They have an interesting way of building the reputation database: in addition to receiving customer reports, they buy Twilio's "dirtiest" phone numbers, the ones getting so spammed they're unusable by other businesses. If you call ~3 dirty numbers, welcome to the dynamic block list.
Is there any normal use for it in the states? If not, surely you should just blacklist your own number?
(I'm aware that any time you say "you should just ..." it's never that simple)
Presumably one can feedback loop that into the reputation score. Honestly, though, I don't think this is a terribly likely attack.
The major problem with some of these issues is that if I understand it right, the phone system often isn't always aware of the source of the calls because they get routed through foreign gateways and voip and the number you see in the caller ID is spoofed and has no connection to anything.
The FCC is aware this is happening and these fall within its jurisdiction, but they're having trouble enforcing the rules.
The fact that congress is revoking the FCC's ability to enforce these rules for student loans is just bog standard corruption.
Even scammers don't want to waste resources on people that aren't going to convert and this is a pretty strong signal.
It usually works even when you have to talk over an aggressive operator to say it.
It'll totally work with regular telemarketers, but that isn't what we're talking about here.
Basically there's two things going on: Robo calling, which is restricted under FCC regulations. And calling numbers on the do not call list, which is also restricted under FCC regulations.
Someone who does both... usually isn't going to stop if you ask them to. I'm curious if you've experienced otherwise, very few people report having any success with that. Most call centers who violate federal two different federal regulations while dialing your number don't particularly spend time maintaining their calling lists.
Of course it doesn't end such calls altogether, but 2 a week is a damn sight better than several a day.
Do you have direct knowledge that they would not bother managing their call lists, or do we have dueling suppositions?
But we could call that dueling supicions if you'd like.
And just to clarify, you're talking about a US number that's been listed on the national Do Not Call list, right?
And not just regular scam calls, but calls placed by an automatic dialer and answered by an automated system that falls to a human caller only after being answered, right?
The ellipsis in my terse comment was sort of grounded in why the hell else would I post what I posted, and now we are 2 or 3 rounds deep in you asking me if I'm really sure.
I have no worries about your faith! Just your context!
Picking up at all confirms that your number is valid, connects, and an adult human at least occasionally answers - this makes your number more valuable for passing on to others.
There isn't much of a peer-to-peer "valid number sharing" market between companies, they protect their lists as a business asset with at least a little value, but larger groups will pass such data around their constituent parts and when a company folds whoever buys their data as a cheap asset is under no obligation to use any do-not-call list as a don-not-call list instead of a real-people-answer-here-add-them-to-the-next-campaign list.
Funny you should mention, because that is exactly what worked for me. Every time I get a marketing call I say I'm 17 so I can't buy anything from them, sorry.
I've noticed the robocalls I get seem to have the same area code and prefix as my number and the last four digits appear to be random.
I love how it makes it really easy for me to screen the calls however, as no-one I know has the same prefix and there are a couple area codes covering the local calling area.
So I think a database would help if it could be updated in near-real time. If 100 people across the country get a call from the same bogus number, it could get added immediately and stop thousands more calls from going out that night, at least.
When we implemented caller ID based blocking, our mix of crap traffic stayed the same. Just instead of getting "good" dialer traffic, we'd just get the bad randomizers. This is because the carrier sending the traffic would tune it to make sure they never exceeded the 20% short call limit. Even at the volume we were doing (hundreds of millions of calls a day), there seemed to be a limitless supply of dialer, good and bad.
I wonder if services like trello are being used/abused for these. (And is unsolicited robo calls against their TOS?)
You're looking for Twilio.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.truecaller
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flexaspect...
Fees sucked, so I started (shameless plug) Phone Janitor[1] to give me better filtering. This allows me to check voicemail anywhere, unlike my cell line (unless I sign up for their service) and just transferred it to my own company. Turns out this helps a lot of other folks with similar privacy desires. Control is a wonderful thing.
Ultimately it's really, really crappy, but the Telecoms and the FCC don't want to be too heavy handed in this, and advertisers are finding new ways of skirting the donotcall rules. They ruined SMS in this regard[2] as well, deliberately.
[1] - https://phonejanitor.com/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_spoofing
So don't? It's your phone, after all. Just let it go to VM.
Why would you ever answer unrecognized numbers?
It's now the case that a database of every phone number (10 billion entries, highly compressible) could be mirrored to every phone, with a reputation score for each number. Or looked up in real time. The phone company won't do it -- it'll have to be independent, like an ad blocker. I'd buy a subscription to that database.