Not trying to defend US or its telecoms here, but I think it has more to do with scammers trying to maximize for profit.
Just like with malware heavily targeting Windows instead of macOS/Linux, or some apps prioritizing iOS instead of Android (by either launching as iOS-only and then introducing an Android version later, or just not holding up the quality and polish of the iOS version on Android). It isn't because Windows is inherently more insecure, and not because Android is a worse platform. It is simply because it makes sense moneywise.
Why would a scammer focus on targeting low-disposable-income countries, if they, on average, can extract as much money from one US person as they would have to from 10-15 people in Phillipines. For scammers, it seems to be simply more profitable and efficient to target US residents.
I don't think anyone disputes this, but apart from Canada (which has a largely similar telco structure) no other developed country has this plague of undesirable robocalls. You could probably net a similar payout in the UK or Germany but as far as I'm aware there isn't a robocall problem in Europe.
Also, the most spammed country appears to be Brazil, and it is far from the top of the disposable income lists. Many among the most spammed countries don't register on the top disposable income lists.
There's something else at play here. Likely legislation/regulation.
Spam info: https://www.truecaller.com/blog/insights/truecaller-insights...
Disposable income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Not at all. The rest are just not that viable for a multitude of reasons. How many people do Switzerland and Australia have, compared to the US? Much less. And Japan isn't english-speaking, so I dont expect foreign scammers putting effort into learning japanese just for that. They already struggle enough with english.
To be fair, all of that is just me trying to reason through it myself, so there definitely could be other reasons at play here as well.
I hadn't considered the money angle before, but it makes a lot of sense. The poorest US state (Mississippi) has higher per capita disposable income than the 6th highest-ranked country (Norway). Every state other than Mississippi has a higher per capita disposable income than Australia. There are a ton of Americans, they're rich, and almost all of them speak the most popular language on the planet. The US has a high fraction of immigrants (12% of the population), so many Americans aren't immediately suspicious of accents. Compared to other countries, the US is a big juicy target.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/303534/us-per-capita-dis...
I bought airpods day 1 and I've had every single issue described in the article. Carplay is unreliable. Airpods are unreliable. As apple hardware steadily improves, apple software steadily degrades.
Really? Because a telephone call is, by definition, between at least two people. And even if you have your shit sorted out, I find it surprising that every one of your contacts does too. Because although I, too, generally have the process down pat (it's true: it's crazy there needs to be a process around this now), a lot of the people I talk to sure don't.
Not sure how telcos profit off scammers. Especially since I would imagine many times their payments are fraudulent. If anything these scammers waste the telco’s time too.
This problem clearly isn’t getting fixed but I feel like saying “telcos make bank off scammers” is just too easy of a reason. There has to be some underlying reason this is a hard problem to solve.
I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. I tell people this whenever I give out my phone number.
Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you, if they want to reach out they can text or email, and I can't imagine many urgent situations where they can't text, can't forward the message through anyone in my contacts, and can't directly get the authorities to contact me.
The only exception is automated phone calls (e.g. call from a random number for an interview or to confirm 2FA where I can't do SMS), in which case I have to temporarily disable silencing calls. But systems where you get called once from a random number and can't call back are really awful for other reasons...
I teach an after-school coding class. Some weeks ago, the parents of two children didn't arrive at pickup. After 20 minutes, I called the parents using the phone number listed in my company's system. The parents confirmed they were running late due to extenuating circumstances and were now five minutes away.
I think this was probably better than involving the authorities?
That's how I tell the scammers from actual calls 95% of the time - the scammers never leave a voicemail.
It's frustrating because all we'd need is some way to trace calls back to source providers and then let us apply client-side filtering akin to UBlock Origin. Easy.
Now, there are other ways this could work. My company has a "director of client services"—let's call her "Anna"—and all parents have Anna's number. So I suppose I could have called Anna, and Anna could have called the parents, and then Anna could have called me back to relay what the parents said. It just would have taken longer.
Of course, Anna is occasionally sick / on vacation / otherwise unavailable, in which case there's a second person—let's call her "Vivian"—who I can reach out to in an emergency. We're an after-school program, so we're not set up to have a centralized office phone, but I guess parents could add Vivian to their contacts as well.
Basically, I'm happy I was able to just call the parents.
I've only once had the problem that someone from the school used their personal mobile to call me and didn't get through, but I was already calling to let them know I'd be late.
There's no reason for parents to be able to contact you socially unless you invite it, but surely you should contact them from a school/shared number?
I'm suggesting this not for the sake of others, but for your sake. Given that people will block unknown numbers, I would think using a known number makes your life easier.
Put another way, how would a parent contact the program in an emergency? They'd likely (as you illustrated) go through an intermediary that may or may not be there. That seems less than ideal, and certainly wouldn't be something that I'd be happy about if my child were in the program.
At least 99.9% of my voicemails are a couple second long robocalls, but in the rare event of it being a genuine phone call, I get the google transcription of someone saying 'please call me back' on my watch and then I do so. Just because I'm willing to glance at notifications on my watch of incoming voicemails for an instant, doesn't mean I'm willing to talk to hundreds of robocallers per month. Its just too expensive.
Voice phone calls are dead, kid discussion would usually be handled via text or email. I don't really get phone calls about my kids. I believe the more corporate-type environments enjoy the written documentation provided by text/email as opposed to unrecorded undocumented phone call.
The era of always-on low-fi audio connections was very short. Just 30 years ago, parents certainly had no electronic tether and had a home phone number, maybe with an answering machine in later years. And now that technology is completely dead and unusable.
In the case in the GP, maybe a message would have worked too but I don't see the problem with calling.
That said, I get a lot of spam calls on my Fi phone but I simply don't answer if I don't recognize the number. Fi asks me if the number was spam and it's simple to give a brief scan of the transcript if there is one and tell it yes or no.
I am amused by this blanket assertion. It really depends on the age/type of people involved and the kinds of interactions they are involved in. I am 50 years old and work in both software consulting and run a tugboat company. I had to take over the tugboat company two years ago due to a death in the family. For 30 years prior to that, I was working almost exclusively in software. During the last couple of years before taking over the tugboat business, I had my phone set to do-not-disturb almost all of the time. In the tugboat business, that does not work at all.
For dealing with software people in purely technical matters, text/Slack/Teams is fine. I respect the needs of others who don't like real-time conversations. For doing business deals in software, I often end up having phone calls with decision makers.
For the tugboat industry, it is too fast paced and too much money is on the line in quick deals to screen phone calls.
Don't assume that everyone works the same way.
My ringer is always silenced, I get notified to calls because I have notifications for calling enabled on my watch. I should consider disabling notifications altogether for calls not in my contact list.
I probably have 15 voicemails right now I never knew came through because they're junk and auto-blocked.
I get a lot of calls from people for whom my first introduction/interaction is a phone call. I make a lot of money and otherwise get a lot of value from some of these interactions. Some are completely bogus telemarketer calls, of course, but I find that being reachable is still valuable. I hope that my competitors ignore unsolicited calls.
(This depends on industry and role within an organization. Certainly people who never have to interact with strangers can screen calls. But don't assume this is true for everyone.)
The truth is that this problem will kill the telephone system and honestly if this is how the telcos treat it, it deserves to die.
There are decisions to be made in these situations - notify work, transfer health information, ensure payment stuff is in order, notify people. It's much nicer to have someone handle all of these things.
And, in the end, I think people would have liked to have seen me before I died, should that have been my fate. And that takes flying out of wherever into wherever.
> This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?
Some people have tenuous connections to humanity. In this case, a failure to understand anything surrounding a loved one's accident, other than the provision of physical care. I think that's somewhat more common with tech people, due to how some idealize aloof "rationality" to an extreme.
"Call Þórunn mobile." "I don't have a Thorin." "Call Porun mobile" "I don't have a porun".
So if you set Þórunn's nickname to be "thorin" Siri will be able to recognise it. Basically just go through your contacts and give them all nicknames that are English phonetic spellings of their real name.
Before that she was only "mamma" as first name but I had other "mamma zoe", "mamma ale", "mamma gio" and Siri always wanted to call "mamma zoe" when I said "Hey Siri call mamma".
After filling some fields of my mamma she started asking "Who would you like to call?" and started saying all mammas in my phone book, but when I said "mamma mamma" she started calling a random one or not getting it.
Now that I have my Mamma (first name) Mamma (middle name) Mamma (last name) of company Mamma nicknamed Mamma with email mamma@mamma it works... go figure!
Often, a human comes on afterwards. Don't talk to them. If I'm at home (alone) i try and load some porn on the pc and have that play to them. Otherwise, go to the bathroom.
They're paid to talk to you....if you're not talking, some supervisor will notice and eventually you get blacklisted.
Waste their time, not yours.
In my case 90% of time people I know call over WhatsApp or other Voip calls.
Whereas 100% of phone calls from 'critical strangers' are over phone. 'Critical strangers' are delivery persons or cab drivers or courier or office colleagues... those who are calling to find out my whereabouts (critical in that context).
I really appreciate the call screening feature of Google's Pixel phones!
If it is an actual person calling it is an awkward etiquette dance for a minute or so while people wait for that polite "Hello?" that the receiver is supposed to kick off the conversation with. I don't know if the etiquette needs to shift in a time of robo-callers or what. I appreciate that there's an increasing air of excuse now of "fiddling with my phone equipment because calls are so rare" that this article addresses (though the article believes this to be a bad thing).
It's a silly game to play with these robocalls what they are/are not listening for and it seems to change from time to time (and obviously from bot to bot). "Dead silence" is sometimes easiest and the easiest way to describe it (though I believe I did mention I generally put things on speaker and rely on ambient noise), but yes, not "required" and it is a dumb space to explore sometimes.
I have had many of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods/AirPods Pro/AirPods Max w/ an iPhone, iPad, and a MacBook since AirPods came out.
I now use a Bose headset. It works. My AirPod devices do not.
I have always thought that a simple --and likely very effective-- way to combat robocalls is to charge a nominal fee for all calls not in your address book. That fee could be $1 or more. It really doesn't matter how much other than having to be enough to be costly for those making unwelcome calls.
The charge is levied both ways. If someone you don't know calls you, they pay $1. If you call them back, you pay them $1. The phone company handles this, of course. An alternative is that the charge is registered to their account and credited if you call them back. Being that billing is monthly, the net effect is that no money exchanges hands unless calls are not returned. If you did not respond, the next time the same number calls you the charge is increased by a nominal amount, say, 25%.
Oh, yes, of course, the money goes to you, minus a, say 30% fee to the phone company. This accounting happens at the end of the month, not call-by-call.
If someone wants to make a million unsolicited calls, it's going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of that money will go to the people they are spamming because they will not return the calls. Anyone in your address book is exempt from these transactions.
Without diving deeper, this seems like a simple, clean and perhaps even elegant way to deal with the issue. Let the free market do it. If spammers want to give you hundreds of dollars per month just to make your phone ring, so be it.
Yes, of course, there could be an incentive there for the phone company because, in the aggregate, that 30% might add-up to a nice pile of money. I'm sure there's a creative way to manage that. Perhaps something like a metric based on that income that penalizes them for not doing a better job of filtering the calls. This is where detailed analysis of the proposal is necessary.
Also as an individual this would be kinda scary. Not to mention the fact I have to share my private address book, but also if my friend forgets to add me I can randomly have to pay?
I like your idea in theory. In practice, many of the calls are originating from countries which would not comply with any regulatory framework requiring this, and are in many cases intentionally complicit in scamming. Additionally, it would require telcos to know every number in your address book, something I think is frankly none of their business.
I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off letting scammers operating boiler rooms in India steal money from your grandparents, so they're happy to utterly destroy any utility that a phone has.
It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know. The few times (like now, unfortunately) I expect a call from an unknown number related to follow-up for in-person business, when I answer 95% or more of incoming calls are scams/spam. This is with "Spam Block" enabled, that already blocks known scam/robocall numbers AND NoMoRobo, what slips through is still the majority spam/scams.
I can't even imagine walking around with a cellular phone in 2022 without any of these tools, it's probably a hellscape just like using the web in 2022 without uBlock Origin, NoScript, and PiHole.
We can do better, and the adtech industry + the telcos making money off straight up scammers has destroyed the very fabric of technology as used for social connection.