I think that it is too late to try to fix the robocall issue, at least from a non-business perspective. I don't pick up the phone for any reason at this point if I do not recognize. I don't know...
I think that it is too late to try to fix the robocall issue, at least from a non-business perspective.
I don't pick up the phone for any reason at this point if I do not recognize. I don't know anyone that does pick up the phone from unknown numbers. At this point, the entire communication system is ruined and most people have kind of accepted it and moved on.
There are exceptions, of course. Business users expecting random customer calls or job seekers expecting responses to their applications are going to still happen. I just do not see a world in which my phone has a ringer on and I make an effort to answer at random.
I'm in a similar boat. I went so far as to automatically block any call not in my contacts (unless I'm expecting a call). It's gotten absurd over the last few years. I'm talking +10 spam calls a...
I'm in a similar boat. I went so far as to automatically block any call not in my contacts (unless I'm expecting a call). It's gotten absurd over the last few years. I'm talking +10 spam calls a day. Carrier spam detection coupled with Google's Phone app helps somewhat, but a few still get through.
Those pictures are hilarious. What the fuck are those companies even thinking?? Literally shitposts they've sent to the FCC. Part of me hopes they comply or shut down but it's hard to believe it'd...
Those pictures are hilarious. What the fuck are those companies even thinking?? Literally shitposts they've sent to the FCC. Part of me hopes they comply or shut down but it's hard to believe it'd make an impact
It feels like any normal person would take one look at those filings and just delete their entry in the database, but it sounds like they'll do almost anything to avoid that: That's very laudable,...
It feels like any normal person would take one look at those filings and just delete their entry in the database, but it sounds like they'll do almost anything to avoid that:
"Finally, he noted that the FCC might have been hesitant to take an action that could harm customers. "One reason to be hesitant is that it's not just the bad actor network that gets cut off," Feld said. "Any innocent customers get cut off. This really goes against the entire mindset of the FCC. Generally, the FCC is about making sure that networks stay operational and that calls go through.""
That's very laudable, but as someone above commented, the system is so very broken that it feels kind of like cutting back a completely overgrown garden. You don't go in with fancy secateurs, you break out the motorised hedge trimmers!
I'm not in the States, so I don't have 1st hand experience, but here in Europe I get calls from numbers that are about 20-30 digits long and they're always spam, always. I don't understand why something like that can't just be blocked and, since everything is tracked, trace it back to its origin and feed the data into some sort of n-strike system (is three too low? I can dream).
I used to get several scam calls a day to my landline, all from international numbers. I contacted my provider (which in the UK are essentially all British Telecom underneath) and asked them to...
I used to get several scam calls a day to my landline, all from international numbers. I contacted my provider (which in the UK are essentially all British Telecom underneath) and asked them to block international calls - I don't think I've ever recieved a legitimate international call in my life - and was told that I could either block all incoming calls or none.
How hard can it be to write a filter that blocks everything which is an international number? The whole phone network is digital, surely that must be possible. But apparently not.
Anyway I had some very dull, mindless work to do for a few weeks so I answered every single spam/scam call and spun them out as long as a possibly could. It was quite a fun improv exercise, pretending to be (usually) an old and confused person who wanted to help but kept stumbling over the technology. I got a few calls over thirty minutes and once infuriated the scammer to the point they were just screaming "fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!" down the phone at me.
Weirdly the spam calls stopped shortly after than and we haven't had any for ages. Not sure if that was just a coincidence.
Reading this article is really a cure for imposter syndrome. Any time you think maybe you don't have what it takes to run a successful business, consider that some peoples' businesses have been...
Reading this article is really a cure for imposter syndrome. Any time you think maybe you don't have what it takes to run a successful business, consider that some peoples' businesses have been running for at least a decade or more despite them being unable to read a document, comprehend it, and send a basic response.
Could just be contempt for the FCC? If I profit from spam calls and I'm entirely aware that my business model is fucked if the FCC ever clamps down on it, but I'm also 100% confident that my...
Could just be contempt for the FCC? If I profit from spam calls and I'm entirely aware that my business model is fucked if the FCC ever clamps down on it, but I'm also 100% confident that my correspondence with them has no bearing on them clamping down on it? Fuck it, MS printer test page it is.
Also, no, I don't think I actually would, but I can absolutely imagine people who would, and who would piss themselves laughing with their colleagues in the pub that night.
Are robocalls really that much of an issue in the US? I'm from the Netherlands and I don't think i've ever been called by a robot. Spam calls from humans are extremely rare too. How often do you...
Are robocalls really that much of an issue in the US? I'm from the Netherlands and I don't think i've ever been called by a robot. Spam calls from humans are extremely rare too.
I have both US and EU mobile phone service. I get what is likely a spam call or text around once or twice a year on the EU number. I get multiple spam calls per day on the US number, and spam...
Exemplary
I have both US and EU mobile phone service. I get what is likely a spam call or text around once or twice a year on the EU number. I get multiple spam calls per day on the US number, and spam texts somewhat less frequently (except around elections). I also have a few VoIP numbers in both areas, with similar results, though unlike the mobile numbers, they also have no history with me, and have in many cases never been given out to anyone.
Spam calls appear to be a significant problem only in the US, and there they are debilitating to the ability to use a phone at all, except for numbers already in your contacts list. Blocking numbers is largely useless, because calls rarely come from the same number twice. Blocking area codes is pointless, because calls come from all area codes.
It seems to me that one aspect here is that VoIP numbers seem much easier to obtain and abuse at scale in the US, and far less regulated. Even at an individual level, as a comparison: I have a VoIP number in Ireland with a geographic area code. It took a few days to set up, costs $7/month, and required at least some documentation that it would be associated with a physical location within that geographic area code's designated region. With the same provider, I also have a UK number, which, as it is not associated with a geographic address, has a special non-geographic area code. It also took a few days to set up, and costs $2.50/month.
I also have some US VoIP numbers. They took seconds to set up, cost $0.85 a month, and could be from any area code, anywhere, not only with no documentation needed, but without any regulation that the user have anything to do with that area code. It feels like the whole process is outright set up to be abused. I could set up a number, make thousands of calls through it, and throw it away in a matter of minutes, for less than $1. And these are not wholesale rates!
It's worth noting that the US also just has a spam culture to begin with compared with the EU, not just with phone calls, but in general. My understanding is that the mail service supports itself through unsolicited commercial mailings, and so there is largely no way to stop receiving masses of junk mail (enough that the physical volume of the mail can easily fill a standard mailbox in a few days). Federal laws that revoked stricter state laws make quite a bit of email spam legal (spam is regulated on an opt-out basis, but recipients are not allowed to bring any enforcement). Political groups are largely exempt, explicitly, from most anti-spam regulations: if you have ever made the mistake of donating to a political campaign, you can expect to receive, in the worst cases, multiple calls and texts per hour during election seasons, with little requirement that they even allow you to opt out. Various groups other groups can largely call with impunity, and data protection is all but non-existent. The inundation of spam calls fits into this culture somewhat, unfortunately.
On the other hand, many of the spam calls seem to be for outright fraud, which are presumably illegal. They're not dissimilar to what you'd expect from email spam fraud. Of the ones in English, I'd often receive texts and voicemails from "the IRS" (or something similar, but wrong) saying that I was delinquent on my taxes, and usually saying that agents were en route to arrest me unless I paid my back taxes immediately, with the standard IRS payment methods of things like Amazon gift cards; these seem to have died down a bit. Many in Chinese seem to be saying that my visa has expired, and that I need to contact them or I'll be deported. The "expiring car warranty" scam is a joke at this point. But on the other hand, it's not entirely clear to me that these are illegal in the US (except, perhaps, the IRS one). Many physical mailings that I would consider to be scams seem to be legal in the US, for example, sending an invoice or letter selling something seemingly required, vaguely implying that you are a particular organization or agency, when you are not, seems to be legal in the US as long as you have fine print somewhere that notes that you're actually selling your services as an intermediary. This is ubiquitous for domain name registrations, for example, but also things like property records offices and universities.
It really seems like spam calls are one of the areas where the rest of the developed world has largely solved the problem, and the US somehow insists that the problem is extremely difficult to solve.
I’d say on average once a day over the last few years, with periods of 5+ a day sprinkled in. I have gotten very aggressive about not putting my # in whenever possible, not answering any unknown #...
I’d say on average once a day over the last few years, with periods of 5+ a day sprinkled in. I have gotten very aggressive about not putting my # in whenever possible, not answering any unknown # except when I’m expecting a call, and even then refusing to say hello until the other person does so first (lots of robocalls will hang up on you after a few seconds)
There are several reasons but chief among them is predictive dialing ratios. For every one human agent, the system will be dialing as many as a hundred numbers in parallel. If a human picks up,...
There are several reasons but chief among them is predictive dialing ratios. For every one human agent, the system will be dialing as many as a hundred numbers in parallel. If a human picks up, the system will attempt to patch in a human but if it can’t it will just log the fact that there was a human and try again later.
It varies. I'm applying for jobs right now and, since I'm pretty sure all these companies' job application portals sell the information you input into them to data brokers, I've seen a marked...
It varies. I'm applying for jobs right now and, since I'm pretty sure all these companies' job application portals sell the information you input into them to data brokers, I've seen a marked uptick in spam emails and phone calls.
At other times it starts to quiet down to maybe 1 every other day. It's a bit like whack a mole. Your number ends up on some data broker's list and they sell it as a lead to a bunch of scammers, then all the various scammers hit you up until they mark you as a bad prospect and it'll be quiet until the next time a random data broker puts you on a list.
Excuse my language, but as someone living under EU GDPR rules: what the fuck?
I'm applying for jobs right now and, since I'm pretty sure all these companies' job application portals sell the information you input into them to data brokers, I've seen a marked uptick in spam emails and phone calls.
Excuse my language, but as someone living under EU GDPR rules: what the fuck?
Y'all need those email aliases for your phone numbers... That myemail+thisaddresswasleakedbyNYT@gmail.com thing, that you give to NYT, and if you ever receive spam on it, you blame NYT? Yeah,...
Y'all need those email aliases for your phone numbers... That myemail+thisaddresswasleakedbyNYT@gmail.com thing, that you give to NYT, and if you ever receive spam on it, you blame NYT?
Yeah, that, except for phone numbers. preferably not as easily sidestepped.
Oh, I have an even worse story. My mom went from literally zero spam calls to ~15-20 per day overnight. I am not exaggerating, it was literally an overnight change. I was jealous of her for years...
Oh, I have an even worse story. My mom went from literally zero spam calls to ~15-20 per day overnight. I am not exaggerating, it was literally an overnight change. I was jealous of her for years and she never rally understood how bad it was for my dad and me.
We don't have evidence, but there was only one place she input her phone number recently: when she signed up for the national health insurance plan. Given the content of the calls, the government or someome working at Medicare most likely gives companies the client lists.
Just as a counterpoint to the other responses, I essentially never get spam calls on either my personal or work cell phone. Haven't for years. I just went through my call history and I can't even...
Just as a counterpoint to the other responses, I essentially never get spam calls on either my personal or work cell phone. Haven't for years. I just went through my call history and I can't even find an example of one. I'm not particularly careful about who I give my phone number to either.
For another, somewhat similar, counterpoint, phone number blocking seems somewhat effective for me. I switched to iOS a few years ago. Since then, I started actively blocking the phone number for...
For another, somewhat similar, counterpoint, phone number blocking seems somewhat effective for me. I switched to iOS a few years ago. Since then, I started actively blocking the phone number for any spam calls I get. I still get some every now and again, but it is quite rare.
However on my parent's landline, they have no way to block phone numbers. They get 5-6 spam calls per day.
I get about 2 a day on my personal phone, but on my work phone (which is an unlisted number), I get anywhere from 10-40 per day. yes, forty. It's ridiculous that this is happening and I've been...
I get about 2 a day on my personal phone, but on my work phone (which is an unlisted number), I get anywhere from 10-40 per day. yes, forty.
It's ridiculous that this is happening and I've been trying to block numbers on my phones as they come in.
More often than not, instead of a spam phone call on my cell, I get spam/scam texts, and I report every single one of them.
The US largely has no protections against being called by random numbers in the first place, but there's no protections against autodialers either. Well no there was, but it was repealed in 2018....
The US largely has no protections against being called by random numbers in the first place, but there's no protections against autodialers either. Well no there was, but it was repealed in 2018.
I didn't know this but after looking it up it appears that cold calling is entirely prohibited in the EU! I found this page which explains a lot. Companies are only allowed to call private people...
I didn't know this but after looking it up it appears that cold calling is entirely prohibited in the EU! I found this page which explains a lot. Companies are only allowed to call private people with explicit permission.
In the US (and UK, Australia, Canada, India) you have to opt out of being called but in the EU it's the other way around.
Hopefully they can introduce similar laws in the US too.
This got me thinking about the few times that I do get called by strange numbers, they're always calling from outside the EU and my phone automatically blocks them. The last phone call like that was six months ago and it was from the Ivory Coast, most likely a scam caller.
Yeah I'm getting some +223 calls lately... on WhatsApp. With Google Pixels call screening and being a citizen in EU I very rarely get them on my actual phonenumber. I'm really happy with how...
Yeah I'm getting some +223 calls lately... on WhatsApp.
With Google Pixels call screening and being a citizen in EU I very rarely get them on my actual phonenumber. I'm really happy with how that's set up and how difficult it is to get scam or cold calls on our actual phones. Scammers often ignore those rulings so they do happen but hey, not as often at least.
I'm American but I moved to Germany. It's wildly different. I got more spam calls on my temporary US number when I went back for two weeks of vacation than I have in 5 years of living in Germany....
I'm American but I moved to Germany. It's wildly different. I got more spam calls on my temporary US number when I went back for two weeks of vacation than I have in 5 years of living in Germany. Which is good bc I have gotten more legit calls from non-contacts since I moved here than I did ever when I lived in the states.
I think that it is too late to try to fix the robocall issue, at least from a non-business perspective.
I don't pick up the phone for any reason at this point if I do not recognize. I don't know anyone that does pick up the phone from unknown numbers. At this point, the entire communication system is ruined and most people have kind of accepted it and moved on.
There are exceptions, of course. Business users expecting random customer calls or job seekers expecting responses to their applications are going to still happen. I just do not see a world in which my phone has a ringer on and I make an effort to answer at random.
I'm in a similar boat. I went so far as to automatically block any call not in my contacts (unless I'm expecting a call). It's gotten absurd over the last few years. I'm talking +10 spam calls a day. Carrier spam detection coupled with Google's Phone app helps somewhat, but a few still get through.
Those pictures are hilarious. What the fuck are those companies even thinking?? Literally shitposts they've sent to the FCC. Part of me hopes they comply or shut down but it's hard to believe it'd make an impact
It feels like any normal person would take one look at those filings and just delete their entry in the database, but it sounds like they'll do almost anything to avoid that:
That's very laudable, but as someone above commented, the system is so very broken that it feels kind of like cutting back a completely overgrown garden. You don't go in with fancy secateurs, you break out the motorised hedge trimmers!
I'm not in the States, so I don't have 1st hand experience, but here in Europe I get calls from numbers that are about 20-30 digits long and they're always spam, always. I don't understand why something like that can't just be blocked and, since everything is tracked, trace it back to its origin and feed the data into some sort of n-strike system (is three too low? I can dream).
I used to get several scam calls a day to my landline, all from international numbers. I contacted my provider (which in the UK are essentially all British Telecom underneath) and asked them to block international calls - I don't think I've ever recieved a legitimate international call in my life - and was told that I could either block all incoming calls or none.
How hard can it be to write a filter that blocks everything which is an international number? The whole phone network is digital, surely that must be possible. But apparently not.
Anyway I had some very dull, mindless work to do for a few weeks so I answered every single spam/scam call and spun them out as long as a possibly could. It was quite a fun improv exercise, pretending to be (usually) an old and confused person who wanted to help but kept stumbling over the technology. I got a few calls over thirty minutes and once infuriated the scammer to the point they were just screaming "fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!" down the phone at me.
Weirdly the spam calls stopped shortly after than and we haven't had any for ages. Not sure if that was just a coincidence.
Reading this article is really a cure for imposter syndrome. Any time you think maybe you don't have what it takes to run a successful business, consider that some peoples' businesses have been running for at least a decade or more despite them being unable to read a document, comprehend it, and send a basic response.
Could just be contempt for the FCC? If I profit from spam calls and I'm entirely aware that my business model is fucked if the FCC ever clamps down on it, but I'm also 100% confident that my correspondence with them has no bearing on them clamping down on it? Fuck it, MS printer test page it is.
Also, no, I don't think I actually would, but I can absolutely imagine people who would, and who would piss themselves laughing with their colleagues in the pub that night.
Are robocalls really that much of an issue in the US? I'm from the Netherlands and I don't think i've ever been called by a robot. Spam calls from humans are extremely rare too.
How often do you get a robocall?
I have both US and EU mobile phone service. I get what is likely a spam call or text around once or twice a year on the EU number. I get multiple spam calls per day on the US number, and spam texts somewhat less frequently (except around elections). I also have a few VoIP numbers in both areas, with similar results, though unlike the mobile numbers, they also have no history with me, and have in many cases never been given out to anyone.
Spam calls appear to be a significant problem only in the US, and there they are debilitating to the ability to use a phone at all, except for numbers already in your contacts list. Blocking numbers is largely useless, because calls rarely come from the same number twice. Blocking area codes is pointless, because calls come from all area codes.
It seems to me that one aspect here is that VoIP numbers seem much easier to obtain and abuse at scale in the US, and far less regulated. Even at an individual level, as a comparison: I have a VoIP number in Ireland with a geographic area code. It took a few days to set up, costs $7/month, and required at least some documentation that it would be associated with a physical location within that geographic area code's designated region. With the same provider, I also have a UK number, which, as it is not associated with a geographic address, has a special non-geographic area code. It also took a few days to set up, and costs $2.50/month.
I also have some US VoIP numbers. They took seconds to set up, cost $0.85 a month, and could be from any area code, anywhere, not only with no documentation needed, but without any regulation that the user have anything to do with that area code. It feels like the whole process is outright set up to be abused. I could set up a number, make thousands of calls through it, and throw it away in a matter of minutes, for less than $1. And these are not wholesale rates!
It's worth noting that the US also just has a spam culture to begin with compared with the EU, not just with phone calls, but in general. My understanding is that the mail service supports itself through unsolicited commercial mailings, and so there is largely no way to stop receiving masses of junk mail (enough that the physical volume of the mail can easily fill a standard mailbox in a few days). Federal laws that revoked stricter state laws make quite a bit of email spam legal (spam is regulated on an opt-out basis, but recipients are not allowed to bring any enforcement). Political groups are largely exempt, explicitly, from most anti-spam regulations: if you have ever made the mistake of donating to a political campaign, you can expect to receive, in the worst cases, multiple calls and texts per hour during election seasons, with little requirement that they even allow you to opt out. Various groups other groups can largely call with impunity, and data protection is all but non-existent. The inundation of spam calls fits into this culture somewhat, unfortunately.
On the other hand, many of the spam calls seem to be for outright fraud, which are presumably illegal. They're not dissimilar to what you'd expect from email spam fraud. Of the ones in English, I'd often receive texts and voicemails from "the IRS" (or something similar, but wrong) saying that I was delinquent on my taxes, and usually saying that agents were en route to arrest me unless I paid my back taxes immediately, with the standard IRS payment methods of things like Amazon gift cards; these seem to have died down a bit. Many in Chinese seem to be saying that my visa has expired, and that I need to contact them or I'll be deported. The "expiring car warranty" scam is a joke at this point. But on the other hand, it's not entirely clear to me that these are illegal in the US (except, perhaps, the IRS one). Many physical mailings that I would consider to be scams seem to be legal in the US, for example, sending an invoice or letter selling something seemingly required, vaguely implying that you are a particular organization or agency, when you are not, seems to be legal in the US as long as you have fine print somewhere that notes that you're actually selling your services as an intermediary. This is ubiquitous for domain name registrations, for example, but also things like property records offices and universities.
It really seems like spam calls are one of the areas where the rest of the developed world has largely solved the problem, and the US somehow insists that the problem is extremely difficult to solve.
I’d say on average once a day over the last few years, with periods of 5+ a day sprinkled in. I have gotten very aggressive about not putting my # in whenever possible, not answering any unknown # except when I’m expecting a call, and even then refusing to say hello until the other person does so first (lots of robocalls will hang up on you after a few seconds)
Why that? To scout out which numbers are live, and sell live numbers to other robocallers?
There are several reasons but chief among them is predictive dialing ratios. For every one human agent, the system will be dialing as many as a hundred numbers in parallel. If a human picks up, the system will attempt to patch in a human but if it can’t it will just log the fact that there was a human and try again later.
I’ve always assumed it was something like that
It varies. I'm applying for jobs right now and, since I'm pretty sure all these companies' job application portals sell the information you input into them to data brokers, I've seen a marked uptick in spam emails and phone calls.
At other times it starts to quiet down to maybe 1 every other day. It's a bit like whack a mole. Your number ends up on some data broker's list and they sell it as a lead to a bunch of scammers, then all the various scammers hit you up until they mark you as a bad prospect and it'll be quiet until the next time a random data broker puts you on a list.
Excuse my language, but as someone living under EU GDPR rules: what the fuck?
I have no evidence of course, but it's a pattern I've noticed. If they're not intentionally selling it they've been breached and are leaking it.
Y'all need those email aliases for your phone numbers... That myemail+thisaddresswasleakedbyNYT@gmail.com thing, that you give to NYT, and if you ever receive spam on it, you blame NYT?
Yeah, that, except for phone numbers. preferably not as easily sidestepped.
Maybe then companies would start giving a shit.
I generally do this but I worry about having "weird" looking emails on a resume.
Oh, I have an even worse story. My mom went from literally zero spam calls to ~15-20 per day overnight. I am not exaggerating, it was literally an overnight change. I was jealous of her for years and she never rally understood how bad it was for my dad and me.
We don't have evidence, but there was only one place she input her phone number recently: when she signed up for the national health insurance plan. Given the content of the calls, the government or someome working at Medicare most likely gives companies the client lists.
It's an interesting cycle for me. Sometimes it's a couple times a day for weeks, and then other times I don't get one for a month.
Just as a counterpoint to the other responses, I essentially never get spam calls on either my personal or work cell phone. Haven't for years. I just went through my call history and I can't even find an example of one. I'm not particularly careful about who I give my phone number to either.
For another, somewhat similar, counterpoint, phone number blocking seems somewhat effective for me. I switched to iOS a few years ago. Since then, I started actively blocking the phone number for any spam calls I get. I still get some every now and again, but it is quite rare.
However on my parent's landline, they have no way to block phone numbers. They get 5-6 spam calls per day.
I get about 2 a day on my personal phone, but on my work phone (which is an unlisted number), I get anywhere from 10-40 per day. yes, forty.
It's ridiculous that this is happening and I've been trying to block numbers on my phones as they come in.
More often than not, instead of a spam phone call on my cell, I get spam/scam texts, and I report every single one of them.
Damn, that's insane. Forty is probably more than I've ever gotten in my entire life.
It's really annoying especially when I have to be available in case a client gets transferred to me.
The US largely has no protections against being called by random numbers in the first place, but there's no protections against autodialers either. Well no there was, but it was repealed in 2018.
I've always thought this episode of ReplyAll was interesting where they go into it.
I didn't know this but after looking it up it appears that cold calling is entirely prohibited in the EU! I found this page which explains a lot. Companies are only allowed to call private people with explicit permission.
In the US (and UK, Australia, Canada, India) you have to opt out of being called but in the EU it's the other way around.
Hopefully they can introduce similar laws in the US too.
This got me thinking about the few times that I do get called by strange numbers, they're always calling from outside the EU and my phone automatically blocks them. The last phone call like that was six months ago and it was from the Ivory Coast, most likely a scam caller.
Yeah I'm getting some +223 calls lately... on WhatsApp.
With Google Pixels call screening and being a citizen in EU I very rarely get them on my actual phonenumber. I'm really happy with how that's set up and how difficult it is to get scam or cold calls on our actual phones. Scammers often ignore those rulings so they do happen but hey, not as often at least.
I'm American but I moved to Germany. It's wildly different. I got more spam calls on my temporary US number when I went back for two weeks of vacation than I have in 5 years of living in Germany. Which is good bc I have gotten more legit calls from non-contacts since I moved here than I did ever when I lived in the states.
On a related note, did anyone watch that Max documentary series called Telemarketers recently? First thing I thought of when I read this topic.