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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: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:32PM (1 child)
SMS SPAM/scams anyone?
Just got an SMS scam message yesterday (23 August) which included a link to eweaka-dot-com:
While I have received quite a few scam calls, I generally only receive unwanted SMS messages from political candidates (which results in a response that I will not vote for their candidate as they chose to harass me. This actually led a staffer from one candidate's campaign to actually knock on my door after receiving such a reply -- which resulted in me reiterating my promise not to vote for said candidate, and a further promise to make it my mission to defeat them. Harassment isn't the way to win political support.), so this was new.
I haven't visited the link provided in the SMS message, so I can't say what the scam may be -- probably some malicious javascript. I could use curl/wget to retrieve the link data, but I don't care enough to do so.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:50PM
A great service I use is urlscan.io because they show you all the requests, the DOM, everything. Plus it is better than most services because they use Chrome in headless mode. Here is the analysis of transactions for that main url: https://urlscan.io/result/83a6aab7-d3d5-4b6b-a893-dc8088ba7044#transactions [urlscan.io] It shows that the root of that domain does an HSTS redirect to the https version and then that redirects you to mobn-dot-it and that request 404s. That 404 page also loads a New Relic tracking script and JSON payload.