How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore?
Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made).
It's really rare I even get a call from someone in my contact list - even for something "urgent" most people just send a text ("call me - urgent!" is serious). Anything for work is scheduled, and even then it's been years since it was anything but zoom/teams/etc.
Part of this I think is a shift in the way people operate with technology: texting is faster and better than voicemail. Slack, zoom, etc dominate workplaces. Part is it's been ruined by spam.
I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you. Had the PSTN not existed and you were to try to launch "Telephone" as an app today, it would almost certainly fail. "You get a unique 10 digit number and if anyone types it in, it makes your device ring loudly, 24/7, no matter what else you're doing, and you're instantly placed in a two-way audio call with them!"
It's not the HN readers that the FCC is concerned with. It's people like my aunt, who through decades of pre-2000 household conditioning, immediately stop whatever they are doing and rush to answer a ringing phone even though 98% of the calls are junk and the volume of incoming calls is 5-10x what they were in the 80s or 90s. No matter how many times I suggest not bothering to even look at the phone, she cannot resist.
Further, this cohort is largely unable to use the tools we take for granted. Many seniors don't know how to block or screen calls, let along apply the phone's do not disturb features. She has been phished multiple times via email, and every time I check her Mac I have to uninstall scammy browser bars and search redirects.
Technology platforms and policy makers have failed people like her.
I'm assuming many people on HN are their extended family's de facto IT support team. It's exhausting.
> It's not the HN readers that the FCC is concerned with.
I hope it is. I hope it's everyone they are worried about. I remember in the way back of the late 90s/early 2000s I always picked up the phone, and if I missed I'd actually call back an unrecognized number. Can you imagine? And believe it or not it wasn't just me, it was a thing people did. Odds were that the person at the other end was someone you wanted to talk to.
Now a few years later when the phone rings all I'm looking to do is silence the damn thing. Literally 9/10 (maybe more) calls I get are just spam, and that's letting Google filter the calls it knows are spam. It doesn't have to be this way, and I hate that we've just thrown up our hands and accepted this. I really hope that we can get back to a place where the phone ringing is a precursor to human contact and not just another annoyance.
Robocalls and support scams only really arrived with a vengeance last year in Ireland. Even still I would answer and call back pretty much every call from an Irish caller id today. I reckon at least 19/20 calls are legit...
I suppose we've been flying under the radar up to now...
That said, there has been a definite deterioration in the last 24 months...
Older folks with declining cognitive abilities are especially targeted.
I have a friend whose grandmother had severe dementia and sent 400k to scammers via wire transfer.
I have nightmares about my father, who has shown a tendency to put credit card numbers into pop-up windows. I found a coin miner on his laptop recently.
I have a few clients who are getting up in years. Talking to them one on one, they seem as sharp as ever. And yet
both of them have recently called shady 800 numbers from obvious (to me) scam emails.
Thankfully both spoke to me before completing the money transfers, but it was close. As one of them was explaining to me after the fact, they got so startled by the (fake) expensive invoice, they felt overwhelmed, and just didn't even think to think that it might be a scammer.
If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements.
This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out.
> If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements. This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out.
I would normally say "n=1" and "YMMV", but in this case n=everyone I've ever had this discussion with and the mileage has not varied. I don't know about you, but I have received exactly one phone call in the past year from a 1-800 number, and it was legitimate. You know how many calls I receive daily on average from people spoofing what they think is my local area code? Seven. Sometimes it's none, sometimes it's 12, but I have been tracking it for this exact purpose and the average is 7. That's too many.
Do you think anyone would have adopted email if the only two options to deal with spam were 1) read the text in the body and manually delete it if you can recognize the scam or 2) disable incoming mail from anyone not already in your address book? Of course not! And it's high time that the company charging me for my expensive phone and my expensive service plan do something about the expensive attention I waste when getting interrupted with these extremely preventable attempts at exploitation. Not to mention the poor victims who fall for these scams and lose their retirement savings because they grew up in an era before incoming calls became synonymous with massive social engineering dragnets.
I apologize for ranting- I recognize you were offering a workaround in the meantime for the parent and I've upvoted you for that; I rarely rant on HN, but this topic and the apathy surrounding it really ruffles my feathers and I needed an outlet.
> You know how many calls I receive daily on average from people spoofing what they think is my local area code? Seven. Sometimes it's none, sometimes it's 12, but I have been tracking it for this exact purpose and the average is 7. That's too many.
I'm grateful I've been able to keep my number from my first cell phone. I live in a different state now and all the numbers from that area code that I'd get a legitimate call from are in my contact list, so I know not to answer any other number from there.
For me it's an average of one a day (though clustered towards the start of the week), and the only reason I haven't already turned on the toggle that sends all non-contact callers straight to voicemail automatically is that most of the calls come in during work hours when my phone's already set on do-not-disturb.
I got my parents a call blocking box that has a big red button. If they get a robocall they just push the button and the number is blocked. It's dramatically cut down on the amount of junk calls they get. They too are a lot less likely to answer a call from a number they don't recognize, letting it go to the answering machine where if it's a legit call they can just pick up and interrupt the machine.
Answering machines - how quaint (yet effective for call screening!)
When I was younger I thought like this. As I got older, and my thumbs fatter, I tend to answer it if I'm expecting a call(windshield replacement at the moment), or a contact, or just curious. If nobody ever answers, then I'd never get to talk to my parents, and I value that time so make time pretty much no matter what I'm doing, within reason.
I don't hate texting, but strongly do for some use cases. I was trying to get directions from a friend recently via text and it just became... annoying. Something like
me - ok, which building is it I'm outside
wait
them - you see the red one?
me - yes, is that it?
wait
them - ok it's two down from that
At this point I called, because I'm not going to text and wait again to ask left or right(above example is not exact, but similar to this).
I think texting is great for saying hi, or asking a question. I do not in any way find it useful for conversation or back and forths. Just my .02.
I do wish phone numbers weren't guessable items but something more like, say, long random addresses so that companies couldn't just flip through dialing anyone and everyone. I haven't thought out how discoverability would work though without something like DNS.
I have DND on all day/night for exactly this reason. It's set up to allows calls from people in my contact list to get through - which is fine because none of them are going to call me unless they _really_ need to.
What's frustrating is when dealing with a healthcare provider or contractor or something, where they're going to call within the next couple of days, as then I need to turn off DND and open up the potential for the spam calls to make my phone ring.
Fortunately there are far fewer spam calls this year, but there are still a few.
> I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you
I think that's a huge part of it, along with all the new asynchronous forms of communication we have put together in the last couple decades. 30+ years ago, you could visit, call, page, or send a letter. There was no immediate means of sending a fully thought-out message that the recipient would receive quickly and then be able to answer on their own time in the range of immediately through never.
I definitely prefer it this way. Maybe 14-year-old me who could talk on the phone for hours wouldn't be a huge fan, but adult me very happily keeps overall phone time to a few minutes per month.
I feel like living somewhere and having an area code from somewhere else is a secret hack for this. Call from my area code 1000 miles away? Definitely without a doubt spam. Call from the local area code? Almost always legitimate. If I ended up having a local number I'd lose this natural filter.
Absolutely! My number is from a city I haven't lived in since 2012. Anyone I know who calls me from that city is definitely in my contacts. Everything else is spam or politicians (also spam, but less so as someone who had voted in local races).
I feel like a lot of spam networks have worked around this. When I went to school hundreds of miles away from my area code, I got very few spam calls from my phone's area code. Most came from the area code I was living in.
That might be from your phone number getting leaked to some spam companies over the course of being in school. There's always those random events or emails or whatever in college where you inadvertently put your contact info down and I'm sure these spammers try their hardest to get ahold of student phone numbers and other lucrative metadata.
At least where I live now its nowhere near my home or my old college, dozens of states and several time zones away, and I just don't get any spam from these local area codes over here. I just scrolled over my last few months of call logs to see if this was true, and all the spam was from my phone number's area code from back where I grew up or an adjacent area code to that one somewhere near my home city. It's all voicemails and occasional texts asking me to sell a specific house I don't own (sometimes the exact address changes). Maybe I lucked out, who knows.
That seems very American-centric. I answer every phone call I have and only twice in my life has the call been an attempt to sell me anything. Both times I've left my number and forgot to disable the checkbox that said "you can call me once for a sales offer".
There's nothing in "society" that prevents phones from being a normal thing. It's all in the signal to noise ratio of the phone calls themselves, and that's a solvable problem.
Business owners whose numbers have been published have the same problem here: loads of scammers and scummy salesmen spamming their phones all day long. I'd consider it a mistake to use a publicly listed number as your always-on contact method, but that's victim blaming and not a real solution to the problem.
My point is: with some proper oversight and enforcement of decent laws, there's nothing wrong with phone numbers.
Every major chat app and mobile platform has some kind of (video) calling functionality for a reason, interrupting people for a realtime conversation is a feature people want and use. The failure of the American telecommunications market doesn't take away from that elsewhere in the world.
> interrupting people for a realtime conversation is a feature people want and use
Really? I'm dumbstruck by this sentiment. I've never met or even heard someone express they like being interrupted with a unsolicited, unexpected (video) call.
I'm Canadian, and my team is all remote, with people in Canada, US, UK, Portugal and Romania. No one does unsolicited video calls.. at all. Don't get me wrong, we do lots of video calls, including adhoc ones, but those are always started with a DM like "hey, have a few minutes to chat?"
If I'm deep in something, I'll reply with "maybe in an hour or so" and if I'm ready right then I'll just call. Sorry but not asking first just seems rude and totally disrespectful of the other person's time.
> Really? I'm dumbstruck by this sentiment. I've never met or even heard someone express they like being interrupted with a unsolicited, unexpected (video) call.
How about a call from a family member or friend that need urgent help?
Pretty much everyday I get 5+ spam calls, almost all from numbers with area codes in Texas (no idea why). The calls start at 7:30am.
My number is in the federal do not call list. I used to manually block every single number from spam calls, but now I gave up.
I’ll just never answer a call unless it’s from a known number and I’m expecting it. Otherwise I’ll just return it later if it’s important enough.
My guess is that phone network operators don’t care because they haven’t figured out a way to make money blocking these calls.
At the same time, the same carriers are going out of their way to block text messages from businesses that legitimately use services like Twilio to communicate with their users/customers. Why? Because the alternative for these businesses is to pay about $3k setup fee + $3k/quarter to get a shortcode for the privilege of texting the carriers customers - the same customers the carriers don’t care about protecting from spam phone calls.
I fill up my voicemail ever week, 99% of them from the area code of my phone, which is 1500 mi from where I live now, and all are spam. I wish I could just block an area code.
I use Calls Blacklist [1] to block calls from unrecognized numbers -- just checked, it supports blocking numbers based on "Starts with" so that would probably work, if you're on Android.
Sure, I don't but... my spouse helps take care of her parents. They aren't fluent in English, so my spouse handles all the calls and callbacks. That means she gets calls from unknown callers frequently that she must answer.
It's a big issue for people who actually need to answer calls from novel callers.
I don't answer the phone anymore. I don't think I ever did to begin with. I hate phones. I have a subscription because it's impossible to get mobile internet without it and nearly all mobile software uses phone numbers for identification and authentication. Wish I could turn off the calls. I don't want people to call me! I want people to message me. It used to be easy to ignore. Now with all these automated calls the system has become unusable and unbearable. Every single day I get at least 5 automated calls and my phone always thinks they're the most important things in the world, worthy of my immediate attention and warranting the interruption of anything I'm doing. It makes me wish I could delete the telephony app without breaking the phone!
That's what phones are, most fundamentally. They're human interrupts. When I call people, I'm interrupting them in order to make them talk to me. There's this underlying assumption that the call is more important than anything. People will ignore other humans in front of them in order to answer calls! Hard to think of anything more disrespectful. That may have been tolerable back then when phones were the best technology we had but they've been obsolete ever since asynchronous messaging became a thing. Why can't phones just disappear? What's keeping them alive?
I have lots of family with landlines. Older people who still think of phone lines as something valuable just because they used to be worth a ton of money decades ago. 95%+ of the calls they receive are nothing but a waste of their time. Banks offering them credit cards, loans, scammers. Yet they keep those lines around "just in case"! I simply can't fathom putting up with an advertiser who's brash enough to actually interrupt me with a phone call. That's an unfathomable level of abuse to me.
You are 100% right- they are human interrupts that we're all subjected to just by virtue of forcing to interact with people and companies who refuse to use an asynchronous medium of communication. Horrifying
It resonates with me as well. What a horrifying article! A phone call at 3 in the morning, waking you up from well-deserved sleep as if they had the right. If you manage to ignore this disrespect and pick up the phone -- what if some family member has suffered an accident, right? -- you find it's a god damn advertiser selling you insurance! It's enough to drive a peaceful person to violence.
My parents also used to tell me to answer the phone. Why? These goddamn calls had nothing to do with me. Everyone my age used instant messengers. Even as a kid, the phone pissed me off so much I started physically disconnecting it. Peace! Until my father got home, at least. Disconnecting the phone was the quickest way to piss him off. What if some family member has an emergency? What if X? What if Y? Who fucking cares? It got to the point I didn't fucking care anymore. I'm not suffering this just because there's a chance people will call us instead of emergency services. I'd rather piss my dad off than suffer the indignity of phone calls.
Leaving the phone connected was an act of cruelty towards my mother. She's too educated and polite to simply hang up on these abusers. So many times I witnessed these assholes drive her screaming mad with their lies. They'd threaten to sue her over a late payment on a magazine subscription she never had. I tried so many times to get her to just hang up the phone on these fucks! Just hang up! She would never! So I fixed it by making it so she wouldn't have to answer the phone ever again. She could finally sleep in peace!
I don't agree when he compares phone calls to email spam. Spam is just text, they never leave the virtual world. They're the noise polluting the signal, nothing more. Phone calls are like giving people the ability to trigger a goddamn fire alarm remotely, as he himself said. Now that is a great analogy! It perfectly captures that feeling that compels you to stop everything and answer to the fake emergency that is the phone call.
I also feel the same way about businesses. Having to call some business in order to get something done makes me physically ill. I'd always get other people to do it. I'd ask my girlfriend to do it for me because there's just no way I'm calling some company. The only thing worse is when they call me. I'm so happy nearly every business in my country has a WhatsApp contact now. I don't have to use the phone ever again for anything! If a business doesn't have a WhatsApp, they just aren't getting my money, ever. Even the goddamn ISPs have apps now that let you schedule repairs and whatnot. Trying to call these fucking companies to cancel or switch providers used to be so incredibly obnoxious people made laws regulating this. Phones are also the reason why there's so little competition between ISPs in my country. There is, or at least there used to be, a law saying if you're an ISP you need to provide public phones for people. A massive barrier to entry and completely useless!
Killing the telephone is a big market? Yes, please. Where do I deposit money in order to speed it along? I want telephones to be literally wiped from this Earth. Not a single phone left anywhere.
Just today I got two phone calls that showed up as "Unknown". Neither was spam. One was my family doctor, the other a local bicycle shop. If it matters, I'm in Toronto, using an Android phone, with Rogers as my carrier. The first might be due to privacy (of the doctor). The second I can't explain. But in any case, blocking all unknown calls would not be in my interest at present. I can hang up pretty quickly when I hear the boiler-room background and some dude asking me about Air Duct Cleaning.
Businesses __must__ call from a registered business line. Caller ID should tell me who is properly calling.
I won't answer it otherwise, and I really detest how frequent 'personal phone for business' is how places expect people to operate. At the very least they should have to bounce the call through a switchboard somewhere that rings me from the business line.
My landline phone has a very loud ring, non-adjustable. If I’m sitting near it, it is quite annoying. I frequently get calls when I’m asleep. I also get them in the middle of work video calls and since the ringing won’t stop, I have to pick them up. I get dozens a day, every day. I have reached a tipping point where I actual feel as though I’m being tortured. I seriously wish the phone companies would be held to account to fix this problem. I suspect the vast majority of phone calls to be illegal telemarketing calls which should revoke the telecoms common carrier status. They should not be allowed to profit from massive illegality.
It’s definitely possible. I should probably do it. But other than the loud ring it has worked perfectly with very clear sound forever. Perhaps relocated to a different ___location would also be an option.
I answer all the time. My HMO always calls from unknown or blocked numbers. And because of HIPPA they can’t leave a voicemail detailing the reason for the call (I’m not sure if I should be upset at HHS or the FCC here.)
They probably can. But it’s an HMO with thousands of doctors and a non-deterministic phone tree. I don’t even know if staff know what phone number they’re calling from.
> Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made).
That is my personal choice, alas many Doctors, government departments, companies etc etc alas withhold there numbers and a right PITA it is as well. This is in the UK.
One of the many things I despise about the NHS’s (UK universal health system) bureaucracy is that for some brain-dead reason they insist on calling on withheld numbers. I’ve been conditioned into ignoring withheld numbers by years of scammers, spammers, and even a nutty ex who’d use it to try getting around my call blocking. They also seem to have call waiting systems designed to be as frustrating as possible so people give up and just suffer with their ailments without deigning to bother the NHS about them.
I’m so glad the world seems to be slowly adopting a policy of “text before call” even if a few family members have picked up an irritating habit of using recorded voice messages rather than texting (I disabled my voicemail a decade ago for a reason). It should be considered rude to call people without warning them I think.
My phone has a setting to not ring or vibrate unless it’s a recognized number. That alone has largely solved the issue for me. Fortunately I don’t need to answer calls from unrecognized numbers my job.
I'd like my phone to have a setting where unknown callers get a busy signal. I don't want my phone to ring and I don't want it going to voicemail.
At the very least, these companies with their amazing machine intelligence divisions ought to be able to figure out that a message that is 2 seconds long and silent isn't actually a message.
The one problem with this is we still have a landline. All the time people will complain that we didn’t answer their text. They don’t seem to know how to respond when told it can’t receive texts. Then they promptly forget because the same people try texting us over and over again. I wish there was some way a number that can’t receive texts could immediately respond and let them know.
How does that solve the problem? Landlines will still continue to exist and people will still mistakenly believe they can receive texts. It seems like a doable solution to have non-mobile numbers auto return a message that it cannot receive text messages. Where do the text messages to landlines go? Into a black hole? I assume there is a service that at some point realized that the number cannot receive a text message and sends it to dev/nul. Instead, why can't that service ping back?
Our children do not have cell phones and their baby sitters often don't have cell phones (at least the younger baby sitters). A landline allows those without cell phones to make calls out of the house.
>Why don't you get rid of the landline and give these people your cell phone number?
For me, because I live in a large, dense city, my apartment is in a place where other, larger building surround it. As such, I have poor cellular reception in my home.
As such, if I don't have a "landline" (actually a VOIP line), I would often be unreachable at home.
And despite the fact that my provider claims to support such a thing, and my phone supports it, I am unable to to use WiFi calling.
Your use case is not mine.
Don't pretend to have all the answers to a situation of which you are ignorant. It's unhelpful and unpleasant.
Edit: My comment was also unhelpful. I was going to delete it, but instead I'm going to leave it up and qualify my remarks by saying that your suggestion is a good one, and despite the fact that it's inappropriate to the circumstance, thank you.
Actually had to use WiFi calling yesterday and it just didn't work on my main #. Only my app based phone # (Google Voice) worked! That was a really unpleasant discovery since I had no cell service.
Definitely affirms what you are saying -- it doesn't always work! Yesterday was the first time I ever had a problem.
No errors or warnings, the calls just never go through.
I just think this is uniquely American problem and for some reason American carriers are completely uninterested in dealing with it. Here in UK I get maybe....1 spam call every 3 months? If even that. And it's always the same robo-voice that you can recognize within 2 seconds and disconnect. I have absolutely no issues answering my phone.
Zero ever on my mobile phone (and I know the number has been leaked by at least one breach).
Maybe 1 per month on the landline of my parents and these days it's exclusively "Microsoft" trying to "fix" their computer (weirdly enough with an English speaking scammer).
Either Germans are not a valuable target for "legit" companies or some regulation is working it's magic behind the scene.
My feeling is that Americans are easier targets of fraud for technical and legal reasons.
E.g. 'stealing someones identity' is a thing. Where I live, SSN and driver licenses are public record (you can get a photo copy of anyones driver license), so they are unusable for fax scams. Having a system built on such items being 'secret' is probably a culprit.
I've been thinking that what probably helps too is the fact all German speaking countries are wealthy. Much harder to build a spam center with human callers.
On the other hand some (legitimate) support call centers are located in Eastern Europe so it's possible to find enough German speakers there (although not native ones).
If you were older (say, 80) you would get significantly more. As you approach 60, they will start to ramp up slowly to that amount. I don't know why, I presume they find this information somewhere.
After the lock down Mexico has seen an absurd increase of spam calls, and I suspect most of Latin America as well. More than the law, I blame the weak law enforcement.
Personally, almost never. My phone is always on do not disturb with work and family contacts added to my favorites to bypass do not disturb. If an unrecognized number is calling from, say, my dentist's office then they usually leave a voicemail and I'll know whether to return the call. Otherwise, I just assume it's spam.
An older relation has gotten sick and my wife and I have to track their medical care. the hospital and doctors will ONLY talk on the phone, and only do things like callbacks.
So after 21 years of essentially never answering the phone, I now have to answer from a variety of unknown numbers. it is frustrating, I'd much prefer text messages.
Personally, I find voice coms higher bandwidth and overall faster then texting/email. And email with sorting, filtering and searching capabilities is miles better then texting for me.
I started answering scam calls. And pressing 1 when it said so to speak with someone about my microsoft account, apple account, car warranty, etc. And telling the person on the other end to kindly fuck off. After a few rounds of this, the calls stopped calling, as I'd gotten on enough of the spammer blacklists of someone who will waste their time. It took a while to build up the courage to do so, but I'm glad I did, because when the phone rings now, I can be reasonably assured that it's someone who I actually want to talk to.
They need to give you information on how to send your payment that works, so you need to lead them on until they give you that information. Once you have that you have a place that really exists, and courts can go from there.
>They need to give you information on how to send your payment that works,
As a general rule, if they don't have you buy gift cards (as someone else suggested), they want your credit card details which they check immediately upon receiving them.
What's more, I'm not exactly sure how I might engage the courts in Kolkatta, Bangalore or Minsk. Perhaps you could share your (obvious) expertise in this matter.
Generally there is a US company behind them someplace. though if it is a foreign company it won't work (well I'm not an international lawyer, maybe there is something)
They tell you to buy a bunch of gift cards at the grocery store and then read the number off the card over the phone. How do you successfully sue them with that information?
I definitely call a lot. Whether it's talking to friends, relatives, or dealing with appointments (doctors, car, etc.) there's lots of calls all the time. I travel a fair bit and often find calling is the only way to get airlines to fix certain problems.
I tend to screen by area code. My cell is from a place where everyone I'd want to talk to is in my contacts list. So only calls local to where I live I actually answer. Also if it's urgent people leave a voicemail or call again.
> I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you.
This is why I drifted away from my friends and family until I set up an account on https://calendly.com/ where they could book time to talk with me.
I totally agree on the point that any random individual trying to inflict "sync" voice interaction on anyone deserves to be ignored for good.
That said however gateway providers are consciously funneling malicious crap to citizens. And they ought to be held responsible for that by the law. This will fix the problem.
> How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore?
Everyone that works for a large company and has any kind of corporation-spanning responsibility. Phone calls are almost always the last fallback if someone really needs to reach you for something critical.
I used to work in IT. We had a system where every call would be sent to voicemail- "Please briefly describe the issue, and let us know how to contact you."- and would arrive in .mp3 attachment in an email inbox. Within 15 minutes someone would listen to the voicemail, transform it into a regular written ticket, and prioritize the issue that way. We never needed someone chain-linked to a phone receiver.
This is how you woke someone up at night if you need to figure out why a specific server is given some arcane error? I can't imagine it is, this is a system for during the day not so critical time. And for that it's probably great (at the very least it's cool!).
yeah, outside of a tech job people still heavily rely on phone calls to get their jobs done.
Sales, HR, field services, etc all call people directly since a text message could be missed for hours. And a lot of stuff is still based on legacy systems (manually inputing info or hand writing records)
> "apply STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication to, and perform robocall mitigation on, all foreign-originated calls with US numbers,"
This won't affect anything that is actually a foreign number (which wouldn't be used for robocalls anyway as people wouldn't answer it, with the exception of some Caribbean countries that have three digit area codes instead of the typical +CC format). It will just block foreign phone companies from pretending to have US phone numbers, which seems like it should have been done long ago.
I guess I assumed that the call center would just send the voice packets to over IP and a US carrier would actually introduce them onto the PTSN network. Do the foreign carriers actually own the US call center numbers themselves?
in which case they can properly identify themselves as a legitimate user of that US phone number? I'm not familiar with the STIR/SHAKEN stuff but surely it is possible to delegate authority to use a number.
I find it astonishing that robocalls are still an issue in 2021, especially those coming from abroad. How can it be that hard to force authentication to use the phone network and permanently block malicious carriers?
If someone from the US wants to sell me a vacuum cleaner sure, but when "Michael" from "Microsoft" is calling me from a call center in India to tell me that my computer has a virus, how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway? How about the solution is to allow me to block any call not made from North America/Europe and be done with it.
If you have family in India you can just not block the country and that should be good enough for everyone? Of course my solution that I came up in 5 minutes is probably not the one we'd actually want to implement, but this has been an issue for probably half a century at this point, I'd hope this is enough time to find one decent mitigation implementation.
I would love to be able to block all calls from Texas. Every day I get 5+ spam calls, starting at 7:30am, almost all from Texas. If I could block all of Texas, then 90%+ of the spam calls I get would go away.
> how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway
Spoken with the hubris of someone who has never been more than five miles from the town they were born in, and who can't imagine why anyone else would do such a thing.
India isn't Mars, there are over a billion people living in it, most of whom have telephones, many of whom using them to talk to their friends and relatives who live abroad. The Indian diaspora is 18 million people, but I guess we should just write all of them off, their needs and desire to communicate doesn't matter.
You're going to need to come up with a better solution than 'Blackhole the entire country'.
This is a bit hurtful, especially considering that I address this right in my comment:
> If you have family in India you can just not block the country and that should be good enough for everyone? Of course my solution that I came up in 5 minutes is probably not the one we'd actually want to implement, but this has been an issue for probably half a century at this point, I'd hope this is enough time to find one decent mitigation implementation.
But to rephrase, my point is not about India or any country it's about how a basic linear classifier could probably detect most robocalls because *I* don't get calls from India so it's very unlikely that the call is legitimate.
The person you're responding to wants the ability to block callers in India from reaching him. I don't think he wants the ability to block callers in India from reaching you.
Consider Albert, white, who was mugged twice by black men. Now when strangers turn to him - say to ask the time - he'll tell them the time if they are white but will put his head down and walk away quickly if they are black.
Is Albert racist, or is he responding to past trauma as you are suggesting by blocking all Indian calls?
For someone whose transactions are principally in their own home town and state, denying access to random long-distance numbers would be a feature.
The restriction isn't against calls from those of South Asian Indian heritage, it is against calls made from India.
A critical property of space is that it puts those who are in the same loction near one another, and those who are not, far apart. The fact that telecoms obliterates distance is not an unalloyed good.
> Is Albert racist, or is he responding to past trauma as you are suggesting by blocking all Indian calls?
I'm not sure why you're phrasing things that way, it's not my proposed solution to the problem.
A similar but more practical solution might be an account setting toggle for allowing or blocking international calls. That's not super practical for people living in a small nation who spend a lot of time on international calls. In a country with tens or hundreds of millions of people, it's more practical. Most people wouldn't have any trouble with having to arrange international calls beforehand. They might very well decide to rely more on Zoom or some other IP solution, which I think would be fine...
Blocking Indian calls is not racist, just like nullrouting all of China to stop a legion of bruteforcers hammering your servers is not racist. It's a measured response to a real problem, which you are free to not like.
That is, unfortunately, not the way society as a whole sees it. It is fairly common for stores to be attacked as racist when they lock down products that are targeted at a specific minority segment; even when they have clear data indicating those products are stolen more than others. The intent and reason for actions is no longer the deciding factor in whether or not something is racist/biased; the effect is what's focused on.
As a side note, I am of the opinion that, if the effect causes real problems for the target segment, then focusing on it is reasonable. For example, if loans are harder to get for a minority because they are more likely to default, then (regardless of the intent/reason for making the loans harder) it makes sense to consider this bad and look for a solution. If it's something like a hair care product that is behind lock and key because it's stolen more often, then calling the store racist is a little over the top. I guess, in the end, it's a matter of balancing the interests of society against that of the store (or other party). There's a large gray area there.
> Without partitioning world telephone connectivity? Easily.
I certainly don't care if foreign call centers can't call me from domestic numbers. If they want to call me and try to sell me some scam, they can use a number that's local to them.
I don't see the problem. ATT cleans up their network, or they get shut down just like anyone else that is allowing anonymous bad actors on to the network.
I’ve long wondered about this problem and why phone companies don’t just defer to their users. I understand why some people need the option, but I’d gladly opt out of accepting any foreign-originating calls since that’s just not relevant to me. Then they can use all the modern phone routing tech on my number to further enforce number verification etc and hugely cut down on my exposure to scammers. If a lot of people opted into this setting, it would help everyone as there’d be herd immunity as scammers would have a much harder time finding people who they could even contact.
Is not that they can’t, is that there’s no money in it for them, at least not yet.
At the same time that these companies don’t do anything about spam calls, they formed a consortium to push something called A2P-10DLC on services like Twilio, to force smaller businesses to pay more money for the privilege of texting their own customers. They say it’s for protecting the end users from spam, but clearly they don’t really care about that, instead they realized they were not getting a big enough piece of the pie of texting services and want to get more.
Migrating to IPv6 is hard because there is hardly any real will to do so. Most people don't need a unique IP address and don't mind being behind some ISP-level NAT. So it will happen as bigger companies are forced into it.
The phone network on the other hand could work with a very simple reputation list. If you carrier fails to act against malicious actor they lose access to everyone else and that's it. Once they have a financial interest that forces them to look into it the problem would solve itself. Just today I've had 2 calls from "the government of Canada" telling me that there was a warrant out to my name.
I cannot attest as an expert, but I learned something about your phone carrier would actually be punished by the FCC for not connecting the call of a scammer. It’s possible your carrier knows it’s fishy but has to let it through due to large government getting in it’s own way.
Any source on this? I heard carriers let them through because their spam call filtering service was a cash cow (i.e. they didn't have to let them through, otherwise no anti spam service could exist from them, they maybe did have to by default, but could have offered the service free with opt-in and advertised it).
guessing he's thinking about human-assisted text-to-voice services for disability, where there is indeed a requirement that your text be read aloud unaltered and thus they cannot warn you even if it is obviously a scam
I love that since the invention of the telephone the FCC has tried to "rein in" robocalls and failed at every step. Is there a more inept government agency? How many years of failure has it been, has no one ever told them it goes on since carriers profit from it?
This is the agency that wants to regulate internet providers and they can't fix robocalls. It's an embarrassment, because we could use some of the former.
It’s not ineptitude but limited power: the major phone companies profit from spam and they’ve made it clear to their Congress members that they don’t want action – and the previous guy was famously a fan of any approach which involved hoping that they really meant it this time.
Note also that this is not terribly different than email spam: Gmail is a bit better but they also have major false positive problems so to me this looks an awful lot like what happens when you have a smart adversary and limited will to change the system.
My strategy with robocalls has been to answer every single one of them if I am able, get a person on the line, and then waste as much of their time as possible while being extremely weird. I'm down to one every week or two now. Everyone needs a hobby.
This assumes 1) The scammers talk to other scammers buying the same list of phone numbers 2) The scammers bother to clean up the list of people to call.
I keep getting the same "You have received a parcel in the mail that contains illegal drugs" call many times a day, talk to an "officer" every time, and they keep calling me again. Either there are multiple gangs running the same scam (including the same tape), or they just don't care that this mark has already been called a few times with little luck.
My brother had a stressful afternoon in court a bit more than a decade ago with the same “yes” obviously spliced into a recording. The judge was pretty humored by the recording and kept asking the plaintiff (the scammer) to play it over & over again. After a while the plaintiff’s attorney left.
This was a one-off scuzzball. However, to this day, myself, and all my acquaintances answer the question “Is this thechao?” with a “this is he/she”.
We have an Asterisk exchange at home, it supports a US number and a NZ number - we get maybe one spam call a year from either number .....
Why? .... because the home exchange answers every call and asks for a 1 digit extension number - that's enough to put off all those robo calls, the machines that call ahead for them treat this as an answering machine and move on.
Back when the kids were still at home everyone had a 1 digit extension (and VM box), calls would ring in kids' bedrooms and then in the common space, everyone had their own ring cadence - my daughter got 90% of the phone calls so I gave her the short ring, we never had to answer the phone for her
These spammers often spoof the phone numbers of people with the same 3 digit prefix as you in hopes that you’ll be more likely to pick up. I even get calls from people saying they got a missed call from me when I never called them. People shouldn’t be able to spoof outgoing phone numbers. It’s messed up.
I still think the carriers should just reject calls with obviously fraudulent caller-ids.
Call coming from an external interface, but presenting an id owned by the carrier? Reject the connection. And tag the network partner for follow-up investigation.
Number portability just means that the owner of the number can change. When an ownership change happens, the new owner knows they are the current owner, and can reject calls entering their network claiming to come from that number. Likewise, the former owner knows they no longer own it, and can accept calls from it.
same, my cell number is in a distant region of the state and I don't actually know anyone who lives there, so it's almost a 100% indicator that it's a scam
Just make the gateways liable for any spam calls that they originate. It works in the credit card industry by holding the processors accountable so they have to vet all the merchants.
I find it weird that it's STIR/SHAKEN that's constantly being mentioned. It won't actually change anything apart from people getting a more accurate source displayed.
The part that actually changes something is this:
> When the FCC notifies a gateway provider about an ongoing robocall campaign, the provider would have to [...] and "promptly block all traffic associated with the traffic pattern identified in that notice."
That's all that was needed for years. Make it the telco's problem to either point the finger at the next peer responsible, or block their customer. We didn't actually need the caller authentication for this - you can identify and flag calls without it. I'm happy this rule is coming, but I wish that was done earlier before the effort of fixing the callerid.
Why won't it change things? My team was responsible for implementing STIR/SHAKEN at a large Telco. Customers could, in the future, block calls for which the number is inaccurate (B/C attestation). If you get a call from a number, you should be able to know the number owner actually made the call. Then, robocall laws could be enforced, since you can actually find the responsible party from the number that dialed you.
Numbers are relatively cheap. The scams will just get a bit more expensive to run, but getting a block of thousands of provably-correct numbers is trivial. Especially if you're going to return them in a month after they're burned for spam purposes.
Though STIR/SHAKEN is now common on the IP networks of large phone companies, carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers still have until June 30, 2023, to deploy the technology.
So... the major carrier already have this, and its still making no difference? Is this rule going to fix the situation when applied to smaller entities or not?
The entire situation is such an utter failure of the FCC. Literally millions of people can no longer answer their phone, and its been this way for years.
Perhaps they need to give us all the hops, and let us block calls based on that. I'd just filter out anything that has any non-US hops, that should eliminate most if not all of it.
How does it come that while the US is swamped with robocalls in many other countries (e.g. Germany) this is not just not a problem, it's complete unheard of.
One factor is simply that there are many more people who speak English than German in the world, and the same is true among the fraction of people who operate scams. But I'd imagine there are also some regulatory factors that make a difference.
I answer and make calls on a frequent basis. People expect me to be able to do both. Its not actually weird or old fashioned.
That said, there are a few caveats.
Unknown callers? I'd better have an appointment with you at that time. Otherwise off to voicemail with you!
Junk calls? Spam calls? I'm on various lists. Some of thise lists have teeth. Others not so much. Either way, you'll end up on my list and you'll vanish from my future.
This action seems too late to save the public telephone network.
The usefulness of the network has already fallen below the threshold needed to be self sustaining for person to person communication, much like email has too.
Both are now used mostly for person to organisation communication, and that too will fade in the coming decade.
I wish my phone or carrier would allow me to batch block phone numbers, and auto update with a shared list, just like I do with adblock. Although I understand that spammers can call with non-spammers numbers, I think that's tolerable because I don't know those people and likely never will!
The vast majority of spam phone calls are made with false Caller ID information. Blocking these calls based on their Caller ID would at best be useless, as spammers can easily change what false Caller ID they're using, and would risk blocking legitimate calls from the real owners of those numbers.
The obvious comparison is spam email. Nobody seriously recommends using "From" headers to block spammers. Caller ID is effectively the same thing, but for phone calls.
A large point of STIR/SHAKEN is that caller ID is now signed and shouldn't be able to be forged - STIR/SHAKEN is being rolled out across the US now the FCC is requiring foreign carriers who want to connect to the US to do the same
Effectively the "from headers" will no longer be able to be forged
does somebody know why the hell caller id spoofing is a thing though? It must have served a purpose at some point, otherwise we could just fix it, right? I'm befuddled by the fact that we just don't make caller ids not spoofable...
I cannot browse the web without leaving all the personal information ever imagined about me, but a phone call? Impossible to trace back, but please, report it on donotcall.gov thanks.
Ever hear "If you know the extension of the party you are trying to reach please enter it now."? Unfortunately, an extension standard does not seem to exist at the carrier level? But, NAT is also private. Some CMS likely has the ability to auto route a callback to the same extension/agent given his or her current status without requiring entering an extension.
It's not really call centers, it's any business. When someone makes an outbound call, you usually want it to show the main business number, not the extension of whatever phone they used to make the call.
Let's say I'm using my personal phone to make work calls, because reasons. I want my caller ID to say "XYZ Corp" instead of "Animal Muppet", because people are more likely to answer.
I just wish I could *7726 to report that the last call received was spam. Let the carriers figure out who to block since they connected the circuit. I’m sure if I called the Whitehouse with fake caller I’d and made a threat the secret service would track me down in a heartbeat. The problem is not that they can’t, it’s that they make money by not doing it
I am convinced that the issue can be fixed, but that too many people on the inside profiting from it. Robocallers cause financial ruin on the vulnerable and tie up critical infrastructure. They are literal terrorist and should be treated like it. I guarantee that they'll have a hard time finding people to handle those calls when they realize there are serious consequences, like having a drone drop a missle into your call center.
I'll believe it when I see it. Seriously, just label robocallers terrorist already. Offer rewards to people willing to turn in the hedge honchos. Sanction the countries that refuse to prosecute them.
I'm surprised some enterprising lawyer hasn't initiated a class action lawsuit against the telco's on behalf of those who have been scammed as a result of their inaction.
If PSTN (public-switched telephone networks, a/k/a direct-dialed general telephony) doesn't get its act together very soon, my sense is that it will cease to be a viable communications channel simply because so many people will have abandoned it, and quite possibly sooner than anticipated. The disruption to general communications will be huge for people, businesses, governments, emergency providers, and others.
I'm not referring merely to landline phones, but any predominantly voice-based communications system in which any user anywhere can presume to reach any other person without some additional requirement.
I've asked this question a few times --- asking when people think PSTD might die, in 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32+ years. Results are of course nonscientific, though interesting, and have varied widely. (My pessimism isn't especially widely shared.)
I did discover a while back though that telephone engineers share the same concern and for largely the same reasons:
[S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.”
When the telephone was first introduced, and as it expanded through the 1950s and 60s, it was, as Facebook in the aughts, an aspirational instrument. Truman beat Dewey, but pollsters, relying on wealthy- and Republican-skewed polling, got the race wrong. Service was expensive, long distance was insanely expensive. There was little automation, and if someone was calling, odds were quite good that you really wanted to talk to them.
What killed the phone is the same thing that killed email, Usenet, and is killing the Web: it got too cheap. Good for those with legitmate business, but unfortunately, a far larger improvement to those with illegitimate business. Penny-ante schemes become viable when launched at scale and from low-overhead locations.
A couple of instances of the poll (and discussions), here:
For anyone keeping tabs on my accuracy, I'd suggested on 17 July 2019 that death of PSTN telephony was <5 years away. That's looking somewhat overambitious from here.
Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made).
It's really rare I even get a call from someone in my contact list - even for something "urgent" most people just send a text ("call me - urgent!" is serious). Anything for work is scheduled, and even then it's been years since it was anything but zoom/teams/etc.
Part of this I think is a shift in the way people operate with technology: texting is faster and better than voicemail. Slack, zoom, etc dominate workplaces. Part is it's been ruined by spam.
I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you. Had the PSTN not existed and you were to try to launch "Telephone" as an app today, it would almost certainly fail. "You get a unique 10 digit number and if anyone types it in, it makes your device ring loudly, 24/7, no matter what else you're doing, and you're instantly placed in a two-way audio call with them!"