Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To Combat Robocalls

Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by todipa on Friday August 23, 2019 @10:05AM (#20777740)

The way I handle this is to create a contact called SPAM RISK and add all the spam calls I get to that contact. My siblings do the same. Once a month, when we go to our parent's house, we sync this contact (we block this "caller"). Our parents are getting old and are starting to fall prey to these robo callers. I haven't figured out another way to help them...

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by tehlike on Friday August 23, 2019 @10:34AM (#20778046)

I am using Google's dialer on android, and it's been very effective with identifying spam callers...

disclaimer: google employee.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by techntoke on Friday August 23, 2019 @10:48AM (#20778190)

Suggestion... Don't block Google dialer app from a majority of non-Google phones.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by jchw on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:45AM (#20778781)

Google employees do not agree with all of the things Google does.

Disclaimer: also google employee.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by tehlike on Friday August 23, 2019 @04:00PM (#20781983)

in fact, i disagree with a healthy portion of it.

Edit: I don't think he's being negative - he's saying "don't do it" and i agree.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by dwyerm on Friday August 23, 2019 @01:08PM (#20779793)

...or maybe even offer those features to Google Voice's dialer, as well.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by awinder on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:15AM (#20778478)

I'm using robokiller (https://www.robokiller.com) which does a decent job of "getting ahead" of fraud numbers, especially of the local number spoofing variety.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by sjg007 on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:25AM (#20778586)

The escalation is that spammers will spoof well known local numbers (e.g. the doctor office)

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by fooey on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:56AM (#20778887)

Lately, I've been getting them spoofed as the local WalMart

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by jerf on Friday August 23, 2019 @12:00PM (#20778930)

I was doing that for a while and stopped when I never got a duplicate.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by lprubin on Friday August 23, 2019 @10:37AM (#20778073)

Thats a good start. What about telling them to never answer a call from an unknown number. Any legit call will leave a voicemail and that will weed out a large number of scammers.

Next, if the voicemail is clearly a robot voice, make sure they don’t respond until checking with you first. That should weed out another big chunk.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by toast0 on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:28AM (#20778610)

> What about telling them to never answer a call from an unknown number.

Just yesterday, I got a call with caller ID for Chase bank, audio in Chinese. Trusting caller ID is a bad choice (at least currently)

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by fortran77 on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:43AM (#20778745)

Exactly! Telling people to "only pick up from numbers you know" is not good advice. The whole point of this article is that caller IDs can be spoofed. That's what these new protocols are all about.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by jerf on Friday August 23, 2019 @12:02PM (#20778949)

2 or 3 weeks ago I got my first call from "Comcast", which I do not have a contact for. I was surprised because I didn't even know the system as a whole was capable of that. I've never seen a non-contact name come up in my phone UI before, only phone numbers, or phone numbers mapped to my contacts.

On the plus side, when I get a call from a textual non-contact number it's a heck of a strong signal I don't need to pick up.

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Re:Phone Companies Ink Deal With All 50 States And D.C. To C... by drfrank on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:25AM (#20778581)

Many telemarketers have switched to "soundboards" which use responses pre-recorded from native speakers. It's increasingly difficult to recognize that a robot is talking to you. You can ask them if they're a robot, and they have a pre-recorded answer ready for you.

They have a finite set of responses, though. Ask them what the difference is between a burrito and an enchilada.

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