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from the thought-they-were-really-cleaning-up dept.
Feds crack down on brothers behind 45 million illegal robocalls:
Three New Jersey brothers will pay $1.6 million to settle charges of instigating more than 45 million illegal robocalls nationwide, including to tens of millions of Americans on the Federal Trade Commission's Do Not Call Registry, the agency announced on Friday.
The siblings also agreed to a permanent ban on telemarketing and will hand over a residential property to resolve the agency's allegations, made in a complaint filed by Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC.
According to the FTC's suit, Joseph, Sean and Raymond Carney initiated more than 45 million illegal telemarketing calls to people across the U.S. between January 2018 and March 2019 to pitch a line of septic tank cleaning products. Most of the calls, or 31 million, were placed to numbers on the FTC's registry of people who don't want to receive marketing calls.
[...] Telemarketers working on behalf of the brothers falsely told consumers they were calling from an environmental company to offer free information on their septic tank cleaning products, the complaint charges.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Monday July 19 2021, @08:15PM (7 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday July 19 2021, @09:22PM (6 children)
>why does it have to be easily spoofable?
looks like reading comprehension issues. let me explain a different way. How else do you change a hundred random numbers in mumbai to display the bank of america 800 number when they call you w/o spoofing? no, at&t is not going to be able to get the random indian telco to follow any guideline or protocol, just like they won't be able to do so with the thousand other telcos worldwide. the world can't even agree on a tv standard.
>Is this apathy from the carriers?
no, it's not. tell me, if Bob who lives on your block decides you should all invest in a roof solar panel, which will pay for itself for 5 years, and make that the standard for all new houses in every county in every state, will you follow his order? why would another telco, out of thousands of them, listen to ATT on how to implement secure callerID? How long do you think it would take those robocaller spammers to get a guy to hack AT&T's new secure callerID? How often do all those worldwide telcos update and patch all their hardware to fix the hole? Mind you, they all need to update together, worldwide, or it'll break.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @10:33PM (3 children)
I dont buy that argument at all and I think you are still missing the GP's point. There is no technical reason why a system couldn't be put in place that allows businesses to give proper caller ID information without also allowing individuals like these three brothers from taking advantage of that system. Your analogy isn't great either since Bob isn't another company I am forced to do business with anyway. Not only that, the argument was never that the individual businesses should implement their own proprietary systems and force their competitors to use it. The argument is that a standard system should be enforced through the FCC, a government entity, and that all telecommunications companies that want to operate in the US have to abide. Telephone calls aren't free and every single robo call out of india that a US telcom accepts is also charged back to those indian companies. That is a large inflow of cash that nobody wants to part with.
As far as details are concerned there are many ways to ensure such a system isn't abused. We could easily require all calls with a callerID to have a cryptographic signature that is signed by a telco stating that the callerID has been vetted by them as real. We could maintain better track of who owns/operates what phonenumbers. Why should a new jersey company be able to use a california phone number without any sort of checks? If that number is "owned" by some company, and to use that number requires a cryptographic signature from only that company, it becomes far more difficult to make random use of the number. If those brothers try, the first telco they go through drops the call when the signature is incorrect. Extending this system to international calls is NOT an insurmountable obstacle. At any rate I'm not a security expert and there are definitely far more and better ways to secure the system than what I've described. Your line of reasoning that making it secure would also inhibit businesses from functioning doesn't make any sense.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday July 20 2021, @06:49PM (2 children)
>a standard system should be enforced through the FCC, a government entity
whose standard? what goverment? half the calls we get are from overseas call centers that show up w/ a US business's number despite coming from another country. no one cares what standard we put in place, no one is going to bother following it irrelevant of what regulation or standard the US passes. And yes, I still want my incoming calls to go through.
>Why should a new jersey company be able to use a california phone number
and you can enforce that. except none of the spam calls are initiated in california or jersey. they're all coming via voip from another country, just like the incoming call from bank of america's customer service is coming from another country. and there's nothing you can do to force a telco in that country to follow any standard you make up. you can only block the call completely, and then you'd lose all your customers, because me - I want that call from my bank to go through.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @08:37PM (1 child)
You are still doom crying without giving any tangible reasons beyond your feeling that nobody would play ball. The US could easily require that all international calls that are routed into this country are closely tracked. As I said in a previous post, all those calls require the US company to bill back, so they know exactly who is calling already. We could absolutely enforce a system where international telecoms that transmit spam calls are just dropped by US telcos. US telcos wont want to do it but the FCC could absolutely require it. If a US company wants to set up a call center in india, they'll have to go through a telecom that actually checks the phone calls. Why would they do that? Money, plain and simple. If they want their calls going through to america so they can get a cutback, they have to manage their customers. Note, they don't have to have our system in place at all. All they have to do is not give spammers free reign on their network or they are less likely to be trafficked into the US. You could enforce penalties on US companies that do business with telcos that do nothing to stop the spam. In actual first world countries I could absolutely see governments enacting similar systems and I see absolutely no reason why international companies wouldn't enact policies that go beyond the borders of the US. And my point about a new jersey company being able to use a california phone number is even more important in the international scope. There is even LESS reason for a company who operates in india to be able to use any US phone number without any basic checks. Again, if the company who operates that call center in India was forced to purchase or license those phone numbers from a US telco, we can verify the people using those numbers are associated with an actual US company. Then it becomes far easier to prosecute individuals who abuse the network. Accountability doesn't hamper anyone's ability to make or receive calls.
So maybe for your next post you could come up with actual reasons why there can't be ANY kind of system in place to accomplish the end goal of attenuating spam calls. Your protestations that it just can't be done, full stop, are unconvincing at best.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday July 20 2021, @08:57PM
>You are still doom crying
so saying all the world's thousands of telcos won't follow a US standard is "doom crying" to you. gotcha
>any tangible reasons beyond your feeling that nobody would play ball
not at all. I'm sure a few would play ball, like they did by adopting the american analog TV and then digital TV standards, followed by emission standards, followed by our measuring units, followed our cell frequencies, which is why you don't need special phones to have them work worldwide.
>why there can't be ANY kind of system in place to accomplish the end goal of attenuating spam calls
we do have many various systems implemented by different telcos. they have been in place for decades and are constantly being upgraded. some are implemented by carriers, some by the telcos themselves. you have zero idea of what you're talking about.
https://www.t-mobile.com/customers/scam-shield [t-mobile.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @11:27PM (1 child)
at&t can solve this by putting out a specification of what you must do to connect to their network. Rather the FCC should make that specification so all U.S. phone carriers have to use it. You don't follow the specification, you can't make calls to the United States. Make spoofing part of the specification and set up a reporting system where the spoofers whole network gets cut off for violations. The network owners will get their act together or be cut off into their own island.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday July 20 2021, @06:44PM
>at&t can solve this by putting out a specification of what you must do to connect to their network
so again, for those who can't read, you're asking the carriers of the world to follow a spec AT&T put out, update their software as it changes multiple times a year to fight hackers.
and your solution is for AT&T to block calls to AT&T's customers if the global carriers don't follow their spec? Got news for you - I don't want half the business calls to me blocked, I'd just switch to verizon who doesn't block them.
>The network owners will get their act together or be cut off into their own island.
no, they're going to be dumped by customers who are purchasing the ability to have incoming calls, which AT&T isn't delivering.