Aaron Foss won a $25,000 cash prize from the Federal Trade Commission for figuring out how to eliminate all those annoying robocalls that dial into your phone from a world of sleazy marketers.
The year was 2013. Using a little telephone hackery, Foss found a way of blocking spammers while still allowing the emergency alert service and other legitimate entities to call in bulk. Basically, he re-routed all calls through a service that would check them against a whitelist of legitimate operations and a blacklist of spammers, and this little trick was so effective, he soon parlayed it into a modest business.
Link to Wired article here.
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This Guy Found a Way to Block Robocalls when Phone Companies Wouldn’t
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(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:08AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by nyder on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:36AM
The NSA are terrorists though
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday January 29 2015, @05:01PM
the NSA is not here to improve our quality of life.
I'm not sure WHAT the nsa is here for, to be perfectly honest. seems they do more harm than good.
as for the phone companies, they have no desire to stop it. they make good money from it.
I once got a call that was clearly scamming me (trying, at least) and had a hidden caller-id. why I even picked up the phone, I'm not sure, but it was a scam call. using *69 to call back didn't work. I called the phone company and tried to report it. asked for the phone #. they refused. I told them I was being scammed and they didn't care; just told me to call the police.
the phone company makes money from this, so they don't care about USERS. (so, what else is new in this world?)
blacklists and whitelists are the only way. for my cell, I use 'mr number' (lol) - an android app - and that uses crowdsourcing to tell me when the caller is a spammer. works pretty good, for the most part, too.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 30 2015, @01:45PM
Don't contact the phone company; contact the FCC:
https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=39744 [fcc.gov]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:54AM
that phone scammers hate
(Score: 2) by everdred on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:47PM
Came here to say this. Have an upvote.
Hope this isn't a sign of headlines to come here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:29AM
This has got to cost money. How's he paying for it?
I suspect it is the same way every other "free" service gets paid for nowadays, he's selling your 'metadata.'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:48AM
Deja vu! I stopped robocalls, unsolicted commercial calls, and "do you have prince albert in a can" calls all at once by dropping my landline. If these bastards find their way on to my smart phone, I would have to think my smart phone is not so smart, but yet another ploy by the marketing division of Dynacorp. Whitelists are alright, but what about the call that notifies me of my winning the lottery? Somehow, I get the idea, that in any civilized society, communication and commerce would be completely separated with massive penalties for breaching the barrier. Robo-call? Death penalty. Spam? Death penalty! Fake notice that the warranty on you car is expiring, final official notice from some dipshit company in Texas? Double death penalty! And you know, I am morally opposed to the death penalty. Except in these cases. And their dogs too. Wait, that may be a bit harsh, be maybe it will have a deterrent effect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:27AM
I guess that will only work on cats and James Bond.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday January 29 2015, @12:06PM
I too dropped my land line. Not had one for quite a while.
In the UK, there is the Telephone Preference Service [tpsonline.org.uk] that allows you to register your number. You should not get a call from anyone after that.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:39PM
It's a nice idea but they call anyway. At least it allows you to tell them that they are in breach of the law by calling you.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 30 2015, @01:47PM
Here in the US we have the national do not call list. I decided to sign up for it about a year ago, and soon started getting more spam calls than ever... -.-
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Thursday January 29 2015, @05:13AM
When a telemarketer calls up a number expecting a human and he gets a machine, they hang up. Most won't leave a message, and if they do they have to reveal their true phone number, not the one they spoofed through their PBX.
Once you answer a telemarketer with a personal acceptance of their call, you get on a special list highly valued by the telemarketing associations, as you are one of the very few that will take their telemarketing calls.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday January 29 2015, @08:55AM
Well if you run a business, you have to answer your phone.
So you have two choices: some kind of automated answer and call direction system, or flack catcher people answering for everyone.
Either is expensive.
With more and more people using cell phones it gets more complex.
Personally I haven't found that robo callers seem to mind all that much getting hung up on. At least they never call back to bitch.
If i don't get a known caller ID, I pick up the line and say nothing for a couple seconds. Other times I say hello, and if I don't get a human voice immediately, i hang up.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @12:03PM
The only thing that is/was ever needed, was to copy the ANI information into the callerid field of SS7 call setup message, effectively eliminating callerid spoofing. The only reason this isn't done in bulk is because consumer harassment results in the sale of additional telephone products. It also facilitates a false need for the national do-not-call registry which is itself an telemarketing list for donor calls by brand D and brand R. This is a regulatory thing, not a technology thing. We are talking about ONE line of configuration on the SS7 switch. It has been possible or decades. It was never done because communications rights are asymmetric.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:51PM
I suspect there's a similar conflict of interest with snail mail. These days almost all the paper mail I get is advertisements, and the remainder is a small amount of important correspondence from local government or financial institutions. I wind up having to open and shake the junk mail to make sure an important letter isn't hidden inside it, a practice I'm sure is to the advantage of the junk mailers, but I can't help thinking that this is what's keeping the US Post Service afloat. The proportions of junk to actual calls may be trending that way for land lines as well. It's like if email providers had been paid to deliver spam instead of it costing them, there's no way we would have all this wonderful Bayesian filtering, blacklisting, etc.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday January 29 2015, @12:06PM
The only way to stop robocalls is to follow the money and make it painful for people who sell outbound dialing services to robocallers. Until that happens, nothing is going to work. Make the penalties for selling outbound dialing that enables robocalling so painful that these fly-by-night telecom companies would go out of business, and enforce them, then things will change. These stupid contests and dumb ideas are just a waste of time if no financial pain is introduced to the system.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:22PM
Honest question, once in a while there comes up a story here or elsewhere about those robocalls. I live in Germany, i have a land line (same number for 15 years now) and I have never been called by a robot or any real person who wanted me to buy something. Maybe it is the law over here (AFAIK contracts made over the telephone are not legally binding in GER, so it is not an attractive business model) or I'm just lucky. How often do you get called p.a.?
(Score: 2) by iwoloschin on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:40PM
Yes.
I routinely get several calls per day on my cellphone. I don't use my cellphone much, so I've got a "per minute" style plan, so answering a spam call uses a minute. I've gotten good at just ignoring calls from numbers I don't recognize (I don't know anyone in Oklahoma, so I can safely ignore those numbers), but it's annoying and frustrating, not to mention technically illegal.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:24PM
I think this is the real difference: who pays for the call.
The caller pays for the whole call in most (all?) of Europe; the callee pays nothing. If it's to a mobile (cellphone), the caller will pay more than if it's to a landline. (Mobiles usually have a readily-identifiable dialling code, clearly different from geographical numbers, so the caller will be aware.)
As I understand it, in the US, the caller pays only the landline rate, and if it's to a mobile, the callee pays the extra.
And I expect that seriously changes the economics of cold-calling.
As a UK resident, I don't think I've ever had a cold-call (human or robot) to my mobile, even though I've had the same number since last century. And my landline gets very few. (This may be because it's registered with the Telephone Preference Service [tpsonline.org.uk], which makes it technically illegal to cold-call within the UK.) (Actually, there was a couple of months late last year when one company would call up most days and leave a message about government grants and solar panels, but they seem to have given up now, thank goodness. Still, apart from that...)
I don't know of anyone here who gets 'several calls per day'; if they did, they probably wouldn't stand for it (e.g. by getting a new number). And that's just from the annoyance, without being charged for the privilege.
Why do you stand for it?
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by ticho on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:33PM
I get one such call every other week or so. I'm in Europe, so I don't pay anything for incoming calls, so I usually just mute the microphone, put the phone down next to me and let them waste their time, while I continue doing whatever it is I am doing. Time is, after all, money.
(Score: 2) by iwoloschin on Thursday January 29 2015, @08:56PM
I've had the same cellphone number since high school and it'd be annoying to change it, and it's not certain that changing would actually help. Who's to say the new number would be any better?
I rarely "get" spam email anymore. I mean, it's there, but Google filters it out and away from me. I'd think that filtering out bogus phone numbers would be even easier!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @12:49AM
The law that set this up actually put some teeth in it.
Start by reporting it to the FCC.
There are federal penalties up to $16,000. [google.com]
Report it to your state Attorney General.
There are state penalties up to $25,000.
Sue the bastards.
You can recover $1500 per occurrence. [privacyrights.org]
I can imagine someone making a business of this.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:35PM
My Favorite one:
*loud horn blast* This is your Captain speaking. You've been selected for a free cruise to the Bahamas! *birds cawing in the background* All you have to do is complete this survey..
I also get the FBI one:
"Hello, the FBI reports there is a home break-in every 15 seconds.."
Since last year i've been getting a stupid healthcare one but i've never gotten past the first few words. Something about medical and dental costs.
Robocalls seems to be a normal thing in the US. I keep reading in the news how the government is fining them for millions of dollars. Those robocalls must be making more money than the fines because they never stop.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:13PM
I inherited a (mobile) phone number that belonged to a deadbeat, and I get daily calls from collection agencies and infrequent SMS to trick her into contacting them. In the beginning, I told them that she no longer has this number. But since trying doesn't cost them anything and they thing an incorrect number is better than none at all, I just ignore unknown calls, and mute rings from their numbers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @06:17PM
I got a number like that once. I just told them that the number was no longer good and that any more calls would be considered harassment under 15 USC 1692d(5) and I would ask for statutory damages under 15 USC 1692k, which is $1,000 per call. One particularly bad company ended up sending me a check after I sent a letter (clearly marked as an offer to compromise under rule 408) detailing what happened to their RASP and I included a copy of the petition.