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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
New data shows that the majority of robot-enabled scam phone calls came from fewer than 40 call centers, a finding that offers hope the growing menace of robocalls can be stopped.
The calls use computers and the Internet to dial thousands of phone numbers every minute and promote fraudulent schemes that promise to lower credit card interest rates, offer loans, and sell home security products, to name just a few of the scams. Over the past decade, robocall complaints have mushroomed, with the Federal Trade Commission often receiving hundreds of thousands of complaints each month. In 2013, the consumer watchdog agency awarded $50,000 to three groups who devised blocking systems that had the potential to help end the scourge. Three years later, however, the robocall problem seems as intractable as ever.
On Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a researcher said that slightly more than half of more than 1 million robocalls tracked were sent by just 38 telephony infrastructures. The relatively small number of actors offers hope that the phenomenon can be rooted out, by either automatically blocking the call centers or finding ways for law enforcement groups to identify and prosecute the operators.
"We know that the majority of robocalls only come from 38 different infrastructures," Aude Marzuoli, research scientist at a company called Pindrop Labs, told Ars. "It's not as if there are thousands of people out there doing this. If you can catch this small number of bad actors we can" stop the problem."
Pindrop researchers reached the conclusion by creating a security honeypot of phone numbers that received more than 1 million robocalls. The researchers transcribed about 10 percent of the calls and analyzed the semantics with machine-learning techniques to isolate identical scams. The researchers combined those results with analysis that tracked 150 different audio features of each call. By studying the codecs, packet loss, spectrum, and frequency inside the audio and combining the results with the machine learning, the researchers were able to obtain a fingerprint of each different call center.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday August 06 2016, @07:36PM
Think about it, the phone companies see these call centers as valuable customers so they run cover for them while their pet politicians allow it. Think two seconds about it and it is obvious this problem could be eliminated in a month if the powers that be actually cared.
Establish a * code to report a fraud number that pulls the ANI (i.e. the real originating number) and and routes it to a small task force of ten FBI agents. As each agent finishes their previous case they pull the number with the largest number of complaints in the past week. Call a sample of the complainers and get statements, use those to get a warrant to tap the line and record actual fraud attempts in progress. Arrest everybody involved (including the actual low level telemarketers) and seize everything connected to the operation. Make sure there is plenty of media coverage. Within a month you could reassign eight of the agents because phone scams within reach of the FBI wouldn't exist. Then move on to the VOIP shops trunking calls in from overseas and start drying up their ability to keep US based lines for long enough to matter.
This of course has not happened. And it won't happen.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @07:50PM
The problem is that the government is too busy going after the easy people to go after, namely, the victimless criminals. The war on drugs is designed to create 'criminals' that are easy to go after so that you can hire more law enforcement and proclaim that you are doing something constructive. Now you can justify having more law enforcement which can be used to otherwise enforce your police state when convenient.
In the meantime the war on drugs distracts from going after actual crimes with victims, crimes that are more difficult to stop, while still allowing law enforcement to pretend to be doing something useful. It's sad how useless law enforcement is when it comes to stopping actual criminals, people who actually deserve to be categorized as criminals. Instead, they focus on victimless criminals and overcriminalizing everyone to make easy targets for law enforcement to go after while claiming they are doing something useful.
This is just another example of that.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Saturday August 06 2016, @10:22PM
the government is too busy going after the easy people to go after ... the war on drugs is designed to create 'criminals' that are easy to go after
Seems to me that it would be pretty easy to go after these Robotcallers. But style points for trying to change the subject of the discussion to your own favourite issue; nice try.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07 2016, @11:32AM
Some years back the government ran a contest to seek technical solutions to the problem. They got half a dozen entries suggesting such a code and half a dozen more saying that such a code already exists and they just needed to tell the telecoms to upgrade their equipment to support it. Of course these entries were all rejected.
(Score: 1) by daver!west!fmc on Monday August 08 2016, @05:41AM
Way back in the 1990s it was possible to run a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) whose business was modem pools configured to answer inbound calls. The way this worked was that there were settlement fees paid by the originating LEC to the terminating LEC, one when the call was answered and a per-time-unit charge for the length of the call. As calls to ISPs tended to go on for a while, and always went to the ISP, the business model was to sign up ISPs as customers and then collect money from both ISP customers and from originating LECs (usually the incumbent telco(s) from which the ISP's customers had wireline telephone service).
I'm not sure what happened to this, whether the settlement fees were done away with once the ILECs complained about not having done this themselves or whether the decline of dialup Internet access made it not worth doing.
If the settlement fees are still in place, there's your motivation for why the phone companies don't see robocalls as a problem: every time one of those calls is answered, there is money in it for them.