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Phone companies and state attorneys general join forces to fight robocalls
US consumers receive as many as 350,000 unwanted calls every three minutes, according to the FCC. Despite multiple efforts to end the onslaught, an estimated 4.7 billion robocalls hit American phones in July alone. Now, attorneys general from all 50 states and the District of Columbia are teaming up with 12 carriers in a united effort to prevent and block the spam calls.
Under the new agreement, the carriers will implement call-blocking technology, make anti-robocall tools free to consumers and deploy a system that labels calls as legitimate or spam, The Washington Post reports. The companies also agree to aid investigations by law enforcement. The major players -- AT&T, Comcast, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon (Engadget's parent company) -- are on board, as well as smaller carriers -- Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Consolidated, Frontier, US Cellular and Windstream. Though, there's no deadline for the companies to implement these measures.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:34PM (4 children)
Won't happen for a bunch of reasons.
The easy self-enforcing way - demand a phone plan that only charges for outgoing calls. That's all it takes.
Somebody has to pay for that spam call and if the carrier can charge you everyone except you is happy.
Demand free received calls and whoever is placing the call pays or the phone company does it for free. Big surprise when spam calls drop to almost zero.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:55PM (3 children)
But that is already the issue. The Robocall scourge is a consumer visible expression of just how cheap it really is to initiate a phone call, i.e., it is the part that says "you, consumer, are being way overcharged for whatever it is you are paying, to the point of being screwed".
That is also why the carriers are all dragging their feet on any cure. Those calls are already being 'paid for' by the caller. But the payment is on the order of tenths to hundredths of a cent per call. So it only takes one mark out of a few thousand calls to fall for the scheme and hand over a few grand of money, and they gain back 95+% profit margins, even including the costs to pay for all the calls that went to voicemail or were never answered (although I think non-answer ends up being no charge). But from the phone carrier viewpoint, those Robocalls are a nice chunk of the daily profit margin, and stopping them would reduce their revenue. So the carriers drag their feet. The carriers could stop them immediately if they wanted to, which is why the GP's "reduce CEO's salary by $1 per robocall" suggestion would actually work. Since every single one of them is billed through the accounting system, there is already a record of exactly where they came from, and accordingly a way to both trace them back to the source, and ultimately stop them (by cutting off the sources that are creating the problem).
But the carriers have no incentive to cut off their own profits (even if their customers are complaining, since where are you going to go, all the other carriers deliver robocalls too).
The fix to robocalls will ultimately involve changing the incentive structure such that it is better for the carriers to block them and remove them from their networks than to ignore them. Cutting the CEO's pay by $1 per call might be just one of those incentives that just might work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @05:11AM (2 children)
It doesn't matter how cheap it is to call, what matters is who pays. If they can push the cost off on you they make money. The phone company makes money from spam. You pay.
The only way to fix it is to turn the system around and stop the payments. Then the spam will stop. (I would bet that the spam call centers get free calls.)
You should start a class action suit to :
discover,
1/ How much the phone companies charge the spammers,
2/ How much they charge customers to receive spam
and to demand a refund and costs and punitive damages for 2/.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:37AM (1 child)
Not paying for receiving calls won't stop spammers. In most of Europe this is the case but we still must put up with over a dozen spam calls per month to land lines. And most of these calls they just hangup on pick-up. Although is true that there are less spam calls to cellular lines.
But can you guess whom are the absolutely worst offenders? Telcos and ISPs resellers to offer internet and voice services with fake discounts and promotions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @10:38AM
"A dozen a month."
The yanks are complaining about dozens per day to their cellphones, and they have to pay to receive them.
Once the calls are free you can play games. Have 'talk to a spammer day' where everyone competes to keep them on the call as long as possible. Waste their time and money until they give up.