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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: 3, Informative) by RedBear on Thursday March 16 2017, @03:58AM

    by RedBear (1734) on Thursday March 16 2017, @03:58AM (#479668)

    I've honestly just about had enough with the traditional phone system. It seems like it's become actively dangerous to even have a phone number. I heard about a new scam recently where they say something like "Hello? Can you hear me?" as soon as you pick up the line, and then record you saying "Yes," and use that recording of your voice to threaten you with legal action if you attempt to fight the fraudulent charges they stick you with. How a simple recording of myself saying "Yes," without further context can be used legally to charge me money is quite beyond me. At this point I simply don't answer calls at home from numbers that I don't immediately recognize. Legitimate calls from places like the local clinic calling about appointments will leave a message. Scammers generally don't go to the trouble. If I happen to accidentally answer a call that turns out to sound like a survey or robocall or scammer, I simply hang up without speaking. Always.

    As others have noted, the phone companies are clearly colluding with the scammers and couldn't care less about all the fraud going on, as long as they're getting paid for the use of the phone lines. The phone companies will never produce a solution to this problem unless people threaten to completely stop using the phone system en masse. I can't because I have DSL and it's the only valid Internet option locally. But a lot of people simply don't have land lines anymore.

    I came to the conclusion a few years ago after attempting to research a way to effectively whitelist my home phone calls (and finding nothing practical available) that there is only one possible ultimate end-game solution to this problem. We need every phone to be answered by a "receptionist" that is highly skilled at holding convincing human-like conversations. The only way this will be practical of course is to use AI systems. A voice answers each and every phone call and then proceeds to string the scammers along with utmost skill without ever giving them anything that's actually useful or any accurate information. In fact the AI should be programmed to give disinformation and keep the scammers on the line for as long as possible. Only if the AI deems the caller to be legitimate does the call actually get forwarded to a real person. One way to get through would be to know a password. Alternately, the AI could offer to hang up and call the caller back at a known, publicly available phone number to verify that the caller ID wasn't being spoofed.

    This is a long way of saying that the only way this kind of fraud will ever stop is when it becomes completely unprofitable. Period. You can't make water flow uphill. Every scammer group that gets identified and shut down just leaves an opportunity for two more to spring up in their wake. It's pointless to even try to spoon feed the FCC specific information about one particular scammer call center that probably only exists for a month in some random apartment or office building anyway, before they move to a new location under a different name. You have to get to the actual root of the problem to solve this, which is that people successfully make money off this behavior, just as they make money from spamming emails. Make it impossible to make any money doing this and the problem goes away by itself.

    If anyone knows of an affordable phone number whitelisting device that doesn't involve me becoming an Asterisk/PBX guru, I'd love to hear about it. I looked around for a while and never found anything that impressed me. When I discovered that my home phone system allows me to set specific ringtones for numbers stored in an address book in the handsets, I changed the default ringtone to a quiet "burburp" tone and assigned a louder tone to a few "known" numbers. This got most of my sanity back after the bot-storm during the 2011/2012 campaign season. But this was a pain in the ass because you have to populate the address book manually in each cordless handset. Putting in more than a few numbers is just not worth the trouble. I wish there was some kind of better/smarter phone available that would make it easier to add legitimate numbers to the entire system, and allow the default ringtone to be completely silenced (heaven forbid it has a smart option to allow a number to ring through if it calls back repeatedly within a few minutes, like the Do Not Disturb feature on the iPhone). Heaven forbid too, that the phone could self-update from the Internet (just like an AdBlock plugin) a list of known scammer numbers that should be automatically blocked or fed a phone system error tone indicating the phone number is disconnected. All of this together would solve at least 99% of the problem already.

    I'm guessing that a lot of this is possible with something like Asterisk, I just don't know if I'm up to the task of managing my own PBX or whether it would be ultimately worth the trouble.

    --
    ¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
    ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
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