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Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by TeMPOraL on Monday May 06, 2019 @04:35AM (#19837733)
To call other people?

Calls I make are split ~50/50 between personal, to people who know me and have my number, and business, when I either want to buy something or resolve some issue. Calls I receive are split 40/60 between personal and spam. And I'm in Europe. In the US, from what I hear, that would be closer to 10/90.

There's a huge asymmetry in phone use. Marketers and scammers make the phone network near-unusable to regular people, by ensuring most of the calls they receive are unwanted.

Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by martin_a on Monday May 06, 2019 @04:45AM (#19837782)
Where in Europe are you?

I'm in Germany and I'd say I get one call a month from somebody who wants to do a survey or something like that.

And I also might get one spam SMS per month which I report to the "Bundesnetzagentur", which will then take care of that as this is prohibited in Germany.

Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by TeMPOraL on Monday May 06, 2019 @05:04AM (#19837843)
Poland.

I regularly get a survey call and "congratulations, you won a vacuum cleaner/spa/whatever" call roughly once a month. From time to time, I get some company I'm technically in business with call me (through an outsourced call centre), trying to upsell something useless. I used to get a lot more of calls like these a couple years ago, but I vaguely recall something in the legislation having changed since then, and most spam calls disappeared.

That said, a year ago I started my own business, and now the cold calling just doesn't stop. In Poland AFAIK it's illegal to spam individuals, but it's legal to spam businesses - and now I have, for example, Polcard (card processor) representatives calling me roughly once a month, asking if maybe I'd like a POS terminal. I keep saying them, I'm a contractor, I only do B2B and don't need a terminal - they note this down, and call again the next month.

So currently it all adds up to ~10 +/- 5 unwanted calls a month. It's still usually more than personal calls I receive (but less than personal or business calls I make). Rise of the mobile-connected IMs pretty much put a stop to most personal phone calls among the people I know.

Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by pndy on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @12:55PM (#19851228)
> In Poland AFAIK it's illegal to spam individuals

Still happens despite of regulations and it wouldn't be that bad if you just could get the info from person calling you, who got your number and demand removal from database but as you probably know, they love to hang up the second they hear this question. I've heard that the newest trick is to give the victim the premium service number saying "that's how you can get your phone number removed".

Personally, I'm still dealing with periods during year when all 3 phones in my house from Orange are receiving calls from same spam number - two mobile contracts and one landline. I explicitly demanded which was check-marked on my subscriber's account that I do not wish receiving spam calls even if that means my bill is cut by 5 PLN and I'm missing chance to win something (sic!); so it seems even service provider doesn't bother with legislation here.

> they note this down, and call again the next month.

It's probably due to rotation of people - one shift comes in and then next one and nobody cares what called person has to say. It's still a potential "client" for them and the mindset here is "maybe after n-th time they'll gave up and purchase our stuff", I believe

Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by martin_a on Monday May 06, 2019 @06:02AM (#19838067)
This seems to be somewhat similar in Germany. I got lots of calls from companies trying to sell me SEO optimization or whatever when I was in charge (and listed on the website) for the online business of my former employee. But I received little to none mails from those companies because cold-mailing is prohibited by German laws against unfair competition. Seems to be somewhat broken that you may telephone-spam somebody but are not allowed to do so via mail.
Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by mr__y on Monday May 06, 2019 @07:15AM (#19838341)
> I vaguely recall something in the legislation having changed since then

There actually was a change in Polish legislation - Telecommunications Act 172.1 (Ustawa Prawo Telekomunikacyjne art. 172 par. 1)

Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by taejo on Monday May 06, 2019 @05:26AM (#19837921)
BTW, if I receive spam SMSes on my German number that are sent from the UK, can I report those to the Bundesnetzagentur, or do I need to find the relevant UK authority?
Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by martin_a on Monday May 06, 2019 @06:03AM (#19838077)
I would just give it a try. Probably the BNetzA knows best who to contact in case they can't get hold of that number.
Re:'One Ring' Phone Scam by taejo on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @05:13AM (#19847729)
According to their website they only take complaints about commercial spam. The spam I'm referring to comes from a non-EU political party, which probably makes things more complicated.