In addition to marking calls as scam, now they simply block them outright. Getting approximately 0 scam calls in the past 2 days.
I have a test/dev phone that I used for a project several years ago with an associated ph#. I forgot about it (don't think about the charges accrued 8^) for several years, but just charged it and turned it on.
It's a number that was never used or answered for 3 years and it gets several scam calls a day. They must be calling every valid number.
These calls are spam for phones. Certainly, there's an obvious pattern that can be identified and then neutralized.
None the less, can't the phone providers detect the excessive outgoing traffic? And if it's a residential number can't that raise a red flag?
The US government isn't in the business of running the internet or phone or micropayment systems, and it's not interested.
Most people leave a voicemail. Thanks to technology, the voice mails get transcribed and I can quickly decide whether I should return the call.
I also see “Spam Likely” for a whole range of numbers. Not sure if it’s Apple or T-mobile but I sure do appreaciate the heads up.
I'm talking to random scammers more now because I'm looking for a job and I feel like I have to answer the phone even if I don't recognize the number. Man it is annoying.
Zero spam for me for a long time. Yes, zero!
Also see the T Mobile spam service. There's two you have to turn on IIRC.
YouMail for voicemail is good too.
That would root out domestic telcos who enable bad behavior. What happens when the origin telco is in another jurisdiction?
Once someone does this, legitimate telephone companies elsewhere will become interested as well, and may "play nice" so long as local laws allow it.
That is not correct. You can send legitimate calls with spoofed caller id between different countries. Many providers will let you do that. (as in, you can assign a caller id from country A to a call originating from country B to A)
There are literally treaties that govern phone traffic that would have to be updated. Most telcos are a monopoly or oligopoly and don't care about customer dissatisfaction. It's not like there's a substitute to the PSTN ready to go. Are you going to tell all of your contacts you are only reachable through Skype/Hangouts/Facetime? Cutting off a spammy foreign telco would also hurt revenue.
Frankly, the definition of telecom fraud should include corporations ripping off their customers not just petty criminals getting free calls.
For example if you go to another country with your mobile phone, your call will be international, but the caller id would not match the source.
I have a hunch that no telco wants to entirely block a foreign telco because they would lose money and because of the ensuing chaos.
Robocall friendly service providers intentionally mix robocalls with legitimate traffic to avoid terms of service enforcement. e.g. Robocalls are laundered by splitting across n carriers so spam (identified by bad ASR/ACD stats) stays below each carrier's threshold. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339739
I live in Europe, but do not receive robocalls at all (zero), while when I enter the US, and put in my US SIM, I immediately start getting multiple per day.
> Most taxpayers in the UK are taxed at source and so do not need to complete a Self Assessment Tax Return. ‘Taxed at source’ means that the money you receive has already had tax taken off, such as the wages you get from your employer when paid under the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system, or UK bank interest taxed at source.
Later versions of Android really help with the 'spam call' filtering, though I've noticed that callers tend to just recycle through nonsense caller IDs and/or unknown numbers (which is really annoying if you have clients phoning you from unknown numbers).
At one point I was getting 10+ a day, which seems to have calmed down now. Everything from tax scams, to PPI, to car accidents.
Also: 96% of the Dutch speak English, and the Scandinavian countries aren't far behind.
So I don't think this is the reason.
I’m probably going to get downvotes but this is what I’ve experienced in the US, at-least in the hyper growth Silicon Valley.
It's part legal enforcement and part culture. There are dishonest individuals in every country.
It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation with these sorts of laws, and the prevalence of phone scams.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/30/15906800/verizon-anti-spa...
Seems like they would like to unclog their Network not to mention their servers have to handle and store all the voicemails.
It may only be a fraction of a cent per minute, but these are the same telecoms that will gladly send you a bill every month because you owe them 1 cent.
These days with unmetered calling, the receiving telco still makes some money off incoming calls through termination charges.
If carriers became financially liable for robocalls by a government mandated date, e.g. 2020, they would find a solution. Even if was as simple as not getting paid to carry spam traffic (as opposed to an EU level % of global revenue fine).
You can fairly easily make the code whatever you want or make it a multi step process.
I believe I'm at something like 6/10ths of 1 cent per minute.
The collateral damage are systems that have you mark your place in line and call you back. It seems like these could be manually whitelisted though with some ingenuity.
[1] https://www.asterisk.org/products/telephony-interface-cards
I've been thinking about issuing my friends and family priority access PINs. If they save it to their contact entry for me after the number, I can entirely gate access. e.g. "5558675309,9876" Especially if combined with a time condition e.g. 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.
I just don't answer my phone anymore unless I recognize the incoming number. And caller ID is trivially easy to spoof. Thankfully nobody spoofs any of the numbers of my top 50 contacts.
If the major carriers don't soon understand the magnitude of the telephone spam/scam problem and treat it seriously, They will soon be crippling their business. While this is been likened here to the email spam problem in 2000, back then, everyone in the computer industry took the spam problem much more seriously telephone industry does now. E.,g., Verizon gleefully offers a blacklist where you can block 20 numbers (nevermind that the spam calls typically have spoofed caller IDs) -- they think they’re good, and it’s utterly useless.
They really need to implement a true Source ID (regardless of the presented caller ID), and a way to instantly flag calls as spam then do targeted tracking and prosecution. If they fail to do this or implement another effective solution, I expect they will lose a century-old line of business to new habits that work around the established habits.
But these are all on my work-phone and government agencies don't pay taxes anyway.
My personal phone has been relatively safe for unknown reasons that I'm happy about.
So yeah it happens, though probably less blindly than US and more from information sharing.
If you are asking whether you can call and be called by canadians for free from american gvoice, the answer to that is yes.
That said, the robocall problem is getting worse, not better. Robocall volume is at an all-time high: https://robocallindex.com/
In many respects, the problem of telephone spam today is similar to the problem of email spam in the early 2000s. Litigating against spammers had limited efficacy, so the community developed blacklists, better filtering, and stronger authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC).
Until the major carriers get serious about similar steps, especially filtering and authentication (i.e. SHAKEN and STIR), these fraudulent calls won't stop. And, in the interim, vulnerable populations will continue to be disproportionately victimized.