What's especially crazy is that these guys have been on the radar already, for a long time.

https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/0...

https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...

Yes, the FTC, not the FCC, but look. Roy Cox settled and was permanently enjoined from telemarketing. Aaron Jones apparently just ignored the complaint altogether, and the FTC won a default judgment banning him from telemarketing also. Yet, here we are again with both of them allegedly involved in this scamming. Maybe the car warranty calls are not considered telemarketing?

It seems like they know the responsible carriers, but not the originating customer of those carriers, probably because they're fly by night organizations. These recent orders are basically the FCC saying to the responsible carriers: "We've told you about this before, you've failed to uphold your promises to stop it, so here's a cease and desist and failure to comply and provide information about how you're complying will result in you being de-peered completely."

And then telling all the other US carriers that they are now authorized to identify and block such calls from the responsible carriers without running afoul of the FCC rules that normally require all carriers to carry for other carriers.

If the originating carriers get de-peered, the FCC will effectively allow other carriers to not carry any of their traffic, legitimate or otherwise and put them out of business.

This is what I'm wondering. I often get auto warranty calls and I don't even own a vehicle. I just assumed that the calls were spoofed or were illegal in some sense.

Therein laws a potential flaw in those assuming that the solution can be found in plugging personal information leaks. Just like with e-mail, many (most?) of these scams aren't targeted. If the scam has no relevance, people ignore and readily forget it about. For those for whom the scam is pertinent (and that can be a large fraction of the population at any one moment), it seems like the scammer knew something personal about them. The salience may be purely in the mind of of the potential victim; the scammer is often just blasting out the same crap to everybody. I can't even count how many Chinese-language robocalls I've received, for example, and I neither speak Chinese nor could anyone have reason to believe I do (and in any event, such calls are a common experience, AFAIU).

I mean, most scams work similarly to this. Fortune telling, for example. The scammer relies to some degree on the victim connecting the dots themselves as the scammer lacks the necessary information. This is just especially true when it comes to spam.

The Chinese robo calls are about visas and as immigration rules are a massive source of stress, they probably work pretty well.

I used to work a job where we did a follow-the-sun model, so not only do I not drive, I'm not even in the US - but I did answer a US 877-number for part of the day.

We'd get one or two of these calls per month. I don't think there's a chance in hell these are targeted - randomly dialling 877 numbers in the hopes that one will be answered by a human instead of another robot has to be a complete crapshoot.

Too much money to be made in Robocall scams.

Indeed they are close to 95% of the calls I receive.