet so it isn't terrible but man it's effective. I still get the spam calls but now I don't get a little voicemail I need to delete.
- xsmasher 4y agoI turned on "silence unknown callers" for a month or two and that seemed to get my number off of the hot list.
- jzig 4y agoThe trick is to pick up and immediately mute your phone. They will hang up and eventually flag the number as inactive or unscammable (like maybe it’s a machine picking up). If you don’t answer, they can call back later. If you pick up and say something, then they know there is a human behind the number and that it is actively used.
- snarfy 4y agoChange your voicemail prompt to "We're sorry, the number cannot be completed as dialed..."
- ungamedplayer 4y agoThey don't fall for this. Or at least using the local Australian no-number recording... Somehow they know.
- drewbitt 4y agoFor me, they’ve moved on to spam texts. I get 5-10 variations of “Hey”, “How are you?” a week. No provided names, just social engineering attempts if I were to reply.
- cellis 4y agoI get 5 - 10 "Your <Amazon|Paypal|Google|> account was suspended...". I haven't tried to see what their followup is for phishing.
- kjs3 4y agoFunny you mention it. Last couple of months I've gone from getting a handful of "account suspended" SMS phishes a year to getting a handful a week. I assumed it was something that broke at AT&T; never considered it might be a global economics driven phenomenon.
- deelowe 4y agoI wonder how much of this is due to STIR/SHAKEN [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
- l_theanine 4y agoI got a new phone about a year ago and requested an area code that’s not from around here. All the spam calls come from that area code, and I have no business there, so it’s simple to filter out which calls are legitimate just by seeing if the area code is my actual one or the other one.
- ssss11 4y agoA high profile corporate hack happened recently, lo and behold I now get tons of spam sms’s that I never used to.