Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @10:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-can-save-you-hundreds dept.

Complaints about automated telemarketing calls jumped steeply last year, and have quintupled since 2009, according to a recent FTC report. The report says that in fiscal year 2017, the agency received over 375,000 complaints per month about automated robocalls, up from only 63,000 per month in 2009. That’s a total of 4.5 million robocall complaints, plus an additional 2.5 million complaints about live telemarketing calls. For comparison, there were 3.4 million robocalls and 1.8 million live calls in 2016. (The FCC also regulates robocalls, but has received far fewer complaints — only 185,000 since August of 2016.)

The report says that robocalls are steadily increasing because of cheap access to internet calling services and autodialing, and because it’s getting easier for spammers to hide their true identity and location. People reported more “neighborhood” number spoofing, where calls appear to come from a local area code, in 2017. The most popular topic by far, according to complaint responses, was debt reduction. People also reported spam calls about vacations and timeshares; warranties and protection plans; prescription medication; and “imposter” calls ostensibly from businesses, the government, or family and friends.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/1/16837814/robocall-spam-phone-call-increase-2017-ftc-report


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by shipofgold on Wednesday January 03 2018, @02:39AM (1 child)

    by shipofgold (4696) on Wednesday January 03 2018, @02:39AM (#617042)

    My VoIP numbers got lots of robocalls. Now they arrive at my asterisk box where I have a simple captcha method. Anybody not in the address book gets a recorded message: "please press nine of you are not a computer".

    Robocalls are almost always autodialers which only distribute the call to a call queue after answer by human. They determine that a human answered by the fact that initial greeting is a single word like "hello". An answering machine will have a longer greeting. Autodialers mostly bail after my greeting, but human callers will press 9. It is now very rare for a telemarketer to dial the number themselves so my telemarketers are down to about one a month.

    Vendors, doctors, etc. press 9 as it is an easy captcha...Now I don't worry about missed calls.

    System works, but only because nobody else does it. It everybody did it the autodialers would recognize and press 9...

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:41AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:41AM (#617079) Journal

    Well, if many people did it the first line of defense is to use longer entry codes. Nothing special about 9 is there? 1492 would would just as well. Different people using different entry codes would mean the caller would need limited speech recognition. Then it would get more complicated, but if they're already using speech recognition, then you start with simple math problems "What's 2 plus 3?". "What's the third prime number?", etc. When they can handle that, you're probably dealing with an AI sophisticated enough to swear at.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.