The way their process worked was:
* Big company wanted a survey completed. * Big company would want it targeted to a specific state/regional area, so would provide a list of post/zip codes.
* Survey company would translate the list of codes into phone prefixes for each area.
* Computer would randomly generate phone numbers in the area - starting from xxxx 0000 through to xxxx 9999 for operators to call.
That meant you'd get disconnected numbers, businesses, private/silent numbers, faxes, modems, etc.
So having a "clean" number didn't protect you. While a few projects were targeted to specific people/numbers - most were just random.
Customers complain to carriers, who then either get the offending voip provider to block the scamming customer, or just threaten FCC action. But the whole cycle is so slow and you're fighting a never-ending shapeless horde.
I think STIR/SHAKEN will help with this if it ever gets fully implemented and enforced, and voip providers are always trying to come up with better fraud detection to avoid the man-hours associated with assuaging carrier concerns, blocking the customers, etc, etc.
1. Spin up new voip company
2. Issue death threat to US President (or similarly powerful man)
3. Spin down voip company
4. Wait to see if/when someone finds out who you are
Were you the one making calls? How did go through the randomly generated phone numbers?
Having kids, buying a house/land, starting a business, contracting with services - every once in awhile I’ll get a high priority call that I really don’t want to be delayed (emergency at school or daycare, last minute problem with land/house offer, etc.). One time even my doggie daycare called because my dog had collapsed and they were doing CPR in the background and needed my consent to emergently administer epinephrine.
I also live in a rural area and I wonder if I tried to get a local business or contractor to return a call if they’d assume they had a wrong number if they called and a robot asked them to do a math problem. I know I’d not infrequently get confused voicemails with my Google Voice number (“Not sure I’ve got the right number but ...”).
So in the interest of not wanting to risk those rare important calls being delayed or blackholed I’m one of those luddite bozos who answers every call and has to deal with hanging up on the occasional spam call. :-)
* The other reasons I’m dropping Google Voice are 1) it seems like it noticeably affects call quality, at least in my area (particularly w.r.t. latency; I imagine there are fundamental round tripping issues since I’m in the midwest, and I’m sure the cell networks also have a lot to answer for here compounding the problem with the inherent latency of modern voice calls compared to the old POTS) and 2) I’m trying to get ahead of Google pulling the plug on the service and leaving me to track down and update phone number info everywhere and 3) not being able to do iOS stuff with other “blue text” phones (“call me on my other number in order to Facetime”)
My Australian mobile phone receives maybe one spam call per year. It’s my single phone and I give out the number to various businesses and people.
Also idk about other states, but in FL everything is public record, so after I bought my house I've gotten spam letters and calls like crazy.
1. Spam call from new 03 8xxx xxxx range, I was sure these were VoIP numbers handed out by MyNetFone but haven't been able to prove anything. I can't remember what the content of the call was
2. International spam call from Mozambique (?). The call never connects if I pick up.
3. Private number, recorded voice in Mandarin. I think this is a tax scam.
I'm sure I'd seen some changes in the laws regarding caller ID this year, but I can't find it.
Yes, it's much, much worse in America.
There's a national "do not call" list you can sign up to as well. This is amusing called the "Robinson List", presumably after Robinson Crusoe. The same concept is used in a dozen other countries.
I guess the penalties are severe enough that it generally only very shady people call, such as those pretending to be from Microsoft and calling to fix your computer.
> Robinsonlisten er opkaldt efter Robinson Crusoe, som er en fiktiv person, der optræder i romanen Robinson Crusoe af Daniel Defoe. Han strander på en øde ø og lever isoleret.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
EDIT: Just FYI this is a clip from a Norwegian comedy program. Danish and Norwegian have very similar written languages but sound very different when spoken. In reality with some practice Danes, Swedes and Norwegians can speak together and understand one another.
The most prominent type, and have appeared in the last two years are the one-ring-only calls from some foreign country. They're trying to get you to call back to some premium-rate number.
The second are SMS based random spam. Just an hour ago I got spam from "JbHiFi" (even though it's not them, I've never given JB my number) with phishing/spam "you won a contest". I also get random SMS spam from other sources.
Then again, if you have any kind of landline in a regional area you're going to get a ton of fake NBN/Telstra/ATO/etc scammers.
All phone numbers in my Contacts app go into a whitelist that is maintained only locally on my phone.
When a call comes in, a notification gets fired off to the Firewall app, and it checks the number against the whitelist. If the number is on the whitelist, then it actually uses a functional replica of the iPhone Phone app UI to "ring" the call through.
If the incoming call is from a number not on my whitelist, then it checks the blacklist of known bad actors. If the caller is on the blacklist, then the call just gets blocked. I get a notification from Firewall that a call from a known bad actor was blocked.
If the incoming call is not on the whitelist or the blacklist, then it goes to voicemail, where it gets transcribed, and I get a notice that Firewall sent a call to voicemail.
I'm hoping that this is basically the same workflow we will see with iOS 13, just built into the basic iPhone Phone app. Then I should be able to stop using Firewall.
But I certainly don't need Nomorobo or any other such tool. Firewall solves all those problems, and does so better than any of the alternatives.
How does this one work and who provides this number ?
I ask because a twilio number is not a mobile number and therefore cannot receive 2FA from "short codes".
I am sure you know what I am talking about and have run into this ... so I ask, if you have a number that you give out to "companies" (as I also do) do you have a mobile number that can accept SMS from shortcodes ?
Sometimes sites want to know my mobile provider (why does it matter?), so I just choose Verizon or Other.
The only site that won't accept my GV number is att.com. Oh the irony...
All of the 2FA from FANGs and banks and so on come from shortcodes so you can't do a lot of those 2FA workflows with a twilio number (or a number you port to twilio).
As per engineers at the Signal conference, there are no plans to make proper "mobile" numbers available at twilio.
Endless confusing configuration forms with vague repetitive labels.
The push notification necessitates the app sharing SIP credentials with Counterpath (the company that makes Bria), so it's good to have some fraud protection for the extension in Asterisk in the event that Counterpath gets breached. They are a publicly traded company, so hopefully they have decent security.
It's not useful over the open Internet but on a local WLAN or over a VPN call should work fine. Unless you use a damaged phone book storing SIP URLs for your regular contacts should work too. No messaging or fancy codecs though.
SIP calls through Twilio are $1/month plus $0.004 per minute for incoming calls. The spam scoring APIs are "costly", and maybe cost $0.01 combined per lookup.
Google Speech Recognition and TTS are virtually free for my use case. Asterisk can easily run on a $5/month VPS.
The best strategy -- get an area code that's not local and where you don't know anyone. That's what I have on my personal cell phone. Any call that comes in from that area code I know is spam. I don't answer it.
Everyone else can just hang up.
However American Telco regulations are a huge barrier to entry. There are various state and federal rules, so it wouldn't be an easy side project.
www.openphone.co
Happy to answer any questions and talk about my own setup!
I've been praying for a Google Voice replacement for around a decade now, I guess this it it!
I'm dying to jump ship whether or not it's deprecated though, because the web and Android apps are just unbearably shitty.
The web app simply fails to keep up with my typing speed (I can't even imagine how they accomplish this), and the unread counts are usually incorrect.
The Android app doesn't even handle the compose SMS intent, so you can't use it as the default for outgoing messages... this was briefly fixed when they folded Voice into Hangouts, but then broken again 6 months later or so when they decided to roll that back.
1. I have a "clean" phone number I only share with friends/family. Certain prefixes and phone number actually receive next to zero spam calls. This number has received 2 calls in the years I've had it.
2. I have a phone number I share with companies / loyalty programs / etc.
3. I have a legacy phone number I've had for 10 years that receives multiple spam calls daily. For this number I've set up an incoming handler that uses Google Cloud to ask the caller a simple question (What is five plus two?), parses with the Speech Recognition API, and forwards calls with the correct answer. The rest go to voicemail. It's better to use the speech recognition API than it is to ask the caller to press a DTMF tone, in case they are in a car or are calling from a device without a telephone keypad. If I every need to, I'll add this protection to use numbers 1) and 2).
4. I have a number that rings straight to voicemail.
All numbers use the Whitepages and Nomorobo APIs from Twilio. These score the "spamminess" of calls. Calls with sufficiently high values are forwarded to voicemail.
For incoming calls, I set the caller ID for the calls to my SIP clients to indicate which number is being called, and include the spam score.