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World-wide, credit card fraud and other scams cost the public billions of dollars. While credit card fraud is the clear leader in sheer volume of money lost, "regular scams" still result in a significant amount of money being lost each year. Globally, credit card fraud resulted in losses of US$21.84 billion in 2015. The so-called "Nigerian scam", usually perpetrated via email, totalled US$12.7 billion in 2013. Overall losses are likely to be much larger however, as many scams go unreported.
While scams that come in over email are increasingly being picked up by spam filters, around 45% of scams in Australia (and likely other countries) are by phone and text message.
Email spam filters are using machine learning techniques to get better at identifying the wide range of scams that can arrive in inboxes. This is by far the most effective way of dealing with scams, as the average member of the public has been shown to be remarkably susceptible. However, very little has been done about phone and text scams. This is surprising given scammers have quite brazenly stuck to using the same number or area codes over significant periods of time.
[...] Google and Apple should, however, be able to do more independently of these agencies. With the advent of machine learning techniques being used to analyse emails, it will be also possible to apply the same technology to phone calls.
[...] The list of other scam types is fairly consistent, and so is identifiable by software interpreting the conversation in real time. Governments should apply pressure on companies like Apple and Google to tackle this problem. Until then however, it is worth using one of the third party apps (like: TrueCaller, Hiya ) to ward off scams.
Do you have suggestions on how these scams could be stopped ?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday June 27 2017, @12:18AM (1 child)
This (or a more civilized version of this) is what Google Voice was intended to provide. An automated answering system that could weed out known scam/spam as well as learn your preferences regarding specific callers.
The problem is that Google Voice has been mostly neglected, and one can never point all ones advertising and phone publishing toward it because Google may "sunset" it without warning.
Also both Google and Bing now go out of their way to prevent using their search engines to find the actual owner of given phone numbers, (so you can track down the scammers). Instead they lead you to an endless stream of charlatans trying to extract $30 to provide you with 4 year old information. Every one of those "services" could be put out of business tomorrow if Google would just open up search results to actual phone numbers.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday June 27 2017, @12:36PM
It'd be of limited use if they did make searching numbers easier. Most of the scammers don't directly own the numbers (fake caller ID) or proxy through compromised PBXes (real caller ID with legit number, but false pretenses) just like with spam mail. Only a small number use their numbers they actually own, but even those change extremely frequently. The search engines wouldn't do much more than provide a lot of incomplete or misleading information similar to those websites.