Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
By next year, nearly half of the mobile phone calls we get will be scams, according to a new report from First Orion, a company that provides calls management and protection for T-Mobile, MetroPCs, Virgin Mobile and others.
The percentage of scam calls in US mobile traffic increased from 3.7 percent last year to 29.2 percent this year, and it's predicted to rise to 44.6 percent in 2019, First Orion said in a press release Wednesday.
The most popular method scammers use to try to get people to pick up the phone is called "neighborhood spoofing," where they disguise their numbers with a local prefix so people presume the calls are safe to pick up, First Onion said. Third-party call blocking apps may help protect consumers from known scam numbers, but they can't tell if a scammer hijacks someone's number and uses it for scam calls.
"Year after year, the scam call epidemic bombards consumers at record-breaking levels, surpassing the previous year and scammers increasingly invade our privacy at new extremes," First Orion CEO Charles Morgan said in the press release.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/almost-half-of-us-cell-phone-calls-will-be-scams-by-next-year-says-report/
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Sunday September 16 2018, @04:58PM
'Cause they're in a super vulnerable position. If they're charged with conspiracy rather than aiding and abetting, they can be sentenced just like the kingpin of the operation. That's how someone could get life without parole for handling a drug dealer's phone messages.
But wait, there's more! Suppose there's one mastermind and 15 headset people. If the US Attorney breaks up the operation, the organizer can buy a lighter sentence by shopping out the headset people. Then the US Attorney gets credit for sixteen convictions, and yes it's unjust that the headset people get longer sentences than the criminal mastermind, but that is the way it works. Not hypothetical, I know someone this happened to.
I daydream about telling the fake IRS agent to hire a defense attorney specializing in Federal cases and having their attorney try to get them a deal. If the numbers aren't an issue, then it's a simple Prisoner's Dilemma. I've heard there's a tendency for the best deal to go to the first person who cooperates.