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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: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @07:50PM
The problem is that the government is too busy going after the easy people to go after, namely, the victimless criminals. The war on drugs is designed to create 'criminals' that are easy to go after so that you can hire more law enforcement and proclaim that you are doing something constructive. Now you can justify having more law enforcement which can be used to otherwise enforce your police state when convenient.
In the meantime the war on drugs distracts from going after actual crimes with victims, crimes that are more difficult to stop, while still allowing law enforcement to pretend to be doing something useful. It's sad how useless law enforcement is when it comes to stopping actual criminals, people who actually deserve to be categorized as criminals. Instead, they focus on victimless criminals and overcriminalizing everyone to make easy targets for law enforcement to go after while claiming they are doing something useful.
This is just another example of that.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Saturday August 06 2016, @10:22PM
the government is too busy going after the easy people to go after ... the war on drugs is designed to create 'criminals' that are easy to go after
Seems to me that it would be pretty easy to go after these Robotcallers. But style points for trying to change the subject of the discussion to your own favourite issue; nice try.