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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
New data shows that the majority of robot-enabled scam phone calls came from fewer than 40 call centers, a finding that offers hope the growing menace of robocalls can be stopped.
The calls use computers and the Internet to dial thousands of phone numbers every minute and promote fraudulent schemes that promise to lower credit card interest rates, offer loans, and sell home security products, to name just a few of the scams. Over the past decade, robocall complaints have mushroomed, with the Federal Trade Commission often receiving hundreds of thousands of complaints each month. In 2013, the consumer watchdog agency awarded $50,000 to three groups who devised blocking systems that had the potential to help end the scourge. Three years later, however, the robocall problem seems as intractable as ever.
On Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a researcher said that slightly more than half of more than 1 million robocalls tracked were sent by just 38 telephony infrastructures. The relatively small number of actors offers hope that the phenomenon can be rooted out, by either automatically blocking the call centers or finding ways for law enforcement groups to identify and prosecute the operators.
"We know that the majority of robocalls only come from 38 different infrastructures," Aude Marzuoli, research scientist at a company called Pindrop Labs, told Ars. "It's not as if there are thousands of people out there doing this. If you can catch this small number of bad actors we can" stop the problem."
Pindrop researchers reached the conclusion by creating a security honeypot of phone numbers that received more than 1 million robocalls. The researchers transcribed about 10 percent of the calls and analyzed the semantics with machine-learning techniques to isolate identical scams. The researchers combined those results with analysis that tracked 150 different audio features of each call. By studying the codecs, packet loss, spectrum, and frequency inside the audio and combining the results with the machine learning, the researchers were able to obtain a fingerprint of each different call center.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @06:28PM
We don't need to catch them all. If we publicly hang the first few we catch the rest will probably close up shop quickly. And before the naysayers start squawking "due process!" we'll let them call a lawyer but only from one of their fake phone numbers. It's not our fault if no-one answers.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Saturday August 06 2016, @06:50PM
This is one time I would not be opposed to drone strikes. ;-)
Reminds me of playing Fallout, and the encounter with the spammer being attacked by the crowd. I just sat back and watched, amused. Of course, I looted the corpse when all was said and done. :-)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @07:33PM
As a resident naysayer, there is due process and there is due process :)
Criminal sanctions isn't really the way to address this (it's an economic problem. You solve it through economic means).
What you really want is to freeze credit assets, drying up cash flow, making the business unprofitable. This is actually best addressed through civil law.
If the actors are that few, this can be be accomplished by state DAs suing for damages (much like what happened to tobacco companies).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @11:21PM
Economic penalties are only effective if they leave their assets vulnerable. I'm for criminal penalties including incarceration and feeding them into thresher machine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07 2016, @12:33AM
I'm not certain what is more vulnerable than having their assets frozen pending litigation. I mean when you really fuck up, it affects your credit rating :)
Or perhaps you were thinking of the slap on the wrist fines that normally come from this?
As noted elsewhere, the tools to address this criminally are there but for other reasons aren't carried out.
50 DAs looking to get a slice for their state is about as debilitating as you can get, and you don't need to wait for congress to act to pursue it.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday August 07 2016, @03:40PM
Why are we presuming an either-or here? Civil penalties and actions do not preclude criminal actions, and vice versa.
Robocalling is blatantly violating the law. Any business engaging in it as a major part of their business model should indeed be sued into the ground, but also have its officers up on charges. And, based on the robocalls I'm getting, the crime of robocalling isn't the half of it: Dig into these robocalling organizations and you'll find loan sharks, identity thieves, and scam artists. This isn't a case where some business is cutting corners on regulations. This is a case where their entire business is based on criminal activity. In that, they're not much different from drug dealers, except that drug dealers actually make their customers happy for a short while. In other words, this is exactly what RICO was invented for, and we should be making full use of it.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Francis on Saturday August 06 2016, @07:44PM
We don't necessarily need to catch any of them to get this to stop. What we need to do is start fining the telecoms that profit off of this. As it is most of those calls are using spoofed numbers rather than real numbers or just the usual masking. I've even gotten calls that were purported to be from the same line that was being called.
Even just blocking the phone numbers that aren't supposed to be routable would be a huge step in the right direction. I've been getting calls lately from a phone number that shouldn't exist, the telecom is ultimately the one that enables that to happen. I personally only get calls from a handful of people on a regular basis, I should be able to white list those callers and everybody else can go to voice mail unless it's emergency responders trying to get in touch with the person on the phone.
It's sort of like how the banking industry is a large part of the target when it comes to money laundering and other illegal transfers. You can't realistically stop the illegal money transfers, but if you push it out of the legitimate banking industry, it becomes more expensive and riskier to transfer the money.
Making it criminal in whatever way is relevant is another layer that ought to be applied in cases where the technical either doesn't work or if law enforcement figures out who is doing it.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday August 07 2016, @04:59AM
I have called from a "local" (6 digit) number. I gave up my DID with my first VOIP provider when they stopped routing calls to me.