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The robocall crisis will never totally be fixed
Years into the robocalling frenzy, your phone probably still rings off the hook with "important information about your account," updates from the "Chinese embassy," and every bogus sweepstakes offer imaginable. That's despite promises from the telecom industry and the US government that solutions would be coming. Much like the firehose of spam that made email almost unusable in the late 1990s, robocalls have made people in the US wary of picking up their cell phones and landlines. In fact, email spam offers a useful analogy: a scourge that probably can't be eliminated but can be effectively managed.
Finding the right tools for that job remains a challenge. The Federal Trade Commission has had a strong track record in its 140 robocall-related suits, including a recent victory at the end of March that targeted four massive operations. Bipartisan anti-robocalling legislation is gaining traction in Congress. Apps that flag or block unwanted calls have matured and are solidly effective. And wireless carriers—in part facing pressure from the Federal Communications Commission—have increasingly offered their own anti-robocalling apps and tools for free.
Yet the number of robocalls continues to hit new highs. The anti-robocalling company YouMail estimates that March 2019 saw 5.23 billion robocalls, the highest volume ever. And other firms recorded similar highs. But those numbers don't take into account calls that were successfully blocked. A more useful measure might be the number of complaints filed per month to the FCC and FTC, which remained mostly static in 2018 and the beginning of 2019.
"Even though we're at an all-time high, there's some good news," says YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. "The numbers may be creeping up a little bit, but the situation seems to be mostly stable at this point. We have not turned the corner, but maybe the corner is in sight."
In fact, some consensus has emerged about where that corner is. Industry groups led by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions have been working since 2016 on a pair of standards, dubbed "STIR" and "SHAKEN," that will be used across landline, mobile, and VoIP carriers to cryptographically authenticate the source of calls. Basically, this means that the "spoofed" phone numbers robocallers rely on to ramp up their call volume—also the reason so many robocalls appear to come from your area code—will be easily flagged as untrustworthy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday April 10 2019, @05:15PM (1 child)
No, this problem will not be solved by the cryptoweenies. This problem is about money and political will and can only be solved by attacking it at the root.
Thought experiment:
We (as in we tech types) know the difference between the spoofable callier-id and the non-spoofable ANI used for internal billing purposes by the telephone network. So if the goal is to stop robo-calling add a *code to report it. Collect N reports in Y time of number X and a human at a government agency investigates and drops a telephone death penalty on them: shuts down the service of that customer and that legal entity AND the registered physical address goes onto a blacklist for a year and can't purchase phone service in the U.S. Cost to spin up legal entities is non-zero and renting office space certainly is. Worse, landlords will be impacted and quickly cut a deal to avoid the penalty by agreeing to refuse business to them, using the same public blacklist. Problem instantly vanishes.
This solution is simple, instantly effective and 100% impossible to even conceive of a path to implementation for. And there is where the problem lies, solve that and everything else follows. And we probably solve a lot more currently "intractable" problems at the same time. As others have already noted, the telcos make far more money from the boiler room operations than they make from you. Both the scammers and telcos own more politicians than the tiny slice of one your vote represents.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:39AM
Both the scammers and telcos own more politicians than the tiny slice of one your vote represents.
How about 150 million of our votes? I mean, you know, if people were interested in, like, doing something? The non-voters alone are a big enough block to completely clean out the House. *sigh* If they would only try.... They could turn all that lobbying money into confetti with the push of a button. The effort is truly trivial.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..