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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 15 2017, @10:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the with-a-90dB-horn? dept.

I have been getting calls that immediately start with, "Thank you for choosing Marriot Hotels!" for a couple years now. The message goes on to say how I am getting this great offer because I am a valued customer. On a couple occasions, I stayed on the line to get a human, they ask yes/no questions (are you over 28? do you have a valid credit card?). I just replied with questions of my own, and they immediately hung up. I can continue to ignore the calls, but they are always from a random local number and I get nearly twice as many of these calls than I get legitimate calls.

I did a search and found this has been around for a while and Marriot is aware:
http://news.marriott.com/2015/05/marriott-international-responds-to-continued-phone-scam-updated-oct-20-2015/

I have deliberated about posting, but I don't see the FCC [US Federal Communications Commission] as being able to act unless I can provide them something more than the spoofed phone number. Providing the number(s) probably won't help as they are spoofing the caller ID. I know that this is a long shot, but is there anything anyone can suggest beyond creating a spreadsheet of phone numbers, dates, and times to log these calls? Would that even be useful?

It seems that something is fundamentally broken with the current phone system, if this spoofing is even possible. But that is a side topic here, the real question is, what can I do, if anything, to get the data the FCC would need to shut this down?


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by marknmel on Wednesday March 15 2017, @12:33PM

    by marknmel (1243) on Wednesday March 15 2017, @12:33PM (#479358) Homepage

    Happy belated Pi day.

    Asterisk is fast enough on a Rpi, as long as you don't need to transcode - for instance G711u to GSM.
    I don't generally transcode - but I do end to end G711u. I use a voip carrier and ported my number there, but for a time I used POTS with a SPA3102. It worked generally well. I believe there are distributions pre-built, just flash and boot.

    --
    There is nothing that can't be solved with one more layer of indirection.
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