FCC Calls On Phone Companies To Offer Free Robocall Blocking (fastcompany.com) 120
The FCC chairman on Friday pressed major U.S. phone companies to take immediate steps to develop technology that blocks unwanted automated calls available to consumers at no charge. Chairman Tom Wheeler, in letters to CEOs of Verizon Communications, AT&T, Sprint, US Cellular, Level 3 Communications, Frontier Communications, Bandwidth.com, and T-Mobile, said that so-called robocalls, automated pre-recorded telephone calls often from telemarketers or scam artists continue because the industry isn't taking any action. Wheeler demands answers with "concrete, actionable solutions to address these issues" within 30 days. A report on FastCompany adds: Wheeler also urged carriers to create a list of institutions like government agencies and banks that are commonly impersonated by scammers and filter out overseas callers impersonating them through falsified caller ID data
I'm sure they will fully comply (Score:5, Insightful)
They will offer free robocall blocking and the sudden and completely unrelated rate hike will be completely unrelated.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Or more likely, they'll do nothing at all because they profit every time a robocall hits one of our phones.
Not really, I have unlimited (or nearly unlimited, 1000 minutes) calling, I only use a fraction of that allowance, sending more calls to me doesn't earn AT&T any money, and causes additional load on their network.
Re:I'm sure they will fully comply (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
And they still profit. Why? Because robocalls like this help push people into deciding they need unlimited calling in the first place, thereby spurring them to spend more. And because not everybody has unlimited calling, and a large portion of their userbase has their minutes eaten up by this. Whether you personally spend more because of it changes that not one lick.
Really? It's hard to find a plan from a major carrier that does't have unlimited (or near unlimited) calling, some MVNO's offer them, but the carriers make so little money off of minutes, I'd be surprised if robocalls would earn any significant revenue for the carriers.
Re: (Score:3)
Even if almost everyone didn't already have unlimited calls, how many robocalls would you need to get before it would make any impact on your minuts. It takes a few seconds to figure out it's a robocall and hangup.
Re: (Score:2)
Umm, I still think the tariffs for "wire-line phone service) charge the CALLING parting, not the CALLED party...at least in every U.S. state I know of. International calls TO you are billed by the carrier at "waters' edge." However, on cellular service you're getting charged for "air time," aka the time you spent at originator OR recipient of a call...that's the cellular scam.
It's why I take these measures:
1. I use VOIP at my home, instead of paying AT&T their exorbitant tariff. Because data demands
Re:I'm sure they will fully comply (Score:4, Informative)
It does earn AT&T money because they charge the originating telecoms network a termination fee for handling the call, regardless of your inbound minutes limit (which is a terrible US thing, we dont have that here in the UK, its outbound charges only for us).
Re: (Score:2)
That's your allowance, not the shitcaller's. It's them who are phoning you, why would your allowance even matter? And they certainly dial more than 1000 minutes.
Re: (Score:2)
You're not the only one paying for phone service. Telespammers pay a lot of money for their service.
Re:I'm sure they will fully comply (Score:5, Informative)
Nomorobo actually works pretty well and it is already free on land lines. It has totally stopped Cardholder Services from call me. That spammer was driving me crazy having called me over 300 times. After about a hundred calls I started answering some of them and telling the operators what a disgusting company they work working for. Or I'd hit '1' and set the phone next to my radio. I heard that other people give them made up credit card info just to make them waste time. Even after paying a $1M FCC fine Cardholder Services is still calling my land line. https://www.nomorobo.com/ [nomorobo.com]
Of now they have started calling my cell phone four or five times a week. And there is no free blocking.
Apparently Nomorobo works by using the billing information in the call to block the call. The billing information can't be spoofed like the caller ID can be. End phones can't access the billing info so the call have to be blocked inside the network.
Re: (Score:2)
The number of these call is ridiculous. From the Nomorobo page:
115,596,364 calls blocked.
I suspect that far less than 1% of phone lines are running Nomorobo so this implies that many billions of these annoying calls are being made.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
On the Do Not Call list. I have reported them about ten times. I stopped after someone told me that it was pointless to report them any more since Cardholder Services is the number one robocaller on the FTC robocall list and they are well aware of who they are.
Put Cardholder Services in Google and you get 17M hits on people complaining about them.
Re:I'm sure they will fully comply (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I actually got a letter back from them once...just basically said I could sue them if I wanted but didn't say they would do anything.
Re:I'm sure they will fully comply (Score:5, Informative)
I can confirm this.
About 10 years ago when I switched phone carriers (didn't port my number, not sure if that was even a thing yet), I got assigned a phone number that had previously belonged to someone who may have had debt. I was getting calls morning noon and night from a collection agency named Luebke Baker, looking for the guy who had the number before me. No amount of "you've got the wrong fucking number" made any difference, they kept on calling, always spoofing different numbers from different area codes, sometimes a dozen calls a day.
I got fed up and went through the FCC complaint process. I don't know how it works now, but at the time, they had a web form that required an intense level of detail and took a long time to fill out. I submitted it. About a month later, I got an envelope in the mail from the FCC. It contained a printed copy of my complaint form, about 15 sheets of paper worth, with a letter saying they found no violation of anything and I was welcome to submit another complaint if I wanted.
Thanks and no thanks, I had Sprint change my phone number. Luebke Baker eventually got fined by the FTC [ftc.gov] instead of the FCC, I guess I should have sent my complaint there instead.
Re: I'm sure they will fully comply (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:I'm sure they will fully comply (Score:4, Informative)
There is a web page at the FTC dedicated to dealing with them -- What’s the deal with “Rachel from Card Services”? Your top 3 questions answered. [ftc.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
Just curious, How many times did you report the calls to the FCC?
Doing so is essentially pointless. The FCC is well aware of the extent of the whole "cardholder services" scam, so you're not giving them any information that they don't already have. Since they fake their caller ID anyway, it's not like you're able to provide any more information about who is actually originating the call.
I still submit complaints when the calls provide real identifying information that I can report, but most of the robocalls aren't that sort.
Re: (Score:2)
Um...report to the FTC, not the FCC.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only do I rarely get robo calls (or live telemarketing calls, for that matter), but last week I got a check in the mail for $55 because I filed a complaint with the FCC on one I did get from a class action lawsuit. The do not call list isn't perfect (and it won't stop the outright criminals, like the psychotic asshole pretending they're doing a survey), but it really, really helps, especially when combined with formal complaints on the violators.
Re: (Score:3)
They will offer free robocall blocking and the sudden and completely unrelated rate hike will be completely unrelated.
It doesn't matter, the rate hike is coming whether they implement this or not -- they charge based on what the market will bear, not on their cost of delivering service.
Re: (Score:2)
they need to work the other end (Score:4, Insightful)
if legit companies were required to prove that their contractors followed ALL laws (with epic fines for violations) then these boiler room companies would go "POOF".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It seems unfair to completely block legitimate VOIP calls to cell phones, but there has to be some way to block the scammers without putting undue burdens on legitimate companies.
All you need is for the information that it's a VOIP call to be carried along with the call, and then let the user decide whether they want to drop such calls or not.
I sure would.
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't. Most residential phones are moving to VOIP; if you have Internet it dramatically cuts your phone bill.
The "Callers'" number can be blocked, and some unreputable robocallers do that. But, then I block all calls that don't identify themselves via Caller ID.
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't. Most residential phones are moving to VOIP; if you have Internet it dramatically cuts your phone bill.
You don't have to. But it would be nice to have the choice.
The "Callers'" number can be blocked, and some unreputable robocallers do that. But, then I block all calls that don't identify themselves via Caller ID.
Which is close to pointless, since most robocallers just use a fake caller ID number anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
When someone is scammed they should sue AT&T for allowing the fake number. It's fraud and AT&T is complicit in carrying it out.
Re: (Score:2)
There are a small number of them, believe it or not. Convince them that they won't ever get any money from you, or that you'll just waste their time, and they will stop. Try http://fakenamegenrator.com/ [fakenamegenrator.com] (they guarantee the credit card numbers they generate are not real), and see how long you string the assholes along. It's the new 419 baiting.
Re: (Score:3)
if legit companies were required to prove that their contractors followed ALL laws (with epic fines for violations) then these boiler room companies would go "POOF".
None of the robocalls I receive (at least the ones I've listened to) are legit companies, they are all "You won a trip to the Caribbean", "Listen for special offer to lower your interest rate", etc. They are fly-by-night companies that are hard to track down, and will just pop up again under another name if they face any punishment for the robocalls.
Robocalls have gotten so bad that I stopped answering the phone for cals from numbers I don't recognize, I just let them go to voicemail and wait for the Googl
Re: (Score:3)
if legit companies were required to prove that their contractors followed ALL laws (with epic fines for violations) then these boiler room companies would go "POOF".
How would they prove that? You can only prove when they DON'T. And most of the time, you can't prove they are breaking the law because you can't identify who it is that is breaking the law. Either the predictive dialer dumps the call after you've answered and you have no information about the call (other than the faked called ID), or you get a recorded message with no information about the caller, or you "press 3" to talk to someone who refuses to identify who they actually work for.
For those who think it
Re: they need to work the other end (Score:4, Insightful)
Fixing Number Spoofing is Hard (Score:2)
Sure, it's just a simple matter of programming to re-architect the signalling system that's driven the phone companies since the mid-80s. Unfortunately, number spoofing has been an important feature for legitimate businesses - it lets them do things like always give you the number of their main office as caller-id, even if the person is calling from a remote office, or let you give the direct number of the caller, even if the call is getting routed through the company's main office PBX VOIP gateway. It al
Re: (Score:2)
We could start with blocking numbers that are not valid according the the appropriate numbering plan. E.g. a +1 number with a nonexistent area code.
iPhone 7? (Score:1)
What does Analysts: These are the new features that will make you upgrade to the iPhone 7 this fall have to do with the summary? Why is there a link to it?
Re: (Score:2)
Because the link is to an automatic news aggregator. The FCC thing is way down the page already and the summary contains the entire linked article. The actual article is here: https://consumerist.com/2016/0... [consumerist.com]
Re: (Score:1)
It was a botched link, for who knows why. The link probably was to point to https://news.fastcompany.com/f... [fastcompany.com]
That said, the actual article (with useful info) is actually here: https://consumerist.com/2016/0... [consumerist.com]
Caller id spoofing already broke that. (Score:2)
The real way to handle it is to create an open source shared black list, have people sign up for a service, and vote when they answer a call on whether or not it is a telemarketer or robo-call.
Caller ID spoofing already broke block lists. By the time a call gets to your local telco there is no way even for them to tell where it really came from. They regularly spoof their identity - often as others they're robo-calling, or even as the phone they are calling.
IMHO the only way available currently is to trac
Re:Caller id spoofing already broke that. (Score:4, Interesting)
How about some variation on holding the telephone company responsible for the falsified CallerID information? The false information gets there in the first place because the phone companies let anyone with a digital interface supply their own CallerID information. Perhaps the phone companies should develop a screening process whereby they don't accept CallerID information from a subscriber if it doesn't match a previously agreed-upon pattern (for the text, and for the number). Legitimate uses of injected CallerID information are for things like Direct Inward Dial trunks handing out the internal PBX routing number; this would fit the pattern for the number, and the names could be prefaced by some kind of approved organizational identifier.
If the CallerID information could be guaranteed to lead back to the real call initiator, then the Federal reporting forums for illegal and harassing phone calls could have real data to work on. As it stands now, I can report the illegal robocall, or the call even though I'm on the "Do Not Call" list, but even as I report it I'm pretty sure nothing will happen because the CallerID information I'm using to identify the actual caller is falsified. And... good luck getting an actual organization name out of an individual should you choose to speak to one on a robocall. They know better than to give you an actionable name.
Re: (Score:2)
How about some variation on holding the telephone company responsible for the falsified CallerID information?
I, for one, welcome US regulation of my telephone company. Will you be sending in the SEALS, or just a predator with a warhead, to enforce your rules?
Signed, N'gtanga Achmed G'wan N'try, CEO, Big Angolan Telephone Exchange And Coffe Shop, LTD.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Too many idiots ignore the explicit telephone number they are told to call and simply use the caller ID as the callback. Do you think corporations who are trying to honestly provide good customer service should be forced to provide an international callback number? Will it be better for those who are trying to resolve a product issue to wind up calling an expensive international number if the call fr
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Route the VOIP over your internal network and connect to phone system in the destination country. Probably cheaper for your company to do that anyway/
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
government agencies and banks (Score:1)
Yeah, they want to block impersonators. I want to block the real thing. Just give us the ability to white-list calls and the problem will be solved.
REAL caller ID (Score:5, Informative)
Just a non-fucking-spoofable caller ID would go a long way to fixing this, the assholes couldn't hide behind spoofed numbers and would be thus made easily reportable to authorities.
As soon as I heard that caller ID was FUCKING USER MODIFIABLE, I realized it was an absolutely worthless "feature".
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, and let's get rid of the email "From:" line, too! That'll teach those spammers!
Re: (Score:2)
Who gets to decide what is and isn't a "legitimate business"? Hint: Whoever is writing the check to the phone company.
Re: nomorobo.com (Score:1)
nomorobo.com (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
There's already a free solution for land lines: nomorobo.com. Been using it for about 6 months. Works great!!!
That sounds terrific, but what's a "land line"?
Re: (Score:2)
Centurylink, a huge provider, does not work with this service.
Re: (Score:2)
At&t's POTS service doesn't work with it either.
Re: (Score:2)
There's already a free solution for land lines: nomorobo.com. Been using it for about 6 months. Works great!!!
Nomorobo works just fine, but supports only a small number of providers. Just as when you have to sign up for one of those online streaming channels, yours is probably not one of them
step by step (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Secure the caller ID system to prevent faking caller IDs.
2. Implement the *666 calling feature -- if you get a robo-call you hang up, then pick up and dial *666. The phone company then blocks all calls from that number after receiving some number of *666 complaints.
Re: (Score:2)
While you're at it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Put some teeth into the do-not-call list:
Upgrade callerID to use ANI or some other tech to prevent it from being spoofed or blocked; so we can find the bastards. Remove the exemption for charity and political fundraisers and pollsters. Remove the "existing relationship" loophole so that when you add your number the calls STOP unless you explicitly exempt them (And that exemption should be revocable.). Remove the 31-day wait when a number is added (Seriously, WTF? I'm not buying a gun here. I don't need a cooling-off period.) And crank up the penalties for violations such that it will hurt even a SuperPAC... maybe add in some criminal penalties too.
Re: (Score:3)
Remove the 31-day wait when a number is added (Seriously, WTF? I'm not buying a gun here. I don't need a cooling-off period.)
The 30 day wait is not for you. It's to keep the system from being overly onerous for legitimate users. You can't make the addition effective immediately because that forces the people you WANT to use the list to look at it every five minutes or so. There has to be some time delay between being added to the list the government manages and it being used by the callers to filter their lists. You can argue that 31 days is too long and that ten days is better, but you can't call for the removal of any wait.
And crank up the penalties for violations such that it will hurt even a SuperPAC... maybe add in some criminal penalties too.
Robo
Re: (Score:2)
That is the current state of things. There's really no technical reason why the do not call list could not be a realtime check built into the auto-dialers. If the number's on the list, the software should automatically delete it (or at least flag it). And there should be criminal penalties for selling software that does not do this.
Re: (Score:2)
The laws are easy to enforce. What they're not is cheap to enforce. The FCC gets convictions and large fines from the ones they go after. They just don't have enough resources to go after all of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Upgrade callerID to use ANI or some other tech to prevent it from being spoofed or blocked; so we can find the bastards.
ANI would be awful to use as a callerID because it marks signals the calling service line billing number. When you have a PRI/DS3/etc service trunk, the ANI for all calls out is that service trunk number, even though you may have thousands of legitimate TNs/callerIDs on the trunk.
I run more than a dozen PBXs hanging off a DS3 and multiple PRI trunks, thousands of incoming TN destinations, plus a fee hundred more valid outgoing TNs (think local business offices, outgoing calls with callerID of corporate main
Re: (Score:2)
Put some teeth into the do-not-call list:
Upgrade callerID to use ANI or some other tech to prevent it from being spoofed or blocked; so we can find the bastards.
If you can figure out a technical way to do that without interfering with the legitimate reasons for spoofing Caller ID that works reliably, go for it. Get a patent, then lobby Congress to make its use mandatory.
Good luck on that.
Remove the exemption for charity and political fundraisers and pollsters.
The reason those exemptions exist is that SCOTUS case law suggests - very strongly - that not including them would make the law unconstitutional. So good luck with that, too. (I agree they should be illegal, too, but they're not.)
Remove the "existing relationship" loophole so that when you add your number the calls STOP unless you explicitly exempt them (And that exemption should be revocable.).
From what I read, that's been done, as of last year
Free Market, suck it Tom (Score:1)
Stop ordering the free market to do your bidding. If the free market wants robocalls to be gone, they will be gone, but they don't want that, so we continue to have them. That's the Free Market making up its own mind. Tom's FCC is the antithesis of free market capitalism and who ever becomes the next president should get rid of him.
Re: (Score:2)
FCC regulates ISPs; let's have spam blocking, too! (Score:2)
tldr: Nobody wins an arms race. they just continue forever.
The USPS's primary customer is bulk mailers. Then a little package delivery. Individuals sending love letters or paying bills aren't even on the radar.
Each evening I pass by my trash can on the way from the mailbox to the house. Very rarely are my hands full at the back door (watch it).
Then email turned into a shitpile of spam and we have spam blockers that (kinda) work.
The web has been a swamp since the invention of the blink tag.
And we have a
Tom Wheeler is Still a Dingo (Score:2)
Priorities (KAT) (Score:2, Insightful)
They'll spend months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to nab a guy halfway around the world for sharing music, but won't lift a fucking finger to hunt down real, actual scammers causing real, actual harm.
Here's a thought... (Score:2)
Say I'm being unreasonable, but here's my immediate reaction: infrastructure providers, whether they're fiber or cellular, should just provide the infrastructure. Voice service should be decoupled from the physical infrastructure. It should be competitive VoIP products based on open standards. The expectation should be that I can get a phone on Verizon's network, but my phone service might be through services like Google Hangouts or Skype, but that Google Hangouts and Skype can talk to each other the sam
hmm (Score:2)
Why would phone companies want to block their best customers?
Personal premium numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
White List (Score:2)
Make it so that the person placing the call potentially pays to call me. I get to set the price. I agree to split that price with the phone company. The phone company agrees to play an automated message to the original caller informing them of the price and giving the caller the option to to complete the call or not. When my phone actually rings I get the option to press a key to waive the charge. Fun and entertainment ensue.
This is almost a good idea. What we actually need is a 'white list' on phone contacts who are allowed to call. Anyone not on the white list goes to voice mail without disturbing you. Could possibly offer the caller the option to pay $1 to get through. Seems like this could easily be implemented on the handset, no need to bother the phone company. Can Android apps intercept phone calls and route them? App idea for someone to exploit if they have the know how and if the capabilities are there.
Do Not Call (Score:2)
Wasn't the "Do Not Call" list thing supposed to take care of this already? Instead of asking the phone companies to deal with unwanted calls, how about enforcing the Do Not Call list and go to after the source?
Re: (Score:2)
I've been on it since a month or more before it first became active.
I get almost no telespam calls at all, and that was a huge improvement over the days before the list was active. It does work. It isn't perfect, but it helps a hell of a lot.
The people who ignore it are criminals in other ways, too. Virtually all robocalls and telespam calls are illegal in multiple ways.
On the other hand, once someone has committed a crime by calling you, they're the outlet for all your life's frustrations. You can let off
Shut down Level 3 and ban VoIP Telephony (Score:4, Informative)
Almost all spam calls, robocalls, and illegal calls to cell phones that I receive are traced to VoIP services offered by Level 3 subsidiaries or Level 3 themselves. They do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to fix any of this.
Shut down Level 3 and ban the easy scam-hiding that is VoIP telephony, I can guarantee you the majority of this bullshit will stop immediately.
I finally ripped my landline out of the wall (Score:2)
We have had the same increasing number of robocalls everyone else has, gradually spilling over onto my cell, but what finally put me over the top was a new type of call. The phone rings, I pick up, and before I say a word it just says "We are sorry. An application error has occurred. Goodbye."
We have all comm services bundled with cable, so the landline came 'free' on the account. the only use we had for it was as the notifier output for an old leak sensor. Now we're replacing the sensor with one of the new
wrong link (Score:2)
I find it ironic that a submission about nuisance calls has the main link erroneously redirecting people to some fluff piece advertising iphone features.
The PSTN is a Garbage-Laden Wasteland (Score:1)
The Public Switched Telephone Network exists mostly to push unwanted advertising and scams on unsuspecting victims, due mainly to an inclination by the Federal Government of The United States of America to let it happen. They've even carved out a special place for themselves in the Do Not Call list that makes this list mostly useless. As reputations go the PSTN deserves zero trust and zero consideration by ordinary people. Curb your curiosity when the phone rings. Only answer calls from numbers or peopl
I Already Have (Score:1)
my own robocall blocking system. Basically, I don't answer anything outside my area code that isn't in my address book so it gets identified. Got about 6 calls today that I refused. Works for me.
Would be nice to have a way to block the robos, tho...
A thought experiment (Score:1)
The federal government's position is "There is nothing we can do about it" even though most of the calls- if you play along- switch you to an America-based phone salesman working on commission. Almost all these folks work and live in Palm Beach County, FL, where boiler room phone scams are the biggest private employer (30,000 people the last time I heard). This has been going on for 30-40 years and started with timeshare and commodities options. The companies use standard credit card merchant accounts the
My phone does this now (Score:2)
I've got a Panasonic land-line phone that does this now. The only downside is that the block list is limited to 30 numbers.
What I really want is for the cellular companies to get off their ass and implement caller ID. Further, I want Apple to add live number lookup and a one-touch way to google a phone number in my recent list instead of forcing me to copy & paste the text. How hard is that?!
Mod Parent Troll Please (Score:2)
I don't have mod points so I can't mod it down. And the shooters were right-wingers yelling hatred for Turks.