Robocalls, and Their Scams, Are Surging (nytimes.com) 171
The volume of pesky robocalls -- and their scams -- have skyrocketed in recent years, reaching an estimated 3.4 billion in April. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] From a report: In an age when cellphones have become extensions of our bodies, robocallers now follow people wherever they go, disrupting business meetings, church services and bedtime stories with their children. Though automated calls have long plagued consumers, the volume has skyrocketed in recent years, reaching an estimated 3.4 billion in April, according to YouMail, which collects and analyzes calls through its robocall blocking service. That's an increase of almost 900 million a month compared with a year ago. Federal lawmakers have noticed the surge. Both the House and Senate held hearings on the issue within the last two weeks, and each chamber has either passed or introduced legislation aimed at curbing abuses.
Federal regulators have also noticed, issuing new rules in November that give phone companies the authority to block certain robocalls. Law enforcement authorities have noticed, too. Just the other week, the New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, warned consumers about a scheme targeting people with Chinese last names, in which the caller purports to be from the Chinese Consulate and demands money. Since December, the New York Police Department said, 21 Chinese immigrants had lost a total of $2.5 million.
Federal regulators have also noticed, issuing new rules in November that give phone companies the authority to block certain robocalls. Law enforcement authorities have noticed, too. Just the other week, the New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, warned consumers about a scheme targeting people with Chinese last names, in which the caller purports to be from the Chinese Consulate and demands money. Since December, the New York Police Department said, 21 Chinese immigrants had lost a total of $2.5 million.
This is what I don't get... (Score:5, Insightful)
Telephone companies have the ability to track every call as to send them the phone bill. But they cannot block calls with fake caller IDs?
Either the Telephone companies just don't care their services are being actively used to scam people with a difficult to track back to them and lock them up and/or their infrastructure is grossly out of date.
Re:This is what I don't get... (Score:5, Informative)
Calls are billed with ANI data, not Caller ID data. There are legitimate uses for caller ID spoofing (customer support returning a call from any station with the one main national number, for example). I use Caller ID spoofing myself for both personal and business calls (Google Voice and multiline SIP phone system). But there are a lot instances of Caller ID spoofing that should still be detected and blocked.
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There are legitimate uses for caller ID spoofing (customer support returning a call from any station with the one main national number, for example). I use Caller ID spoofing myself for both personal and business calls (Google Voice and multiline SIP phone system).
That's not a legitimate use for spoofing Caller ID.
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Which? I named 3.
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And even then it should be announced to the one you do it to.
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Email has distinct "From:" and "Reply-To:" headers. Why can't the phone service?
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It does. But you don't get access to the From (ANI) header. Just Reply-To.
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It does. But just like email "From" and "reply to" headers, it can be spoofed and just like in email it is by malicious actors.
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Caller ID spoofing should require pre-approval from the phone company with appropriate documentation available to law enforcement.
Too much bureaucracy. A simpler solution is to just send a 6-digit authorization code that needs to be entered on the targeted phone.
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Because they make money that way. Selling your number to some telemarketer. I'm not getting calls from telemarketers, scum, on my cell phone. I believe my provider, AT&T, wants to charge me $6.99 to block telemarketers. fucking scum..
Re:This is what I don't get... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Because they make money that way. Selling your number to some telemarketer. I'm not getting calls from telemarketers, scum, on my cell phone. I believe my provider, AT&T, wants to charge me $6.99 to block telemarketers. fucking scum..
Interesting - I have "scam protection" as a freebie on my account (I don't see a line item on my bill for it).
Of course, I'm on the "Un-Carrier" (T-Mobile) so maybe this is just Jon being disruptive. Who knows.
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These days most calls are just VoIP data, phone companies don't really have the infrastructure to track incoming calls; I mean sure they know that a call came in and how long it was. But they only know it came from IP x.x.x.x.x they don't know where it came from before that, not really. If the packets are properly formatted they just connect them to their destination. Similar to how an email server has to rely on self-reporting of e-mail headers to verify authenticity, phone companies are trusting that info
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Isn't it only "VoIP data" up until it enters the actual phone routing system?
I can't help but think that phone companies could verify inbound calling paths were legitimate sources for the presented ANI data.
Number portability means there IS a database of phone numbers and the carriers to which they are associated, there should be a way to check ANI data against the database to decide if the source for that calling party is legitimate.
I'm sure we'll hear about all the "legitimate" reasons to pass fake ANI da
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The problem is they CAN NOT BLOCK these calls from being delivered.
If they give a Letter of Marque to a "Concerned Citizen" (who happens to have a nice net connect and a large stack of telcom equipment) then HOIST THE COLORS time!
this posting brought to you by http://www.jollyrogertelco.com... [jollyrogertelco.com]
Don't answer it? (Score:2)
Unless I'm expecting a call, I never answer unknown numbers. If it is a legitimate call, they'll leave you a message.
That said, I do feel sorry for people who still, for some reason, have a landline.
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I don't answer any calls on my landline that I don't recognize. That happens a few times per week.
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I do the same. The only problem I run into are delivery drivers who call from random numbers. On more than one occasion I've forgotten I have a delivery coming, not answered the phone call and missed the delivery. I wish they would use the intercom system outside my building, but they don't.
I'm just thankful solicitors can't knock directly on my door like they would do when I rented an apartment.
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Unless I'm expecting a call, I never answer unknown numbers. If it is a legitimate call, they'll leave you a message.
That said, I do feel sorry for people who still, for some reason, have a landline.
I've tried that. I missed the call about my mother being in an accident, so now...what do I do?
Seriously, it doesn't work. We just need to punish the criminals, sadly, of course, our politicians are busy yammering about MQ-37 and Korea and tax cuts, when we want paved roads, telemarketing fraud crushed, and our retirement secured.
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A lot of people have jobs or responsibilities where they just can't ignore unknown numbers. Anyone who has business cards printed up so that people can call them can't just ignore an unknown number. Mine automatically forwards to voicemail if they're not in my contacts. Even when I sell used stuff on ksl (local site similar to craigslist) I use a google voice number and I've still been able to connect to the legitimate buyer without issue.
I sort of feel bad for my parents and in-laws who have land lines. Bu
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I have business cards printed up. I ignore calls. I survive.
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That said, I do feel sorry for people who still, for some reason, have a landline.
When we had a two week local power outage, I was very glad I had a landline.
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What annoys me is that the latest version of the software these idiots use doesn't detect the voice mail and hang up until it hears the beep! And so they leave a blank message. Which guarantees both that that particular number is blocked, but also it guarantees that I'll remember to remain vigilant about not answering calls from unknown numbers.
I'm one long weekend away from setting up my own voicemail in asterisk that beeps first, then makes them press a button to leave a message.
You can do the same thing
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I keep a listed landline that I originally set up so that my step-sons father couldn't say he lost our phone number. He still used that as an excuse for not being in contact with him for over a decade. The step-son looked him up when he was 16 and was going to go visit but of course it was just never the right time.
Now that the step-son is 18 and moving out I think I'm going to cancel the landline, all it ever gets is telemarketers and scam robocalls.
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Need suggestions (Score:2)
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Spoofed numbers are illegal unless you own or have a legitimate use for the number you're calling from (e.g. Google Voice spoofs caller numbers when they forward calls to your cell, even though that leg of the call is really from them)
No way to hold them accountable, as most are offshore.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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My time (and cell phone minutes) are also worth money, and its costs me, too. A cost that I am absolutely unwilling to bear. There are better ways to put an end to this nonsense that don't cost me more of my limited time or money.
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Forwarding the call to a bot at jollyrogertelco.com doesn't cost you much extra time or cellphone minutes.
One of these days when I have time (probably have to be after I retire, the way things are going) I'm going to look into what it would take to set up a virtual PBX on AWS or Azure or some such that will forward whitelisted numbers straight through, for others, say "Hello?" a few times until getting voice, when they pause, say "You have reached an automated answering service. Do you have any other messa
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My time (and cell phone minutes) are also worth money, and its costs me, too. A cost that I am absolutely unwilling to bear. There are better ways to put an end to this nonsense that don't cost me more of my limited time or money.
Like what, litigating?
That guy came up with his bots because overall there hasn't been a better way, yet. Not saying there shouldn't be; just that there isn't yet.
Actually, the most interesting part of his service isn't the bots per se, it's the filtering out of known spam #s. The bot part is just emotionally satisfying ...
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what? you think your phone number xxx-zzz-yyyy (in the US) is secret? No. The spammers start with xxx-zzz-0000 and end with xxx-zzz-9999 then move to the next block. It's got nothing to do with your phone. Every hit they get (ring, not "this line is not in service") adds to the value of their call, as they can sell that to others, and every line picked up means that someone was curious enough to answer; that adds to the value of the information as well. Never pick up a call from a number that you don't know
Canadian online Pharmacy (Score:2)
I get calls at least twice a day from some variation of 'Canadian Online Pharmacy' or 'US Online Pharmacy' trying to sell me viagra or cialis. It's continued for close to 8 years. They pull every trick you can think of, ignore requests to "Do not call", spoof caller IDs, etc.
Unfortunately my phone number is used for business so I can't easily change it or ignore calls from numbers I don't recognize as that could mean potentially lost business. But I really don't need their dick pills. Occasionally if I
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The price of free phone calls (Score:2)
This only works because phone calls within the United States are basically free. There is no cost per call.
In Europe it typically costs at least something to make a phone call. It's not enough to matter to a typical America $100 per month cell phone bill, but it is enough to prevent robocalls.
I wish that we had some similar cost per phone call in the US because robocalls have effectively rendered my home and cell phone useless for incoming calls which I at this point I just assume are robocalls and telemark
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So why do you continue paying for this useless service?
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Favorites List (Score:2)
I list my immediate family, close friends, and necessary work contacts in my favorites list. I then set my Android phone to silent, unless it's a call, message, or email from someone on the list. The only suck is when I'm streaming music and the incoming unknown caller silently interrupts it. It's a small price to pay though.
Thanks Do Not Call Registry (Score:5, Interesting)
The telephone industry has always been highly regulated, starting from the government-forced monopoly of AT&T, followed by the government-forced breakup of AT&T, and continuing with a large amount of regulations, including the Do Not Call Registry, which was more of my tax dollars well spent obviously.
Meanwhile, Google has effectively stopped SPAM email, at no cost to me.
Do Not Call Registry worked great for years (Score:3)
Things change. When they do regulations have to adapt. That's just the nature of the world. It's like complaining that rail road crossing are bunk because cars can run stop signs. New tech and new processes need new regulations.
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And email spam keeps changing, yet the government isn't involved, and I almost never see any new spam.
Huh? (Score:2)
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If AT&T had a program where they provide you with phone service in exchange for letting them store recordings of all of your conversations, analyze them with AI, and sell the resulting analysis of your personality to 3rd parties, then you can bet that it would also include free spam filtering.
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If you're implying the government regulation is ineffective and the companies themselves need to solve the problem I don't think this is a fair comparison. Gmail was competing against any number of online email providers while the phone companies didn't.
The government sucks at anything it does. But the real question is, is the inefficiencies/ineffectiveness of the government worst then the a monopolistic company?
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Meanwhile, Google has effectively stopped SPAM email, at no cost to me.
Google has mostly stopped SPAM calls for me, too. My phone does ring (if I'm not in a meeting or something) but shows a big red banner on the screen that says "Suspected spam caller" and the number. I never answer and the rare cases where the robocaller bothers to leave voicemail I'm proved right to have ignored it.
This isn't perfect; if the caller were to spoof the number of someone in my address book it would get through, I'm sure. And the phone does still ring (unless silenced for another reason). But
Standard Government Answer (Score:1)
After receiving more than a hundred calls from various numbers from a supposed solar energy provider, I sent a detailed call log to my state's attorney general, my state's public utility commission, and my state's consumer protection agency.. The response was, it's not our job, contact the FTC.
Best wardialer for just such spamming (Score:1)
The best wardialer used to be sold by Sandstorm Enterprises. I'm not sure of they still make them, since they were purchased by NikSun. I suspect they yanked all the public advertising and sell it much more quietly directly to the spammers, advertising to telco's. They worked really well, detecting whether a call was a fax, a modem, or a human *much* more quickly to corectly connect the line to a salesman or sales message, rather than spending anywhere near as much time figuring that out as most war dialers
Apple and Google could fight the robocallers (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, the scams are surging. Some scammers are even calling in the middle of the night. But if you're waiting for the telcos (or the government) to fix this, you'll be waiting for a very, very long time. Caller ID is completely broken, and it will clearly never be fixed.
But robocalling can be tackled on the user end. Robocalling requires a delay of several seconds between you answering the phone and the call being routed to a live human at a call center. I've got an Obi110 on my home telephone, configured with a "Press 1 to continue" screening message. By the time the robocaller switches the call over, the scammer hears nothing but silence. And unless the "1" is pressed, the Obi110 will not ring my home phone. In three years, not one robocaller has made it past the Obi110.
Obviously you can't put an Obi110 on a cell phone. However, Apple and Google could build a call screening function into iOS and Android. Give users the ability to activate a "challenge before ringing" function, give them the ability to customize the challenge and the response (with whitelisting of numbers in the phone directory), and you'd seriously cripple the robocalling industry. With every phone having different challenges / responses, the only solution for the scammers will be for a human being to listen to every call, at least until someone comes up with an AI smart enough to answer any challenge.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better to fight back than do nothing.
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The minute it becomes a standard, all robocaller software will just send DTMF of 1 immediately upon answer.
Even if you lock down the CNAM system, you will still end up with operators who can draw on large CID pools which are legitimately owned and could be randomized.
The only thing that can truly defeat it is whitelisting.
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You're essentially talking about implementing CAPTCHA for phone calls, but CAPTCHA only works in two circumstances:
1) Security through obscurity. If the CAPTCHA system you rely on is not widely used, no one will bother writing bots to circumvent it.
2) Rely on a skill that is trivial for humans but difficult for robots.
Responding with a preset response to a clearly-spoken, pre-recorded message is trivial to program, even if you let the recipient choose between a large number of preset choices. The only reaso
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I think that a voice recognition program parsing a challenge in my own voice along the lines of "press the number below 5 on your keypad to continue" or "press the number you get when you add 2 and 1 to continue" wouldn't have much success. Give app writers access to a call screener
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There's an easy, market-driven fix for this. (Score:3)
Every time someone calls you on a non-business line, $0.10 should get transferred from their account to yours.
These scams work because the scammers can externalize their costs on a massive scale. A robocaller can make thousands of calls an hour, millions of calls over the course of a month, because the marginal cost of the next call is zero. Commercial robocalling operations charge less than a penny a minute.
Internalizing the cost of a spam call is a market solution. It doesn't depend on some government bureaucrat reviewing the telephone number called and the purpose of the call and deciding if it's allowed. It's dependent on that communication being worth a dime to the originator, which spam calls are not. The market price charged by robocalling service bureaus is less than a penny a minute.
Re:There's an easy, market-driven fix for this. (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone else here old enough to remember this template? :-)
-=-=-
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ...
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
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It's actually quite easy to find who to bill. The telephone network has been doing it for decades with landline long distance calling and of course the 900 numbers that people used to call for phone sex.
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I like this idea, and I'd guess you might even get away with making it universal, where every call you make that gets answered transfers $0.10 to the recipient, with the idea that a lot of people call essentially another number they own, making the net transfer between people zero.
I would suspect you could even drive down the cost to $0.05, since if you're penalizing robocallers, $50k vs. $100k per day for a million outbound calls is still a penalty.
Businesses and maybe even individuals who didn't want to "
Use wisdom of the crowds (Score:2)
There should be a standard option to flag a call as spam. If enough customers flag the same number or source (if number spoofed), then a law enforcement investigation should be started. Email systems use a similar technique already.
How to get blacklisted (Score:3)
Easy. Waste their time.
I got spam calls by the dozen. I picked up, immediately terminated the call when I noticed it's a spam call and they kept coming back. Until I was pissed enough that I felt like playing with the asshole. Be bizarre. Be crazy. Talk about him with some weird conspiracy shit. Eventually you'll get written off as some lunatic batshit crazy idiot and they stop calling.
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>> Until I was pissed enough that I felt like playing with the asshole.
This guy gets it. If you call me and offer to sell me health insurance its going to take you a half hour to get through the opening lines of your script. I can talk about my skin tags, bunions, moles, and all of the medical procedures everyone I've ever know has been through. ... and bless your heart if you give me a callback number. I'll call for a follow-up chat every single day.
]XD
If the law can't break these scams then it's
"Hello this is Lenny" (Score:3)
When this conversation comes up it's always good to take a look back at good ol' Lenny
https://www.youtube.com/playli... [youtube.com]
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The difference is I can do this whenever I have time to waste. It sure beats sitting in boring meetings.
I'm getting 'robocalls' that don't hide their id (Score:3)
They want me to call back. They are local.
If you look up your home's value on the wrong site, they tell everyone who asks that you're interested in your home's worth. These scum are happy to help you refi, or sell, or find you the new home. Doesn't matter why you looked up your home's value. And of course there are interposers who happily scrounge your browser history and sell that info.
If you answer your mortgage broker's come-on for more info, that gets sold.
Needless to say, searches for certain terms will link you to interesting terms, and you get calls. Have fun. Search for 'shipping containers'. Warning, this becomes more of a nuisance than looking for garage door opener parts and getting ads for them for months.
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They aren't "local". Many are simply spoofing your own number with the last four digits changed. If you actually think there is any guarantee that the caller ID number is valid, then you are naive at best, or completely stupid. Fortunately I live in a big enough city that we recently got an overlay area code, so the chance of someone worth talking to with those digits being the same is extremely low. It also means that they will likely never call back with the same number out of the 10000 possibilities, so
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I called the number back a few times to request deletion. Two were mapped to local Realtors. One was just some agency trying to market me. All hung up as I started my 'please remove me' speech. They could have been forwarded, but if so then their decades-old businesses are founded on forwarded service, and since they need licensed agents, this seems kinda stupid.
I'm just bright enough to know the difference, bucko. But nice try, keeping me on my toes.
I get 1 or 2 of those "chinese consulate" calls... (Score:2)
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It's a robocall... I'd say I think I might have a whole lot more fun with it if it was an actual human except it's in Chinese anyways, and they'd probably just hang up the instant I tried to say anything in English.
I still get calls from "microsoft windows" every so often... it's hilarious. When they try to prove that they supposedly know that their "error messages" are coming from my computer by telling me that they have my computer's CLSID, I tell them what I know about what a CLSID actually is and it
I'm genuinely curious? (Score:2)
Who the fuck ANSWERS these calls? Much less, who ACTUALLY GIVES THEM $$ in enough numbers to justify the effort/expense?
I mean, we've *always* hung up on them instantly.
This isn't untrue. (Score:2)
This sort of thing, to me, is just another sign of the times being tough, people being desperate for money, and unscupulous/criminal types will do whatever they think they can to squeeze money (or something they can sell) out of whoever
21 Immigrants Paid $2.5 Million? (Score:2)
That's ~$120,000 per person? I think the scammers found their niche market!
``Hi... This is Elizabeth from Resort Rewa...'' (Score:2)
I've gotten so many of these that I don't even have to hear that much of the spiel before I've launched my smartphone's call blocker and am entering the number into the backlist. These calls always come from my area code and my exchange followed by four random digits. I figure there's no point in reporting these calls; the phone carriers don't care.
Re:They get into the US phone system somehow... (Score:4, Informative)
Because VoIP trunking can go anywhere and still lead to an endpoint in the US. It's just digital data that can be routed. The Caller ID spoofing for people who have no ownership of the number they're using should be much easier to shut down, and that would make it easier to block numbers of repeat offenders.
Re:They get into the US phone system somehow... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a solution:
In order to transmit a caller id # which is different than the originating number, you must own that caller id number you are transmitting, or else have a signed delegation from the owner which you provide the phone company with.
Otherwise, if ANI number doesn't equal caller ID number, ANI number is substituted for caller ID number so that it's visible to recipients. Later, once the kinks of that are worked out, start outright blocking the call if ownership doesn't provably match.
Voip or other phone companies which violate the rules lose the ability to interconnect with those who enforce them.
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That would still shut down inbound calls on Google Voice, for the most part. When they receive a call at your "one" number, they place an outbound call to your private number and spoof the Caller ID of the original caller. Neither you nor Google own that spoofed number. On the other hand, you do own the receiving number in that case, so maybe that could still be allowed.
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It's not Google's problem. It's my problem. But they are one of many providers doing something similar.
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Not if you receive the call on Hangouts. It completes as VoIP to wherever you are running the application. Why would you want to forward instead of using the VoIP directly?
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Because I'm not at my computer or not at home? Data is not as cheap as plan minutes on a cheap cell plan. Google also forwards to my home VoIP number via the PSTN. And I can use that even if I'm away from my computer and my cell phone is charging.
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If you can register a domain and point it to a host, I don't see why there couldn't also be a way to register your phone number and indicate that Google Voice is managing it for you.
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Inbound calls spoof the caller's number when the system is dialing out to you. Registering your own number would not have any effect.
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As mentioned, this is solved in two ways:
1. As you stated, just make an exception for the owner of the destination number to be able to opt-in.
2. As someone else already mentioned below, this would be enforced at the origin telecom company, so they know who owns it. What the destination telecom company does wouldn't matter to the scheme, as long as their customer getting the call is fine with it.
Re: They get into the US phone system somehow... (Score:1, Insightful)
Because it will cut into all the telcom company's profit margin to implement technical solutions, so they don't want to do anything about it.
Re:They get into the US phone system somehow... (Score:4, Insightful)
We go after the providers as it is literally the only way it can be done.
But we won't, what ever law they pass this time will be full of loopholes allowing for continued abuse.
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We go after the providers as it is literally the only way it can be done.
I'm perfectly willing to accept the collateral damage from drone strikes on this one.
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Because that would disrupt all the legitimate VOIP operators and so forth that also need access to the phone system.
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Because that would disrupt all the legitimate VOIP operators and so forth that also need access to the phone system.
Why would a legitimate VOIP operator need to spoof a caller ID to make it appear to come from a number that they do not own or control?
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Is it an expected call, an immediate family member, or someone currently caring for an immediate family member?
Yes: Answer it
No: Reject it
If it was from work I'll listen to the voice mail.
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The robots that call me almost always leave voicemail, which in itself is a recording. Usually it's for a "great rate" on credit, or new windows, or something so stupid I can't believe they can actually get any business like this. They must be interesting someone out there in their services to be able to keep going.
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