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John Oliver tackles robocalls by flooding FCC with spam calls:
"The host of HBO's Last Week Tonight has come up with a new way to encourage FCC commissioners to take a harder stance on robocalls: by robocalling them. On his show Sunday evening, Oliver debuted a system ... that robocalls FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and fellow commissioners every 90 minutes.
Can we call it treason? I don't think so, this guy is foreign, from U.K. Time to deport?
John Oliver Fights Robocalls. by Robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC:
Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners.
In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners.
"Hi FCC, this is John from customer service," Oliver's recorded voice says on the call. "Congratulations, you've just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today... robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes—here's some bagpipe music."
[...] When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said.
"It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls."
It would be a shame to waste all that time between phone calls doing nothing. Maybe John Oliver could be persuaded to add a 100 more people and maybe another 435 people while he's at it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spamalope on Sunday March 17 2019, @12:03AM (1 child)
Telephone companies have the actual origin of calls.
That information has value though, and why provide that when you can provide the faux-N number instead and charge the same fee?
Then you can charge scammers a fee to insert any faux-N number they want and get a second fee.
Then you can make money selling scammer blocking services. Then reset and start the game again with cell phones and digital/voip lines. Add in the services to make the incoming number match your local exchange so the call appears to originate nearby combined with healthcare providers selling detailed medical histories to criminals and you get the medical billing fraud calls I'm getting that appear to be from local numbers but are actually VOIP spoofs.
So, did Oliver use the E-stalking services to get the real personal numbers of those FCC folks? Were they spoofing the call origins to make the call appear to come from a local pharmacy or some other source where you'd want to answer the call? Because it's not really the same thing if he's didn't work all of that in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 17 2019, @04:57AM
I'm sure he didn't to stay out of legal trouble, but, knowing how the internet works, I'm pretty sure a handful of vigilantes did.