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Good start. Next, put the people running these scam phone providers in jail.
by coldpie 1y ago
Good start. Next, put the people running these scam phone providers in jail.
- Timwi 1y agoIs that what European countries do? Is that why there are no robocalls there?
- ruszki 1y agoWe have robocalls, just not that much. I have 1-2 every months. Similar amount of spam SMS during the worst month. But I didn't get spam texts for months now. And my phone number is basically a public domain now. I have no idea the reason.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoYes! Easy to forget that just because "we" don't fall for them, they're still incredibly harmful to our seniors and other vulnerable populations. Also hate the scam "work from home for $125,000 per year" texts. They really prey on the desperate.
- RajT88 1y agoI know a gal whose grandmother sent ~400k to scammers, which is the kind of victim they are looking for - someone in cognitive decline who is malleable. The neighbors apparently also were preying on her, and ended up with her cars and a bunch of other stuff. Absolute scum of the earth.
- RankingMember 1y agoThe "r/scams" sub-reddit is an amazing glimpse into this world. The saddest ones to me are the peoples' parents who fully believe they're talking to a celebrity who needs their money for some outlandish reason (and they send it to them over and over).
- jm4 1y agoExactly. My city started posting about online safety and warnings about various scams. Unfortunately, almost every one of them also mentions how a local resident was victimized. We have a fairly large senior population. It's easy to say it's idiots who fall for this stuff when we're young enough to have grown up in this world or started using new technology at an early age. We will be the ones targeted someday and it will be a medium that didn't become available to us until later in life just like what the seniors are experiencing now.
- schmidtleonard 1y agoYes, although it's worth mentioning that there are scams that target our demographic, they just look different (fake investment, job, real-estate, or romance opportunities).
- rectang 1y ago> It's easy to say it's idiots who fall for this stuff It’s not just “easy”, it’s an ideological imperative to ensure that the vulnerable have “personal responsibility” to avoid predation, while predators bear no responsibility for their own actions. Many tech business models depend on exploitation — it’s not just phone scammers.
- pessimizer 1y agoIt's always convenient to decide that the weak deserve to be exploited because they were too lazy or stupid to be strong. Then we can do the thing that makes the least sense, which is to design society to protect the strong. Or rather, to justify what the strong were already doing and didn't have to ask anybody's permission to do, and that nobody else ever had a say about that mattered.
- mulmen 1y agoApple makes it extremely easy to fall prey to email scams. They absolutely refuse to show an email address in less than 3 taps. There’s no setting in Mail to always show the address and they trust all senders to give an honest name. So if a contact loses their contact list scammers can send a known name with a junk address and you won’t see it unless you go out of your way. Apple makes a lot of dumb user-hostile decisions but this one is particularly egregious and has caught me off guard.
- jacobr1 1y agoHow many are based in the US and subject to US-based prosecution?
- lokar 1y agoThat's no longer a barrier to the use of force by the US
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoLiterally has not been a barrier to the US using force to protect commercial interests since "the shores of Tripoli" in 1801.
- mh- 1y agoMore than you'd think, from what I've seen.
- stonemetal12 1y agoProbably none, but you would think fraud would be illegal everywhere.
- coldpie 1y agoWhy can someone from outside the US make my phone ring? Why can't I opt out of calls sourced internationally? Seems like an easy way to fix the problem. There is no reason for anyone overseas to call me, and if someone US-based does phone spamming, we can prosecute them.
- larrysalibra 1y agoYou're right, it is an easy technical fix. Mainland China lets people opt out of phone calls that come from outside of the Mainland...it's a feature one can turn off on an on their mobile plan. Calls from outside the Mainland always cause a warning to pop up on the receiving user's phone that says something like "this call is coming from outside of the mainland, be careful of being scammed". I can imagine there are many reasons the US doesn't fix this..one of which probably that much of US customer service is outsourced to people outside the US!
- Triphibian 1y agoOr at the very least send them a DVD of The Beekeeper.
- Bender 1y agoGood start. Next, put the people running these scam phone providers in jail. I agree. In fact, 1200 SS7 circuits is nothing. If these people are not locked up they will just get another circuit using another fake identity. It's like blocking 1200 ASN's and saying one made a dent in spam.
- paxys 1y agoI'm going to go ahead and say none of them are in the jurisdiction of the DoJ.
- coldpie 1y agoNo one outside the jurisdiction of my country's laws should be able to make my phone ring or send me text messages without my permission.
- more_corn 1y agoYou got my vote
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoAt least without it showing up as an international number.
- schmidtleonard 1y agoNo, labeling is not enough, options are not enough, unattested communication needs to go silently to spam by default. Anything else encourages the spam. "We let spammers ring your phone unless you tick an option 5 menus deep in your phone that gets automatically reset every 3 months at update time and moved every 2 years between names/locations that range from awful to insane" doesn't cut it.
- coldpie 1y agoThe beautiful thing about default-deny for internationally-sourced calls is it fixes the spam problem for everyone, including those who opt-in. If 90% of the spammers' calls are just immediately dropped, they're no longer going to get enough hits to be worth the effort, so it also protects those who actually do have a legit reason to receive international calls.
- schmidtleonard 1y ago
- more_corn 1y agoOr start assassinating them. They prey on the most vulnerable Americans. Why not declare war on them and start decapitating their organizations?
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago[flagged]
- edm0nd 1y agoI pray and yearn for the day that they legalize and allow drone striking ransomware operators.
- candiddevmike 1y agoDo these scam phone providers have their Google My Business listing verified yet?