These examples are from my own life, and they happen several times a month. I hardly ever make calls myself, but I do have to be able to receive important calls.
Obviously some use cases can be fixed with text messaging and app, and increaasingly they are, but there are always going to be exceptions. Directing to voicemail is also a solution to some of these, but voicemail acts as a filter: The caller may decide to not bother leaving a message.
The problem is phone number that is short and easy to guess. Imagine replacing them with a longer token that would be generated each time you want to give someone else a way to contact you (e.g. displaying a QR barcode on your phone and letting the other party scan it). Then you'd share a unique identifier with all that parties. Delivery guy can get a token that expires after a while. If someone abuses their ability of contacting someone, the token would get revoked.
I leave the details and implementation as an exercise for the reader ;)
Any call from an unfamiliar number get an automated prompt to enter a specific digit. The digit changes, and of course relies on the caller being able to follow this simple instruction. All of this happens before my phone rings.
Once a call does get through (or even if it hasn't), you can review it on the telco web site, and either whitelist or block each calling number. Those that are whitelisted now get through directly, without the prompt, and then continue on as normal.
No cost to the consumer either for this feature, but it isn't on by default.
And if whitelisting becomes a thing you know the UI is going to say "your order is complete! Please click here to whitelist our number in case we need to reach you."
Not a big deal, and it basically solves phone spam.
But that's the whole (big) deal. The solution is usually the trivial and easy part - getting people to change is the hard part.
Humanity is littered with millions of problems that could be solved if it wasn't for inertia. A solution cannot simply be better or more convenient - it has to be so overwhelmingly better, so much more convenient for people to even consider switching.
And while this solution is better, I don't see your average person caring enough to take the time to make sure they've whitelisted all services they use.
>"The FCC last year authorized voice service providers to block more types of calls in which the Caller ID has been spoofed or in which the number on the Caller ID is invalid." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/robocallers-evol...
It also allows me to block numbers from my sim area code. This is where most spam calls spoof to be coming from. When I recently called T-mobile to ask for them to do this, they said they couldn't help me.
[1] At least in North America, each phone number is assigned a "home switch," which will always be notified where (as in "which phone switch it servicing it" not "at 40°58′35″N 80°8′9″W") it is so calls can be forwarded to the proper switch (think roaming).
http://portail.free.fr/m/l-aktu-free/astuces/6159173_2015100...
What I want is for spammers specifically to be identifiable and blockable, or for their business to be made prohibitively expensive. I didn't get spam calls on my cell phone 15 years ago, and as you say, what has changed is largely economics. Why can't we work to adjust the economics back?
I have two EU numbers and have never gotten a robocall on either of them. I have never heard of anyone getting a robocall in Europe, and while that might just be anecdata I think I would have heard something after two decades, especially in privacy-minded Germany.
When I get off the plane in San Francisco and activate my American SIM card, I usually have my first robocall before I get my first beer. And my mother gets so many on her land line, she always screens her calls.
What is Europe doing right here that America is doing wrong?
Exceptions are sales of books, newspapers, insurance, and research (e.g. Gallup). There is also a "do not call" list that blocks all such calls.
In Danish: https://www.forbrugerombudsmanden.dk/hvad-gaelder/markedsfoe...
I get the research exemption, and i’m Happy about a politics exemption, but why books, newspapers and insurance?
Why not bicycles or theatre or education?
I don't even know what most of them are. From times when I've been expecting important calls and checked, the most common is probably accident claims. Some of them aren't even automated.
Likely because cheap francophone labour is available in similar time zones.
Also, isn't that just taking the 9 digit phone number and turning it into a 12 digit?
Or the system could ask for information that someone who knows the recipient might know but a telemarketeer might not know, e.g. "What is the 2nd letter of my first name?"
I haven't played with Asterisk before, so I'm not 100% certain.
The first setting in my default Android phone app is to block unknown callers. What specifically do you want?
I mean, the odds of them hitting that are so close to zero I don't even want to think about it.
Now spam emails are sent to live email addresses harvested from peoples' activities
Today caller ID is spoofed not even with random phone numbers but specifically phone numbers with area codes relevant to you. For me, it's phone numbers of my area code which I have zero contacts in. Or it's phone numbers from my phone's registered address in Houston.
What makes you think it won't be long before fraudsters are able to connect the phone number they're calling with people likely in your contact list by ... looking up leaked contact lists?
I resorted to using Do not Disturb mode allowing my contact list to ring. It’s worked out great, I have missed a couple of blocked caller numbers that I would have liked to have taken but they always leave messages. And the spam calls have more or less dried up now.
I guess I'll generate one for me and store it in the notes app, which is sort of a catchall for this sort of thing.
I took my cat in for an oil change over the weekend. That resulted in three spam texts and two spam e-mails from VCA. Time to change vets.
And to be on topic, you'd need a trusted 3rd party to manage those. But lately we've seen you can't trust them to secure / not resell your data anyway.
https://www.onsip.com/blog/how-caller-id-works-why-it-might-...
Maybe it would be nice if we had something kind of like a CAPTCHA, where an app on your phone would say "please dial <random-number> and say your name to complete your call" and the person would have to dial it and say who they are to talk to you.
Totally knee-jerk idea I realize, but I literally get 10 SCAM LIKELY calls for every real call now, rendering my phone almost unusable. Huh, I just did a quick search and it looks like it might already be possible to install an app to do something like this. Anyone know if this works?
What we need is an abuse prevention system involving authentication. You can get reported for robo calls, and if enough different accounts you called have reported you, you get reviewed/banned/throttled. Let's not reinvent the wheel, it's been the standard way to deal with spam all over the web. But it requires rethinking the way we use phones, and a whole new infrastructure. It also brings some anonymity concerns but half-measures are just an arms race.
This situation is far more dire for the telco's and their debt holders than they are catching on to. The telephone number, portable or not, is what anchors their customers. When it is gone, you've got a commodity.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted for this. My in-laws have this feature on their landline from their local telco. Completely annoying, but I don't want to talk to them anyway.
The call-back cost him ~$4 in long distance charges.
Default ring: silence, no vibration. Custom ringtone for everyone you actually want to pick up the phone and talk to. Yeah you gotta spend some time setting it up for your existing contacts, then spend 5s selecting a ring when you add a new contact.
On other platforms they simply give you the choice to block non-contact calls. I can do so on my Pixel by leaving Do-Not-Disturb on with Contacts Only.
I think this is the crux of the issue, and I don't think it's a situation that any non-spammer end-user wants. There's a definite non-zero cost to receiving a phone call.
I think we'd fix the robocall problem in a heartbeat if a small artificial charge was billed by the receiving phone company each time they connected a call (or rang a customer's phone, not sure about the precise terminology).
> - Bad actors (telephone companies) benefitting from this traffic by charging for it
I don't think these are compatible.
I'm not sure if it works for non-Apple apps, though.
What kind of lack of compassion do you have to have to participate in an organisation that generates something universally hated.
I once knew a guy who ran a spam operation from Chicago. I was in his office once and he showed me something on his computer. In doing so I could see that his mail in-box had over 29,000 unread messages.
I asked him how he deals with all those spam messages. He didn't think it was a big deal at all. Spam simply didn't bother him, and he believed in his heart that spam doesn't really bother anyone else, either.
>"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
s/whitelist/blacklist ?
- Cost of phone calls decreasing to basically zero
- Cost of automation going to basically zero
- Phone calls that can come from the Internet so there are no national boundaries anymore
- Caller ID operating on essentially the honor system
- Bad actors (telephone companies) benefitting from this traffic by charging for it
- Larger players having no incentive to punish bad actors
There's a reason why most messages are now sent on whitelist instead of blacklist systems.
For whitelist systems to work you need to be able to enforce identity or have a significant cost to sending messages.
Frankly I don't even want to receive phone calls on my "phone". If I did I'd be more than happy with a contacts only whitelist. Why I can't get this is beyond me.
EDIT: for those mentioning the doctor's office and other non-whitelist cases, just send non-whitelisted callers to voicemail. If you need to answer the phone then OK, I guess this won't work for you. But for the majority of people for the majority of their time, whitelisted contacts only with the rest going to voicemail will work.