Author Topic: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?  (Read 929 times)

JGS1980

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Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« on: February 20, 2023, 01:55:43 PM »
Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?

I'm very curious as to why we have not been able to eliminate them in the USA.

Have other countries found a way to curtail these daily annoyances?

I feel like so much time is wasted (by everyone) filtering out and NOT answering these calls. Meanwhile a lot of important calls go straight to voicemail which also leads to wasted time. Billions of them per year lead to Billions x 5 seconds of wasted time per year. What a waste of our most precious resource...time!

Who here has specialized knowledge to explain why this plague exists? How to fix the problem?

JGS

GuitarStv

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Michael in ABQ

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2023, 02:03:10 PM »
Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?

I'm very curious as to why we have not been able to eliminate them in the USA.

Have other countries found a way to curtail these daily annoyances?

I feel like so much time is wasted (by everyone) filtering out and NOT answering these calls. Meanwhile a lot of important calls go straight to voicemail which also leads to wasted time. Billions of them per year lead to Billions x 5 seconds of wasted time per year. What a waste of our most precious resource...time!

Who here has specialized knowledge to explain why this plague exists? How to fix the problem?

JGS

I don't know the details, but I guarantee it comes down to profit and government regulations.

My understanding is that telecom companies make money for every call - real or spam. Even if it's a fraction of a cent someone is paying to use their infrastructure, so they don't have any incentive to stop it.

From a regulatory standpoint, there is probably a requirement that phone companies allow calls to go through and treat them all the same. The regulations are probably decades old and don't address modern innovations like VoIP or robocalls. Also, I'm pretty sure politicians have carved out exemptions for themselves so they can use robocalls to campaign.

markbrynn

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #3 on: February 20, 2023, 02:59:20 PM »
Spam calls exist where I live (in the Netherlands), but there are quite a few laws restricting them. And I receive almost zero spams calls myself. So, largely it is the will of your people/government to do something about it.

Daley

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #4 on: February 20, 2023, 03:01:53 PM »
Because the Supreme Court said you can't.

To be fair, the TCPA was a pretty garbage law to begin with that flooded the courts with frivolous lawsuits, and did nothing to actually prevent the real robocallers, because none of the robocallers are domestic in the first place anymore. Here's an old TCPAland post talking about the nature of both STIR/SHAKEN, most of the garbage legislation attached to it, and how it related to the TCPA at the time (2019).

The only good thing that came out of the TRACED Act was SHAKEN, and finally giving the authority that the FCC needed to exercise authentication channels for the PSTN. Unfortunately, that still does nothing to combat robocallers either, because it only deals with spoofing, which actually has legitimate usage in the telecom industry. Now the robocallers are buying up legitimate numbers, authenticating the CID number, and still blasting stuff out, or turning to text messaging.

And again, there's no legislative teeth to deal with this because the TCPA only deals with domestic business, and most frequently only got exercised in frivolous lawsuits against small legitimate domestic businesses. And honestly, the large corporations have already found ways around that as well, by burying automatic opt-in third-party PPI sharing clauses with a lot of online account creation. State Farm has literally figured out a way to create such a massive contact database through this method and other third party businesses that you have to manually opt-out on their own site just to get them to legally stop calling you.

The problem is, it's ultimately an arms race. Laws like the TCPA have teeth, but no reach. Technologies like STIR/SHAKEN have ways of increasing the cost to make these calls, but there's still ways around that. And the more "legitimate" the calls on the network, the harder to block. Ultimately, this is an international problem, with national solutions and a technical arms race on a nearly 150 year old global network that requires interoperability just to function as intended.

There's a decent article on Vox that kind of touches on some of this.

I will close this on an interesting personal note, however. The common recommended logic is to never answer the robocalls out of fear of increasing them. I did that for years with no abate in calls. Then, one day a couple years ago, I decided to not only pick up the phone, but listen to the extended car warranty sales pitch. My original thought was that I'd try to waste time of a human, but near the end of the pitch, they offered an opt-out by just pressing one of the number buttons on the phone (I can't remember which one)... and if you can believe it, the robocalls stopped. They actually respected the opt-out. And it's worked on both cellphones.

dang1

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #5 on: February 20, 2023, 04:41:24 PM »
I'd rather not use voice calls: I give out my Google Voice number, never my Verizon number. All calls go to voicemail (Do Not Disturb), which gets transcribed and I viewed as text

If I can't connect with a business through the internet: website contact form, a messaging platform- Facebook Messenger primarily, etc., I would think- well, if they aren't accessible to their customers in that even basic way, then they'll be a pain to deal with. I'd rather not deal with that business.

I've used 0 minutes of my cell plan for months now, 26 GB data last cycle

TreeLeaf

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #6 on: February 20, 2023, 06:46:39 PM »
I give out my google voice number to everyone.

If someone is a friend/family/school/place I regularly do business with such as dentist office, dr I have their number in my contact list and see their name come up and answer the phone.

For everyone else - I never answer the phone. It goes to voicemail. If it is important they will leave a message.


FINate

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #7 on: February 20, 2023, 07:14:30 PM »
My Android phone does a pretty decent job blocking spam calls, get maybe one per week: https://www.androidpolice.com/how-to-block-spam-calls-android/

chemistk

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #8 on: February 21, 2023, 05:40:35 AM »
JGS - i completely agree, but Daley's right, most of these are not even Domestic.

I don't turn on spam filtering because I have my desk phone forwarded to my personal cell phone, for....reasons. At least 10% of the business calls I receive do end up getting flagged as 'Suspected Spam' - so these would go completely unaddressed which isn't good.

I've noticed, however, that ever since I started to use Google's call screening feature, the number of spam calls I receive on a weekly basis has dropped quite a bit.

Alas, where the voice calls are falling off, the spam text messages from crap like"4aDEcv45tgYHKxx78@amazon-notifs.io" have increased to about once per day. How those aren't immediately flagged as spam is beyond me.

jrhampt

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #9 on: February 21, 2023, 07:23:41 AM »
If I get a spam call or text, I just block the number.  This eventually seems to cut down on them.

Daley

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Re: Why Can't Society Eliminate Spam Calls?
« Reply #10 on: February 21, 2023, 07:44:10 AM »
At least 10% of the business calls I receive do end up getting flagged as 'Suspected Spam' - so these would go completely unaddressed which isn't good.
[snip]
Alas, where the voice calls are falling off, the spam text messages from crap like"4aDEcv45tgYHKxx78@amazon-notifs.io" have increased to about once per day. How those aren't immediately flagged as spam is beyond me.

Yup, that's part of the problem with SHAKEN. Like I said, there's legitimate usage for Caller ID spoofing. It's a feature for larger PBXes with places like hospitals and call centers, where a central number is preferred for call-in as opposed to providing the direct lines to people... and I've seen and used it in smaller business settings as well, where people don't want to hand out their cellphone number, but need to call others from the "business" number via VOIP. All STIR/SHAKEN has effectively done is flag legitimate CID spoofing from legitimate businesses as "suspected spam callers" while doing little to curb and flag the actual robocallers.

The TRACED Act legislation, like the TCPA, although intended to be good natured as it was, was technologically clueless and informed by telecom industry lobbyists who wanted to pass the buck on responsibility because our legislators are professional politicians now, and have little to no real world experience with the very subjects they're writing law about. (This is why any day that this sort of topic goes by, that I don't deeply miss Al Franken in the Senate. He was the first person on Capital Hill that I remember in my lifetime, that actually had the knowledge and teeth to push back against Silicon Valley; the Telecom, Cable, and Entertainment industries; and the deep pocket FCC muppets like Ajit Pai.)

Unfortunately, too, is the SMS problem. SMS has had email gateways for years, and most people don't actually know this. But again, the TCPA and TRACED have no teeth or penalties for the common carriers to be held accountable for not taking steps to mitigate this stuff, only the bad actors abusing the network... I mean, the telecoms get paid the same for call connection and termination and SMS relay and delivery. There's literally no incentive for the telecoms to fight against it, because stopping it takes money out of their pockets. They don't care if a significant portion of that money made is from illegitimate businesses abusing the network, 'cause money, baby! Gotta keep you shareholders happy with your 7% FIRE investment returns, because line must always go up. (Hello, unintended consequence! Funny running into you here.)
Spoiler: show
Maybe folks might be wise to keep this lesson in mind next time they complain about how hard it is to find quality made goods at an affordable price anymore, or the issues with planned obsolescence with technology and appliances, or SAAS models of software, while sitting on enough invested money to no longer work. But then, you got yours already, you'll just adapt and budget accordingly... and the prols can just eat cake. You've totally broken out of the consumer sukka cycle. Totally.

But, I digress. SMS spamming, and SMS/MMS email gateways. Long ago, it was decided that a useful feature would be to attach email gateways to the PSTN specifically for the new-fangled SMS technology on the cellular network. Like, back in the day, carriers like AT&T or Sprint had gone so far as to have a dedicated web page where you could type in the phone number you wanted to send a text message to, and send it! For free! (Suddenly, the old 25¢/SMS received or $10 SMS package add-on with cell phone bills makes even more sense for reasons to bill for a service specifically designed to utilize quiet chunks of unused airtime on the GSM signalling paths. Yup, they used what was effectively a free service to them to print money off of your usage.) By the way, those gateways still exist, and trivially cheaply sent email that rarely has to fight against SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication for delivery with spoofed headers are literally as far away from your phone as [yournumber]@[yourcarriersSMSgatewaydomain], or for those who can't visualize that, 2125551212@txt.att.net

But again, this is a useful feature with legitimate use cases. I used to use it back in the dumbphone days with email forwarding rules, and even used it with Grand Central and Google Voice. It's a legitimate feature, and it's worth keeping. It's also easily fixed to drastically cut back the sheer volume of these sorts of emails by implementing the industry standard at this point MX gateway SPF/DKIM/DMARC settings on their mail servers.

But will they do that? No, because TCPA and TRACED address the domestic abusers with fines, not the industry enabling these problems for failing to do anything about it because they're financially awarded for literally doing nothing about it themselves to prevent it. The less they do to combat this problem, the more money they make.

So, no. This problem isn't going away, unfortunately. Because money. Your misery is literally fueling your own retirement goals and index funds. Sorry to bear the bad news, please don't shoot the messenger.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2023, 07:49:35 AM by Daley »

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!