11 ms·

Great idea! Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss importan

• baby 2mo ago
  I think most legitimate businesses have moved away from phone calls for exactly this reason. In lots of countries they use whatsapp
• LeBit 2mo ago
  The whitelist managed by the government is not a bad idea. I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop). I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
  • left-struck 2mo ago
    Have you tried call screening? I know for sure apple phones can do this but I believe some android phones can too? For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling” The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important. It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period. I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.
    • embedding-shape 2mo ago
      There we go again, technical solutions that doesn't actually solve the problem, yet works for the individual with the right technology :) Jokes aside, besides just outlawing telemarketing as a whole, there are "bigger" solutions that can help more, like the opt-in "do not call" registries that bunch of countries have, that actually work, and works across landline/mobile phones, regardless of OS or manufacturer :) I'm not sure those lists exists in every country, but every country I've lived in (so far) has had a variant of those, that works.
  • deleted 2mo ago
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• germandiago 2mo ago
  At the other side of the spectrum (they are mostly annoying, I agree) how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?
  • jurgenburgen 2mo ago
    Why should shits be given? Find a better way to advertise than harassing people.
    • Gigachad 2mo ago
      Advertising is such a zero sum game as well. The only reason companies have to cold call market is because their competitors are cold calling. So you have to participate to keep up. If no one can do it, no one is getting a leg up over the rest.
      • nehal3m 2mo ago
        You’re making a lot of assumptions. What is the cost benefit for cold calling? You could conceivably be better off letting the competition bleed. But I suspect a legit cost benefit analysis is hard to come by, mostly because marketing sells itself to management first.
  • n4r9 2mo ago
    List it in a register that people can search when they're actively looking for products like yours.
  • tuetuopay 2mo ago
    As if we don't already have enough advertisement channels in our lives.
  • vjk800 2mo ago
    Do you personally buy everything from the telemarketers? If not, how do you find the products you want to buy?
  • 2mo ago
• Gigachad 2mo ago
  I wonder how much we even need international calls from unknown numbers. In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
  • Raudius 2mo ago
    In the EU its not uncommon to receive phone calls from other countries. Just the other day I received a large package and the driver called with an international number to make sure I would be home to receive it.
    • cuu508 2mo ago
      Delivery companies would adapt and drivers would have work-only dumb phones with correct country SIMs. Problem is, spam & scam callers would adapt as well.
    • account42 2mo ago
      Those calls won't be from a random country on the other end of the world that is outside the purview of EU regulations though.
  • msh 2mo ago
    I dont think unknown numbers should be allowed at all, esp for business. I think its a reasonable requirement that if a business wants to call someone they are willing to identify them self.
    • simiones 2mo ago
      I think they meant "unknown numbers" as "numbers that are not saved in my phone", not hidden numbers.
    • embedding-shape 2mo ago
      Yeah, Spain went this route. We used to get telemarketing calls from random mobile phone numbers (or straight up "hidden" number), so was hard to really know where they came from, unless the person admitted it in the phone call. A year or so that was made illegal, and now every "unwanted telemarketing" call has to come from a landline with a regional code, or the toll-free numbers, which leads to them actually having to register first, so easier to crack down on the ones that don't follow the "anti-spam" lists like Lista Robinson and similar, or break the rules in other ways.
• vjk800 2mo ago
  There doesn't need to be any kind of technical solution. If a telemarketer wants to sell something, they must declare the name of their company. The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.
  • eru 2mo ago
    What if the business says 'That wasn't me?' I mean, everyone can call anyone and name any company already.
    • ValentinPearce 2mo ago
      I assume ownership of the caller's number can be logged/checked. I haven't had too much trouble with telemarketers lately but there is a crowdsourced app in France called Saracroche that can be easily installed on your phone and blocks spam numbers by becoming the caller id service. You can also use the app to report a number and help build the huge database.
      • eru 2mo ago
        > I assume ownership of the caller's number can be logged/checked. Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
        • Sayrus 2mo ago
          Not in the domain at all but wasn't this the purpose of STIR/SHAKEN but the biggest blocker was that large telcos hadn't deployed it? I think Android and iOS dialer app show you whether there was Caller ID Verification done or not so you may be able to drop anything unverified.
        • vbernat 2mo ago
          In France, thanks to STIR/SHAKEN, this is not possible any more for the fixed phone numbering plans (and telemarketers have to register their phone numbers in a subset of this numbering plan). For mobile lines, this is still not 100% implemented due to the difficulty of handling roaming, but I think it is becoming efficient as I didn't have a telemarketer with a mobile number since a long time (they seem to hide their number now).
• wolvoleo 2mo ago
  Yes though most of the calls I get are scams. And most of them come from abroad now because Spain also banned them. It is not a very effective measure
  • kuboble 2mo ago
    At least a strategy to ignore unknown international numbers has much less collateral damage if any. All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers. I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".
  • embedding-shape 2mo ago
    Lista Robinson works great in Spain though, enroll there and enjoy the silence :) May take a month or two to really kick in, and if you've already enrolled but it's not working, check that the details are 100% correct. Worked both for me, my wife and tons of friends, although it takes time before it works.
    • wolvoleo 2mo ago
      I am on that list and have been for years but it doesn't help me at all. I did stop getting spam calls but not scams. Scammers are criminals anyway so they don't give a shit about that list. I especially get a LOT of energy scams. They pretend to be from Endesa and they have my details somehow (some company must have provided it to them or it was leaked by a criminal employee). They're usually calling from numbers in Mallorca or the Canaries. However in this day and age of VoIP you don't know where the hell they really are of course.
      • embedding-shape 2mo ago
        That's so strange, both me, my wife and friends and family had similar issues years ago, before I put everyone into Lista Robinson, and it worked for all of us, easily 10+ people throughout the years. I wonder why it's so different between people. Does it depend on the region perhaps? We're all in Catalunya for what it's worth. Maybe double-check the details, I remember for one person it didn't work at first, and the entered name had a typo, maybe it's really strict? Also try just say "Estoy en Lista Robinson" next time someone calls, makes them hang up quickly and blacklist your number at least within that company.
• nehal3m 2mo ago
  Marketing ruins everything it touches, from the public square to the internet and from the phone network to radio. I don’t know what the alternative is, but I don’t need one to see this is shit.
  • corford 2mo ago
    These would all help: well funded public broadcasting (for TV & radio); strongly enforced regulations for public advertising (public square); encouragement of open source & open standards; real anti-trust enforcement. Most of the above exists - the problem is political & regulatory capture constantly undermines and weakens a lot of it.
• PunchyHamster 2mo ago
  Just easy ability to report would be enough. Then the govt can get to the phone number owner and make any middle men also responsible (in "tell us who was your client or pay the fine" way)
• boredumb 2mo ago
  When I was getting a D&B number I missed their call I wasn't expecting because I wont answer unknowns and my phone blocks half the calls they think are spam anyway, then had to spend the better half of a week answering spam calls before finally getting what I needed.
• branko_d 2mo ago
  I feel this could be solved by crowdsourcing, assuming the support from the major phone manufacturers and possibly governments. - After a call from an unknown number concludes, the phone could offer an option to the user to mark it as "spam" (blocking the number in the history would have the same effect). - The spam mark would then go into the central database. If a phone number was marked as "spam" too many times, it would no longer be able to ring the phone (maybe it gets diverted into the "spam folder", like e-mails). Or am I being too naive here? What are the obstacles for something like this actually happening?
  • pipe2devnull 2mo ago
    That would work well assuming scammers and stuff are actually blocked from spoofing phone numbers
  • petcat 2mo ago
    My google android phone already does this. I get basically no spam calls at all except very rarely. But I go to the spam tab in the phone app and I see there are dozens that got blocked
  • clan 2mo ago
    You cannot trust which number which is signalled to the end user. Most spam calls I get is shown as legit numbers. If I call them back they will go to an innocent and unsuspecting user. Google is already collecting this information and shows numbers as "probably spam". It is hard to enforce this harder even with collateral damage as you cannot trust the number which is signalled. Legislation is in this case a good thing which might get the telcos to take this more seriously. This needs to be handled on an operator level. Nothing will happen without legislative incentives. The world is run on SS7 which has a lot of problems which inertia and lacking incentives makes hard to overcome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7
  • inferniac 2mo ago
    there are some apps that do this, I used to use truecaller, but here in poland orange phone seems to have better data
• epolanski 2mo ago
  You don't need to ban telemarketing, you just need to make void and nulls contracts made by phone. Do so, and 99% of telemarketers no longer have the incentive to call anybody.
  • wpietri 2mo ago
    Walk me through an example here. I'm a telemarketer who calls you up, sells you on something, and charges your card. What changes in that scenario?
    • epolanski 2mo ago
      You can't charge nobody's card because in order to do so you'd first need to sign a verbal contract.
      • wpietri 2mo ago
        Again, please explain the details of what you're thinking. If I get a card number, type it into my POS system, collect money, and send you a product, who's going to stop me?
        • vntok 2mo ago
          Wait, am I getting it right you're talking about collecting a prospective customer's card number and CVC over the phone, and then typing it yourself in a third party system? Then it's trivial to settle: that's the big bad PCI DSS violation mouthful, so two to three things will happen. One, the customer's bank will reimburse them as soon as they complain that they have not authorized the fraudulent transaction that appears on their account. Product being sent, received, sent back, etc has no bearing on this. Two, you will be audited, fined $xx,xxx monthly and/or perhaps even get banned from the PSP layer. Again, sending real products has no bearing in this. Three, well the customer's own bank will be in touch pretty soon with yours to "settle things", as banks don't particularly like to advance reimbursements to their clients for fraudulent transactions. Hope you weren't using your own bank as a PSP as they kept receipts of everything you were doing (they just weren't looking until now).
• embedding-shape 2mo ago
  In Spain we have something called "Lista Robinson" (in Sweden exists something similar, called "NIX-registret") which are basically opt-in lists where you can enter your phone number, then once the new lists been distributed, the telemarketing companies cannot call you, if they're doing things properly. If they call anyway, you just mention you're on the list, they hang up, and remove your number from the list they have, eventually you stop getting calls. I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too. Obviously hospitals, doctors, utility companies and similar don't cross-reference against these lists, as they have actual relationship with you already. Both in Sweden and in Spain I used to receive a lot of spam calls, like multiple per week, and once enrolled on these lists, the calls are non-existent, the only telemarketing calls I get now are from the companies I already have relationships with, which happens maybe once a month. If you suffer greatly by the constant spam calls, like I did once before, do take a look and see if there are similar opt-out lists in your country :) They may take a month or two before actually eliminating all calls, but they do work, apparently.
  • joenot443 2mo ago
    We have a similar list in America [1] and Canada [2]. Unfortunately, like any regulation, its efficacy is only as good as its enforcement, so my understanding is they're both routinely ignored. Particularly grim for the Canadian case - > In January 2009, numerous media and consumer advocacy organizations reported that anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer and download a set of numbers from the list for a $50 fee. It took their reporter ten minutes to do so. It has been proposed that list may be being downloaded and used as a telemarketing list overseas, where there's little that can be done as the CRTC has no jurisdiction outside of Canada [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List
    • 2mo ago
• felooboolooomba 2mo ago
  Here you are finally Kon5ole. I've been to reach you regarding a car accident that wasn't you fault, is that correct?
• 4bpp 2mo ago
  I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.
  • ainiriand 2mo ago
    The only limitation is cold hard cash. The phone companies make big bucks from telemarketers by providing an endless list of new numbers and multiple lines. The whole racket wouldn't work without the companies' greenlight.
    • hamdingers 2mo ago
      Exactly. The same reason the bulk of paper mail is unsolicited garbage. The spammers/scammers are paying customers, without regulation the incentive for the phone company is to keep them flowing. Compare to how effective spam filters are on email. It's a much harder problem, but the spam costs the provider money, so they address it.
  • elfly 2mo ago
    It would work until you need to route an international call. And there's a lot of telemarketing and scams happening across country lines. I mean, they should still do it. It's just the first problem they'd face.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      That's fine. International calls pay a dollar a minute. If telemarketers had to pay that they'd be out of business.
      • bonzini 2mo ago
        International calls pay whatever the caller network wants them to pay. You're assuming that the caller network isn't part of the scam.
• tecleandor 2mo ago
  Can't remember right now if it's a EU or a Spain thing, but here they made mandatory to use real numbers on the Caller ID, so you can't use fake or hidden numbers for telemarketing. That way, of you're abusing, your line can easily be tracked, blocked or fined. There has been some waves of spammer calls, more like "fake job offer calls" or things like that, coming from cell phone numbers, and there's still some telemarketing, but it is way way lower than, say, ten years ago. Orders of magnitude .
  • pmontra 2mo ago
    It happened in Italy too (and we also had the fake job offer calls.) Suddenly I got spam calls from France and Spain and not anymore from Italian mobile numbers.
  • Laurel1234 2mo ago
    Don't know if I'm missing something really important or it was genuinely hell on earth 10 years ago but in Spain I get shitspammed by scammers all the time. Android blocks most of them thankfully but some still slip through.
• jareklupinski 2mo ago
  hospitals, doctors, and utility companies are the last ones i want to have direct contact to me :( they can continue to send me junk mail and unsolicited texts which already gets filed correctly friends and family only
  • vanviegen 2mo ago
    I can imagine quite a few scenarios in which I prefer for those companies to be able to reach me.
    • jareklupinski 2mo ago
      it's always bad news with those guys; no thanks
      • embedding-shape 2mo ago
        Might want to re-visit your day-to-day health routine if every time you're in contact with a doctor or hospital you're only getting bad news.
        • jareklupinski 2mo ago
          ... why would my day-to-day involve calling a doctor or hospital if im healthy? _they_ call _me_ with ideas on how to get me to pay them; when i go in, my vitals are strong
          • embedding-shape 2mo ago
            What I mean, is that normally, people go to the doctor and hospital for a whole host of reasons, and if the doctor never says "actually, that's nothing to worry about" or "the test was negative" then either maybe you're not going to the doctor enough, or your overall health is so bad you never get "good news" from the doctor when you go there. But then I remembered that most people here are Americans, and you (if you're American, I'm assuming here) don't go to the hospital/doctor just because, as it costs so much, compared to the life I'm used to, where whenever there is a health worry, you go to the doctor/hospital and they say "don't worry, it's fine" most of the time.
• dominicrose 2mo ago
  > I think there needs to be a technical solution. If the threat of an 999999 $£€ fine per call isn't enough. I opted in to a block list and after a few months received much less calls, but still more than zero. I think that now that everyone is on the block list by default companies will have to be more careful and it will be easier to report any issue.
• VorpalWay 2mo ago
  I think you may be overthinking it. In Sweden we already have a registry where we can opt out of telemarketing[1] (as well as ads in our physical mailboxes[2]). Generally this works well. Yes I still get a couple of "this is Microsoft calling" in Indian accent per year. Two spam calls per year isn't bad though. And this has worked for decades here, without special technical measures. (Companies with which you already have a prior relation are allowed to call / mail you though, but this is always possible to opt out of.) [1] https://www.nixtelefon.org/ https://www.nixtelefon.org/ [2] https://nixa.nixadresserat.se/ https://nixa.nixadresserat.se/
• jmorenoamor 2mo ago
  Marketers ruin every sales channel they can, it's their nature.
• arealaccount 2mo ago
  Allow people to charge 25 cents to accept calls from unknown numbers. I believe iOS has a feature to force unknown numbers to declare themselves before connecting, which is less good but still a thing.
• jimmydddd 2mo ago
  But how do you enforce this? It seems like most of the US spam calls originate from India. Do you have to get cooperation from Indian authorities? Seems unlikely since it's helping their economy? Do you put the burden on the phone company? I guess the phone companies make money from the calls, so they don't care?
  • broadside1296 2mo ago
    > Seems unlikely since it's helping their economy All it helps is filling in the scammers' pockets without being taxed for it. Also, they do cooperate with Indian authorities: * https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cbi-busts-gurugram-call-centre-that-duped-foreigners-arrests-43-suspected-cyber-criminals/article68449768.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cbi-busts-gurugram-ca... * https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/fbi-tip-leads-to-cbi-bust-noida-cyber-crime-syndicate-raided-6-arrested-8-5m-defrauded-from-us-citizens/articleshow/125932755.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/fbi-tip-lea...
• maximilianburke 2mo ago
  If only fucking Zoominfo would integrate with these whitelists. Canada has a national do-not-call list and that hasn't stopped me from getting hit multiple times a week by startup sales reps.
• zeta0134 2mo ago
  Personally I think the trust model for phone calls has worn itself out. The network is too large, and the risk too great, for "guess this 10 digit number and you can call me any hour of the night" to be at all sustainable. In practice, if you aren't already in my contact list, my phone does not ring. (Otherwise it would be ringing all day long.) Telemarketers do seem to have realized that calling at night is unwise, for now. Relatives meanwhile... I feel like if we were designing telephones as a brand new concept today, some sort of two-way handshake would be standard, right? Like a Friend Request on nearly any other network, before DMs can be sent. Phones were invented before we thought we had a practical need for such a flow, and the human-operated switching networks helped to somewhat discourage blatant abuse.
• stronglikedan 2mo ago
  > and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage. They do this to themselves if they don't leave a voicemail or can't bother to send a text. 99.9% of the scammers and spammers never do, so it's a good filter.
• infogulch 2mo ago
  The best technical solution I've seen is a spam review fee that turns into a reward and charged to the next closest originating peer. For example say you get a spam call. You notify your service provider and pay $10 to have them review the call recording to verify that its spam. An employee listens to the call and determines that it is, in fact, spam. You get a $100 reward for reporting spam and your service provider forwards the charge (+10%=$110) to the peer network where the spam call originated. They will in turn forward it to the next peer, or if the originator is a customer, charge and/or close the offending account. If this system is mandatory then the problem will quickly sort itself out.
  • saidnooneever 2mo ago
    its unlikely going to be worth the costs involved for the telco to do this reviewing. perhaps AI systems and other filters could be used but ultimately its tons of time needed because audio takes time to play. a lot of cases will be clearcut instabans but for the ones that are not it requires all of them to be reviewed with _some_ depth and then some with much more. its also prone to mistakes which is another process that needs to be managed etc. from a consumer standpoint this sounds super good ofc tho. i will post my phone nr everywhere :)
    • infogulch 2mo ago
      Why? They get paid $10 every time spam is reported regardless of the outcome. Trained staff listening at 3x speed with AI assistance could classify 3 obvious spam calls in a minute. If you can't turn $1800/hr per employee into a profit center I don't know what to tell you. That's a lot of money to cover for extreme outliers. Eventually the obvious spam callers would all quit and the volume would reduce to a handful of borderline cases. So the spam department wouldn't make a lot of money anymore, but the volume would be so low it would barely register.
      • Kon5ole 2mo ago
        But your idea is basically that the telco pays anyone 90 dollars per spam call they receive, how does that become a profit center? They can't get the money from the spammers, if they could this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
• allthetime 2mo ago
  General white-list is likely useless as number spoofing is still easy and prevalent in North America. Scammers would just set their number to a trusted one. You wouldn't have to see the list to assume that numbers from hospitals, doctors, utility companies, etc. would be included - unless they all had separate secret numbers to call out from. Likely this would be unreasonable - especially considering they still aren't able to end number spoofing.
• ninalanyon 2mo ago
  > I wonder how they can handle it, In Norway there is a list [1] run by the state registry service (Brønnøysundregitrene). Any individual can add their phone number to the list. Anyone cold calling is required to check that list at least once a month and there are fines for calling someone on the list. [1] https://www.brreg.no/om-oss/registrene-vare/om-reservasjonsregisteret/reservasjon-mot-telefonsalg-og-adressert-reklame/ https://www.brreg.no/om-oss/registrene-vare/om-reservasjonsr...
• blitzar 2mo ago
  > A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number. Of course it would be abused, but a properly verified caller id system for all the big ones; the inland revenue, the major banks, would mitigate 9/10 scam calls I get each day.
• guar47 2mo ago
  They've banned it here in the Netherlands since 1st July. Now, just nobody calls me at all