Small Companies Play Big Role in Robocall Scourge, But Remedies Are Elusive (wsj.com) 56
The billions of illegal robocalls inundating Americans are being facilitated largely by small telecom carriers that transmit calls over the internet, industry officials say, but authorities are at odds over what -- if anything -- they can do to stop them. From a report: These telecom carriers typically charge fractions of a cent per call, making their money on huge volume. Their outsize role in the robocall scourge has become apparent as large telecom companies get better at tracing robocalls to their source, spurring calls for regulators to hold them accountable. "There are definitely repeat offenders who keep showing up as the sources of illegal robocalls," said Patrick Halley, a senior vice president at USTelecom, a trade association of telecom companies that runs a robocall-tracing group. "Carriers that knowingly allow the origination of billions of illegal robocalls should be held accountable." U.S. regulators have conflicting interpretations of their ability to take the companies to court, however. And carriers aren't explicitly required to try to differentiate between legal and illegal robocalls, further clouding enforcement.
Easy fix: money (Score:3, Insightful)
Require all callers to pay 1 cent.
Customers would be given say 100 free calls a month. Any more than that and they pay 1 cent for each outgoing call.
Re:Easy fix: money (Score:4, Insightful)
Most robocalls originate outside of the US. The US carriers know which foreign telecom is delivering a billion calls on their doorstep. So cut off that foreign carrier until they deal with it. Note the carrier that gets cut off may not be the direct source. It may be one of their customers, and so on down the line. If you cut off a big carrier they''ll get the message real quick because while they are cut off they don't get any revenue from international calls and their customers can't make or receive calls. So I suspect in about an hour the big carrier will cut off the next entity in the line and get their service restored.
So there are two ways to fix this. Block it all here in the US. Or use a large, financial club on the international carriers to not do business with this scum. Note that this scum is paying those international carriers the 0.1 cent a call so these carriers are profiting (a billion calls == a million in revenue for the carrier). We need to make robocalling unprofitable for the international carriers and a quick way to do that is to cut them completely off from the network until they fix it.
These cuts off will likely never happen. The US carriers simply tell Indonesian Telecom that in 10 days the wires get cut. They just need to be prepared to actually cut them 10 days later.
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^*THIS*^
It's apparently the only thing they're going to understand. Current measures don't seem to be working. I know I have read about at least two enforcement actions against the jackasses that claim to be X from card services. Then today I got yet another call from "Card Services". Different recorded voice, same patter as before.
Of course, we will need to put the screws to U.S. carriers as well. I get 3 - 6 junk texts a day. All reported as spam, yet they keep coming. I know it's the same jackasses since
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Exactly (Score:2)
Charge every caller 10 cents. That 10 cents goes into the account of the person being called.
Easy. The End.
Even 1 cent won't be near enough (Score:2)
I get PO-box spam AKA junk mail. The senders typically pay the post office at least 16 cents, with non-profits paying at least 8 cents. That's on top of the production cost of whatever they are mailing. Source: USPS price list [usps.com].
Adding 1 cent will get rid of some of the "ultra-low revenue-per-call" calls but what's left will be the stuff that is sophisticated enough or "scare the listener" enough to gross at least 1 cent of revenue per call on average.
Plus, adding 1 cent per call will increase the costs of
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I forgot to mention that another benefit of charging more is that it's easier to trace big amounts of money. It's harder to launder and hide the source of big amounts.
And some of the proceeds can go toward detective work in hunting down criminals.
Alternative easy fix - add telco name to caller ID (Score:2, Insightful)
On caller ID identify the originating telco in addition (or alternative) to the calling name and number. I'd be much more likely to pick up a call from a telco that I recognize than some random one. It seems like an easy solution.
Not a bad idea at all. (Score:2)
Require all callers to pay 1 cent.
Customers would be given say 100 free calls a month. Any more than that and they pay 1 cent for each outgoing call.
I've also seen similar proposals to fight spam in email: mandate mail providers charge a penny per email. The cost would be a relative pittance.
Remedies are not elusive (Score:1)
Bill it like Europe (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously - bill it like in Europe. All calls are free to receive, only placing a call is paid. No such BS as me paying for incoming calls like in US.
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There are very few carriers that do pay-for-incoming calls in the USA. That's pretty much a tracfone thing.
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Every single mobile plan that doesn't come with "unlimited talk" does. And those with "unlimited talk" will bill receivers per-minute for certain international, premium, etc. calls.
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"Unlimited Talk" and "Unlimited Text" plans cost more than per minute and per message plans - that extra money means the user is having their money sucked away for the cost of handling robocalls and spam.
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Oh yeah? Then why do incoming count towards your minutes or practically everything?
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Because minutes are counted as minutes utilizing the network, period.
In or out, you're paying for network time, not specific inbound/outbound time. Used to be like that everywhere in the 80s and 90s, not since the '00s has it been like that, those carriers died out, got bought up for spectrum/towers, etc.
And the majority of those are folded into the larger wireless telecoms, now. Sure, there's a pay as you go plan, but people rarely use that because they want that mobile data.
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How many Cell Plans without unlimited talk, don't count your minuted and texts that you revived vs sent.
This is what makes these Robo calls more annoying.
If I answer the line, then it is my money they are wasting.
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Problem is that anything large enough to be worth the billing/processing costs is too large for consumers.
see $10 game 'micro' transactions.
Re:Bill it like Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously - bill it like in Europe. All calls are free to receive, only placing a call is paid. No such BS as me paying for incoming calls like in US.
Well, that was the way it used to be in the US with landlines. The receiver pays was somehow crept in with the cell phone services.
I remember when my mother got called by her friends, she would always say, "Go ahead . . . it's your nickel!"
I really don't understand why Americans tolerate. But given that the cell phone business in the US is more or less a duopoly . . . they really don't have much choice.
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When cellular services launched in the US, long-distance landline calls were still metered. The reason the US chose to bill the receiver for a mobile call is that there's no way to easily identify a mobile number in the US. In most of Europe, Australia, etc. you can identify a mobile number by its prefix, and hence know that you'll be payi
Carriers, Eh? (Score:3)
The same carriers that might also be providing these companies their Internet services (assuming US-based)? If so: disco the Internet service and force the companies to iterate on that. They'll figure out a way around it (mobile hotspots) until the carriers discover that: terminate. Iterate.
This isn't a hard problem to solve, it's a political and management one.
Frequently Blocked List. (Score:2)
Spammers are Spammers, ID them.
For domestic calls, legal accountability (Score:3, Insightful)
For calls that are truly domestic - where the sender is a US company run by people who can be sued in US court - the solution seems obvious: Require anyone making outgoing commercial calls sign an acknowledgment that they are familiar with current laws regarding do-not-call lists and the like. Any person or company making a high volume of calls would have to post a bond or have liability insurance - this protects against "fly by night" operators that just shut down and start up again under a new name.
Also, owners and high-level officers whose companies repeatedly send such calls should be hauled into court by the FCC or FTC and barred from being involved in that industry for a period of time.
As for the telephone companies that are taking a cut, their role would be to make sure their customers' information is correct that that the bond or insurance requirements are met. If it turns out that these telephone companies have become, in essence, "agents of" the actual spammers, they should be shut down.
As for international calls, the best we can hope for may be creating a "partial chain of accountability" from the recipient back to the telephone company that handed the call off to a US telephone carrier, or to the internet-based company that handed the call off to a US telephone carrier, then allow and encourage US carriers to coordinate anti-international-phone-spam efforts, which may include blacklisting entire countries or routing calls from those countries through human operators, which would have the ability to drop fully-robotic calls and waste the time of callers who are robo-dialed but who have a human in the loop. The latter would cost the callers time, which means costing them money.
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No, I demand financial accountability. Let me levy a $1 fee for every robocall I report, paid for by the originating caller. It's a small enough fee that regular callers should accept a few of these as the cost of doing business, or work to minimize it by avoiding annoying calls, training callers not to piss people off enough to demand the fee. It's a large enough fee that callers that send out millions of annoying calls will quickly have to give up the business. Just give us a code, like *69, that'll charg
Congress can act, it they understand robocalls (Score:2, Insightful)
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Is there a way to stop all international calls? (Score:1)
Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
End ALL CallerID spoofing/hiding. Block all non-identified/alteredID calls.
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I agree except for the word ALL.
There are valid uses to Spoof the caller ID, when at work we call out with our phones, but want people to call the office back not our personal line. That said, this should be a service that we should have to pay for and register, to make sure the call back number is actually the organization who we need to call back.
The phone companies knows who to bill. I don't believe the fact that there is no technical way to fix this open caller-id monstrosity.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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That way, the caller ID can be accurate at all times
Accurate, and utterly useless. The information you're trying to convey with caller ID is the entity that is calling you. Not just the literal 10 digits.
Let's say I'm setting up some sort of ringtone/whitelist/whatever, and I want my bank to be able to call me. I know what their main number is. And that number is going to change very, very infrequently. I have no way of knowing all of the phone numbers that their call centers are using....this week.
All that's needed is a legal requirement that 1) the ca
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No technical way that won't "leave some money on the table." Even if your big telcom business model doesn't include clubbing baby seals, it doesn't forbid it. We are the seals(product) and without a penalty(costs), to track the source(customers), the clubbing and profits, will continue.
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*YOUR* phone company knows who to bill when you make a call. If, however, a phone call comes in from outside your exchange, it has no practical way to verify that the number it might be presenting to you is the number that it actually originated from. Even if you have a 900 number, and are collecting a fee for being called, your phone company is not directly billing the original caller, Instead, they are billing the incoming exchange that was making a call to you, who in turn bills the previous exchange
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Arguably, that is not spoofed. Since the same entity owns (or if you prefer, is assigned) both numbers, it gets to choose which is presented.
Just tell us who they are! (Score:2)
A few DDOS attacks later and robocalls will be done!
Just waste their time, it's fun :) (Score:5, Funny)
I love to waste their time and listen to them get more and more frustrated. It's like therapy in reverse- they start off all happy and calm and end up rage quitting and hanging up. I get a warm glow of satisfaction knowing that by the time I'm done with them, they really hate their fuckin' job.
Sometimes I tell them to hold on while I get my credit card ("Payday!", they think) and then I put the phone down, cue up an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle on Youtube, and go about my business. A lot of them will actually listen to a whole episode- it's weirdly captivating.
Sometimes I ask them if their mother and father would be proud of what they're doing; family is very important in India (where 99.999999% of them are calling from) and they often sound sheepish because they know they're bringing dishonor on their family. This "soft attack" approach works better with the women than the guys, but sometimes they get really nasty about it. (Another win for me, lol.)
It's also fun to ask the women scammers what kind of undies they're wearing, ask about their sexual experiences (usually none) and other uncomfortable topics.
The guys, on the other hand, will freak out if you tell them that "as a gay man", you always thought that "Indian men were kinda hot" and see how they take it. Most of them get super uncomfortable. Just tell them, "Hey, it's okay if you have those thoughts, I mean only a man really knows what a man wants, right?" The resulting silence is precious, lol.
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Re:Just waste their time, it's fun :) (Score:4, Informative)
I hate those calls, but I can understand living in a poor country and having to do a shit job that no one else wants to do. This is like yelling at the Starbucks cashier because you disagree with corporate policies... it's not really their fault they're stuck in a bad job.
Taking whatever work you can find is one thing, but society draws the line at crime. While I may not much care for the place, at least Starbucks is a legally-operated business, whereas the people working at the companies being discussed:
1) Are working at criminal organizations
2) Are themselves engaged in criminal activity
3) Are fully aware that their behavior is criminal
Beyond the fact that their call is itself a criminal action that comes at our expense (time spent, as well as money for people who pay to receive calls), in most cases these calls are being made in an effort to perpetrate further fraud. For instance, they're "calling from" Toyota/Honda/etc. with news that your car warranty is about to expire so they can sell you a fake one, they're claiming to work at Microsoft/Apple/Google so that they can get you to install spy/ransomware, or they're saying they're the IRS/credit card company/collections agency and that you owe them money. And that's before we talk about robocalls that threaten to deport legal immigrants unless they agree to "pay a fine", or other crimes of that sort. I might be willing to cut them some slack if it was feasible the grunts didn't know it was a all a sham, but nearly every one of these types of fraud hinges on the employee doing the legwork, so it's pretty obvious that they're not only complicit in the crime, they're the perpetrators of these crimes.
Don't believe me? Mention that you're on the Do Not Call list to one of them. Instead of taking corrective action, every one of these fly-by-night callers will hang up immediately. They know what they're doing and that it's illegal. These aren't innocent employees making ends meet. These are criminals, plain and simple.
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I checked with a local prosecutor (I did IT work for them) and no it's not harassment if they call you uninvited. Bonus points if you make them cry, but yeah, ask them if their parents know that they cheat others. It is better to beg than steal, even if you're hungry.
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but some of what you're suggesting (sexual harassment etc.) is a bit over the line...
If they call my phone, they become my prey, it's as simple as that. I would love one of them to sue me for sexual harassment, it would be hilarious.
"Your Honor, my client was doing was simply minding her own business, working in a global criminal conspiracy commiting wire fraud in order to steal money from hundreds of thousands of people, and this pervert JustAnotherOldGuy asked her if she'd ever worn crotchless panties! Clearly he is a menace to society and must be imprisoned!" .
it's not really their fault they're stuck in a bad job.
Except that they've deliberately chosen to engage in criminal behavior, so yeah, it kinda is their fault.
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That's pointless for robocalls though.
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Don't discriminate, ask the guy scammers also.
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Thanks for the gay suggestion. I'll give it a try. (Yep, I realize I've left myself open for a really out-of-context quote somewhere in the future).
I find it fun to ask them if they've been training their air force better. I mention the dumbshit that got himself shot down flying on the wrong side of the border. They somehow look upon the guy as a hero. Let them know that is not the opinion of the outside world.
Or, mention that CNN and BBC are reporting Pakistan has crossed the border into Kashimir. Wh
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How much time does all that take up? I want to do it, but no time. :(
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How much time does all that take up? I want to do it, but no time. :(
Depends on the type of call. The interest rate scammers get down to business right away, the car warranty scammers take a little longer, and the "Microsoft Virus Alert" calls can drag on for quite a while.
But every minute I keep them engaged and on the line, that's one less minute they have to call someone more gullible or vulnerable (i.e. grandma) who might actually send them money or allow their computer to be hacked.
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Cool. We need more of you. Thanks. ;)
Army of retired people (Score:2)
1. Get many people to sue the originator company in small claims court
2. Aggregate default judgement and sell to ruthless collection company
3. Collection company finds and files liens on originating companies and their officers
4. Collection company seizes properties in U.S. and other countries where the liens are supported
5. Laugh
Because here's the deal: rich people running these scams own property ... it just has to be worth it for someone to track them down. So make it worth it.
Re: Army of retired people (Score:2)
There should be a star *## for that (Score:2)
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Dueling Agency Jurisdiction (Score:3)
FTA:
This is actually a huge point. With broadband/ISP/mobile pervasiveness, the tech industry has largely be allowed to run amuck over the last 12 years... Thanks, Obama... seriously, while the Bush admin approved some mid-2000s stuff, it's the Obama Administration that let Silicon Valley have a field day under the guise of Progress.
Many of the largest problems we have with Big Tech, privacy, consumer marketing and profiling, and anything enabled by the rise of smartphones (including pervasive location tracking) could and SHOULD have been dealt with by a mixture of both FTC and FCC regulation, but each of them has been dropping the ball individually, and then tossing lots of stuff into the other court. Additionally, the decision to remove ICANN from Department of Commerce oversight stopped one additional control that should have remained when it comes to leveraging regulation in core infrastructure like this.
It's high time that the FCC and FTC stop squabbling and start getting tech back under control. Hopefully progress gets made.
Use the SIP From: address (Score:1)
Why in 2019 are we still using telephone numbers as identifiers? Almost all signaling traffic incoming to carriers is SIP based these days, and that's especially true of spammers. What I really want to see is the SIP From: address when it's available. SIP From: addresses could very easily be authenticated at the domain level with a mechanism like DKIM does for email. Spoofers then won't be able to spoof irs.gov on incoming calls, instead of trivially spoofing whatever telephone number they want to right now
They call them "legislators" for a reason (Score:2)
How about a law that holds the carrier who DELIVERS the call to a user is legally responsible for the law that was just broken, with huge punitive damages.
It's not unreasonable, the ONLY reason these calls exist is because CARRIERS profit from delivering the call.
,br>ALL the carriers are TOUTING (ie advertising and charging for) services that detect and block spam calls.
If it works well enough to charge people for then it works well enough to HOLD YOU LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE for