Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I stop receiving spam phone calls?

72 pointsraymondgh75 comments

Hi HN!

I get between 2-5 spam phone calls every day. Often, the callers' numbers have the same area code as my own number. I believe the calls are automated there are many identical messages and on the occasion that I do answer, it's usually a recording.

I've blocked dozens of phone numbers but the calls and voicemails don't stop. I keep my phone perpetually on "Do Not Disturb" excepting calls from favorites and repeat callers. Sometimes I pick up the phone and repeat "Put me on your do-not-call list" a couple times. Sometimes the recording says to press a number to stop receiving calls, and I do that as well. I've also added my number to https://www.donotcall.gov/

Nothing seems to do the trick. It's really annoying and time-consuming to check my voicemails for real messages. The red notification badge is no longer a useful way to know if I've missed a call from someone I care about.

I don't want to get a new phone number either, and I don't know if that would even solve the issue.

What can I do?

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Founder of Nomorobo here. We put a stop to all of those annoying robocalls, telemarketers, and spam/scam calls and texts. It's about the only thing that works nowadays.

It's not your imagination - these types of calls are out of control. According to our data, 40% of all calls made in the US are illegal, unwanted spam/scam robocalls. And those "neighbor" spoofed calls (same area code and extension) are especially prevalent now. Beginning last summer, they started to account for ~20% of all robocalls. Before that they were only about 2% of all robocall volume.

The Do Not Call list is almost completely ineffective against these types of calls. It was created 15+ years ago to stop legitimate companies from telemarketing. But today's robocallers are criminals that don't really care about the law. They have one goal - scam people and take their money.

Manually blocking calls will also get you nowhere. And please, for the love of god, don't press a number to get on their alleged "do-not-call" list. That will guarantee that you will get even more robocalls - they know you're a live number now.

On the technical side, our landline service (free) is powered by Twilio and our mobile product is available in both app stores (14 day free trial, $2 bucks a month after that). We're a PHP/Laravel shop and our team is completely remote.

To do the actual detection, our algorithm analyzes over 70M calls per month and adds over 1,300 new numbers to the blacklist every day. We built the world's largest commercial telephony honeypot (300k+ lines) and can detect new attacks within minutes of them starting (even with spoofed numbers). Just last month, Nomorobo stopped over 27 million from reaching people's phones.

I'm happy to answer any other questions that you have about robocalls. I'm kind of the "robocall guy". I won the FTC Robocall challenge back in 2013 and grew Nomorobo to be the leading robocall blocker on the market. I've even testified in front of the US Senate about the robocall epidemic.

T-Mobile offers a spam blocking service that stops calls from reaching my phone, because of that there's no way for me to gauge just how many are being blocked. What is your take on network level spam filtering?

You're blocking 1300 numbers a day. I assume the spammers rotate numbers, so if someone gets a recycled number that was on your list, what happens?

These spammers get connected to the telephone system somehow. Is there nothing that can be done to force the telecom providers to more carefully check the companies they lease mass lines to?

I tried your service before, but the calls spoofed as if they come from my area code and exchange were never blocked. Why is that?

Spam calls infuriate me like little else. I'm glad you're working to stop them but it seems to be something that will require a larger industry and/or government intervention.

Thanks for sharing any insight you have!

T-Mobile actually uses Hiya for that. Samsung uses Hiya as well for their equivalent service.

You could just download the app directly

Actually, First Orion/PrivacyStar powers the T-Mobile spam product. Samsung does partner with Hiya, though.

The spammers rotate through new numbers every few hours. We're actually adding 1,300 new numbers per day and the full blacklist is over 700k entries.

As for getting connected to the phone system - Yeah, they have to jump on the phone network somewhere and, in theory, the best way to stop these guys would be to at the ingress point.

The problem is that the phone system is built for interconnection. Even just one bad actor letting the traffic on spoils the system. Layer on top of that the way the network routes calls through multiple hops through multiple carriers and tracking the calls back to the source is nearly impossible. Throw in common carrier regulations (you can't just willy nilly block calls coming over the network) and it amps up even more. Finally, allow all this to be done for fractions of pennies and you get the perfect storm for robocalls.

As for the neighbor spoofed calls, make sure that you enter your phone number in Nomorobo so that we can make sure we protect the correct number block ([Area Code]-[Exchange]-[0000-9999]). In our initial release, we were only able to identify these calls but not block them. It had to do with blocking calls from families with sequential phone numbers. But, in our last release, if you give the app contact access, we can now scrub those numbers and fully block the neighbor spoofed calls.

It's been a bit of a balancing act between being privacy conscious (not needing your email/phone number/invasive contact access) and getting the job done. The balance that we've struck is this - you don't have to give us any of that and you'll get really good protection. But, if you try out the service and start to trust us more, we can do an even better job.

And finally, yes - it's going to take a lot of effort to tackle this problem. While Nomorobo isn't perfect - admittedly, the sim ring landline version is just a crazy hack that the carriers can't stop - the past 4 years have seen some great progress in the fight.

As more and more people become aware of robocall blockers and we show that it's actually a very safe way to protect people, only then will the larger industry come along (kicking and screaming the entire way).

I’ve been a nomorobo customer for a long time, and I’ve had my full phone number entered in the system from day one. And you’ve had access to my contacts, too.

However, I still get the neighbor scam calls, and it’s one of the most annoying things I deal with on a daily basis.

I’ve been thinking that I should write my own whitelist-only call screening app on top of twilight, and maybe becoming one of your biggest competitors.

That is, unless you want to take this idea and implement it yourselves, and saving me the trouble. ;)

Neat!

There's a business called Pindrop that conduct an analysis of audio data to guess where a call is originating from. The idea being, if a call originates from somewhere like India it'll take roughly a certain route that will produce certain audible artifacts on the line.

They also score a bunch of other stuff. I'd recommend reading the patents their CEO filed if you're interested. It's interesting.

I wondered if you could share, roughly, what your algorithm is doing? Are you also analyzing audio data?

Yeah, those guys are great. I run into them at security conferences all the time. Their tech is mainly aimed at the financial sector to make sure the person calling in is who they say they are.

In our case, we don't/can't analyze the audio stream of consumer calls. We can only work with the meta data of the call.

Our algo comes down pretty hard and fast on calls that come into our honeypot. These numbers have been out of service for years and no one should be calling them. Since these phone lines belong to us, we can do anything we want with them - there's no privacy concerns like there would be with consumer calls.

We answer, record, transcribe, analyze, and classify almost 10k calls per hour coming into our honeypot. Check out https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup. There's been a ton of health insurance scams running this week but the scam du jour changes every day.

When we analyze the call data coming into consumer lines, we have to be a little less aggressive so that we don't accidentally block schools, police, doctors, pharmacies.

The only thing left for humans is to help correct the decisions the algo makes. Sometimes it misses robocalls and sometimes it stops things it shouldn't. People just report them through our app and website.

For historic analysis, we also ingest the FTC & FCC robocall complaint data sources. But it's not really a great data source for the real-time detection algo - It's just too slow to be actionable.

You really have to be detecting robocalls at the moment they come in to have a successful blocking product.

I noticed that under "new robocall recordings" the recordings are all from October 25, 2017. Not sure if this is a bug or you stopped updating them on that date or something.

Right now, we only grab one recording per phone number so that's the date that we recorded it.

But, the response to our sampling system has been really strong so we're expanding that to grab one recording per day per number. That way you can also go back in time and see the different scams that have been sent from the same number.

We're also building some deeper analytics so that you can see call volume by robocaller and graphs that show the changes over time.

I am confused. It is titled as "New robocaller recordings". The newest ones under that section are from October 25, 2017. However, the "Most active robocallers (Past 24 hours)" has records from later than October 25, 2017.

Good catch. I think I know what’s going on and what needs to get fixed. Thanks!

Thanks for catching that one. It's been fixed now.

Sounds interesting. I was hoping to try it out but your app isn't in the Canadian Android app store.

We don’t have enough data to protect Canada yet but we’re working on it. Do you get robocalls from US area codes too?

Very rarely, generally they spoof/set their caller ID to a legitimate number with the same area code and exchange as my own.

No questions, just a thanks for making Nomorobo.

What information from potential users do you ask for?... to setup NoMoRobo on landlines.

I had the same problem a few months ago before I set up an automated virtual assistant to pre-screen calls[1]. It works with my existing phone number by forwarding all inbound calls to a small Linode box which plays an audio prompt and listens for specific keywords. (Whitelisted numbers get patched through immediately.)

Since I made that post, the system has filtered 100% of the spammers and 0% of my actual contacts. I think the non-bot spammers started to get sick of hearing my audio prompt because the number of spam calls that come in has dropped dramatically.

[1] https://andrewchidden.com/defeating-spam-callers-with-speech...

Are you able to measure which cold calls are filtered, that you would otherwise like to hear?

For example... A call from a garage to say your car is ready to be picked up, or perhaps some kind of emergency service? I imagine their calls would start with similar wording to sales calls. "Hello, can I speak to so and so?"

Good question! I set my prompt to verify that they at least know my first or last name, so it’s pretty good at reducing false positives. For calls that do get filtered, I keep the recorded audio snippets used for keyword extraction (originally used for debugging). If I had more time, I’d implement sending a muted/non-ringing push notification whenever a call gets filtered with an option to play back the recorded audio snippets from that session.

Impressive integration experiment! Is your phone line busy during call forwarding? Would it possible to package all this in mobile app instead? There is some Speech API available and maybe call control/recording too, but I am not sure - not an IOS dev.

Thanks! I think Google Voice has two lines in, so it’d return a busy tone when I’m in an active call with someone (one line for each person to do the call merging).

>Would it possible to package all this in mobile app instead?

Unfortunately the limiting factor would be background processing here; iOS isn’t permissive enough to really replace the server. I think it might be possible by using a background service on Android though.

Track them down and sue them in small claims court. I’ve collected nearly $10,000 doing this.

Short story: calling your cell phone with automated dialing equipment and automated messaging (“press 1 to talk to someone”) is illegal per the TCPA. I’m not a lawyer but it’s fun to be amateur attorney for a day. Definitely a time suck though...

How do you figure out who they are?

How did you track them?

Have you perhaps written about your experience doing this? I'd love to read about it.

Here's a presentation I found to get you started:

https://s.ai/presentations/tcpa.pdf

Why would anyone ever do this from within the US? I guess I assumed all scammers would be on international VoIP.

The company is called NobelBiz and they call the technology LocalTouch which they've patented and claim to be the industry's only legal "solution" to the TCPA.

Here's their page detailing how they rotate through buckets of local numbers to present a new one on each attempt: http://www.nobelbiz.com/solutions/telco-services/localtouch-...

I got to meet these shitlords not too long ago and one them explained how the local calls were great for collection agencies since the poor bastards thought the agency was just down the street. They're also regularly in court defending their patent (google for "NobelBiz v."). So you could call them to report the spammer, they might be able to add your number to their blocklist, or in the case the number isn't operated by one of their customers then they should be interested as it would indicate another company to sue.

I don't receive any spam call at all, but many scam calls.

I once got an Indian Dell "virus" guy to be mad at me after 1+ hour when I got him to my VMWare Windows XP with a super inappropriate wallpaper -- before that I just told him to hold because I need to get my laptop from another building, need to poop, asking stupid questions, etc, and went back to work and pick up the phone after 25-30 minutes as a break. But the lower-tier guys often don't understand many references and attempts that you trick them, so it's not as fun as you thought. After a while, I got kinda bored, because they actually fell for my bait too easily. Tier-1 guys are garbage, if you want to have fun you have to bait them to give you tier-2.

I got a fun call last time.

I have been receiving calls from the FBI lately. A guy with Indian accent was demanding to speak to Mister so-and-so, and I was teasing him (pretending to be dumb, can't hear, fart, etc) to the point he got mad.

Then I was just listening to him going at me. After a while trying to eff my mom, he actually transferred me to another guy (tier-2) who speaks really good English. The conversation went something like this:

- Well, see, I know too well you're not FBI. What you're gonna do?

- Sorry man, I was just doing my job.

- I know I can't know where you're calling from. So tell me, your English is good, and you seem pretty calm and collected, why do you have to stay up at 12 AM to do this shitty job?

- No, I'm not in India. I'm in Texas.

- For real?

- Yeah, I'm a student. Someone asked me if I want to make some extra bucks over the break. It pays pretty well, better than normal jobs in here.

- Oh, interesting.

- Do you want to do it too? I can refer you.

- No thanks, I have a job that pays me OK, but good luck with your ''''job.''''

- OK, nice talking to you.

- Nice talking to you.

Take it for what it's worth, but that seems to be the most successful scam call that I have ever received. I actually don't receive any more calls after that.

Those guys get seriously ticked off when you string them along long enough... nice job befriending that guy. Next time accept his offer to get an introduction - great intel to identify the offending party and sue them for TCPA violations.

Have you tried Google Voice? It has this call screening feature that requires the person calling you to give their name before it forwards the call to you like a secretary. This will block the recorded calls and you can choose to skip the screening for your friends and family.

It started happening to me when I registered a domain name and made my phone number available via whois lookup. The same day I got an Indian company offering me web services for the new domain. Then it escalated and every dodgy Indian web company started calling me. I managed to change the details and update the phone number to a local law enforcement agency's number, but I guess the number was online for long enough to spread through some kind of Indian scammer network. I started getting calls offering me to remortgage my home even if I don't have a mortgage, pretend calls from the taxation office (in American accent even though I'm not in the US) and a million other things like SEO services etc. A lot of the times they'll route calls through a local VOIP number and even have a local mobile number popup in my screen. They could totally scam me if it wasn't for the Indian accent that gives it away.

Answer the phone when they call and conference in the Jolly Roger telephone bot http://www.jollyrogertelco.com

The bot will waste the telemarketers time, which is the most expensive thing that these companies are paying for. Do this enough times and the calls drop off rapidly.

We (Nomorobo) worked with Jolly Roger this holiday season and built SantaBots. Check out all the recordings at www.DoNotCallChristmas.com

Make sure your number isn’t listed on the Whois information for any domains you own.

I had the same types of calls. Changed the phone number on my domains to an old number of mine and the spam calls stopped a few weeks later.

T-Mobile claims to block scam calls now. I just turned it on a few days ago, so it’s too soon to tell, but I haven’t gotten any unwanted calls, where I usually get at least one a day. https://explore.t-mobile.com/callprotection

From what I’ve read, without trying it, nomorobo seems to be recommended. I was going to give it a whirl before I found t-mo will blocks the calls now.

I'd suggest turning on Scam ID for a bit before turning on Scam Block. It still rings, but has a "Scam Likely" caller id name.

So far it's had three false positives: the robocalls from my kid's school related to snow days and bus delays, the reminder calls from my doctor, and a fraud alert from Capital One to confirm or deny a flagged charge.

I only caught those ones because the numbers were already saved in my phone as contacts. I would have never even known about these call attempts with the Block on, whereas with Scam ID they have the option to leave a voicemail when I deny the call, plus I can look up the number later if I feel like it.

A good suggestion; as a counter-anecdote, I don’t recall anything that Scam ID flagged that I cared about (they didn’t leave voicemail, at least), and I’ve had that on since they implemented it. Don’t have kids in school, but doctor/dentist calls get through. But your experience says an experiment is in order first.

Blocking is pointless, the spam origination systems seem to be able to use multiple numbers on a rolling basis. I guess iPhone IOS added a incoming call filter api. I had been receiving so many calls on my cell that I tried some filtering apps. The HiYa app I've currently settled at seems to identify most incoming spam numbers and you can decline the calls. I think the volume of my spam calls as gone down too.

Make note of the telephone number and add it to the Project Mayhem page. This effort uses code sent from VOIP phones to flood these numbers: https://www.patreon.com/ProjectMayhem

How do you add something to a patreon page??

Looks like you can create an account on the website or log in with a Facebook account.

Or not. Many of those calls use spoofed caller IDs. Not only are you not punishing the spammer, you're adding the number of a random person who have no idea this happened.

Sorry I didn't spell out everything for you. You should also feel free to do some investigating of your own, for example, call the number that appears on your caller ID. Depending upon who answers the call you may or may not choose to proceed with punishing the spammer. BTW feel free to propose a better idea if you actually have one...

I didn't say that for you. I did it for the people who are not aware of this issue. Are you upset that I gave people more information, so they don't try to block legitimate callers?

On the contrary, I'm "upset" that you cant offer those poor people a better solution.

This guy had the right idea: 'How one man turns annoying cold calls into cash' (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23869462) and 'Cold-call victim gets his own back' (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/aug/29/cold-call-vict...).

It depends on your situation, but it may be possible to turn lemons into sparkly lemonade!

I think the best way to avoid them is by not using any landlines, but I believe it couldn't be a right option for you. I think ignoring calls from unfamiliar numbers is the only thing that we could do, and it saves your time. I just read at http://www.whycall.me/news/consumer-wins-massive-229500-robo... about suing telemarketers. It might works for you if you are dealing with legit telemarketers.

I used to get tons of these calls in the US maybe 10 a week.

Not sure if it works but I tried to waste as many minutes as I can. I pick up every number. If I know it's a robocall, I leave phone on my desk without saying anything until they hang up. Maybe they realize you're a dead end and stop calling.

Another way I look at it, is how can I develop my social skills? I might string them along, make up a story. Make them so angry or become friends. You can learn how you perform in these situations. :)

This problem would stop instantly if you could press a button during a call and have 25 cents added to the caller's phone bill and perhaps get a 25 cent credit on your own bill. Anyone know why this rather obvious solution hasn't been implemented?

At a minimum, one could switch cell phone billing so that only the caller pays, not the recipient.

Because there are people who would press that button on non-spam calls as well. And then litigation hell will break loose.

Really? You'd press the button when your friends call?

Or, if you phoned a store to ask whether they stocked an item you want to buy, do you think the store would press the button?

At any rate, people already (often) pay to make phone calls. By dealing a number, you're implicitly agreeing to pay. Just think of it as a charge (often waived) for the time of the person answering it.

People could submit their phone number anywhere that collects leads (be it dentists, charities, or SaaS companies), wait for a call, and then press the button to get the money.

Maybe. And how much money do you think you'd loose each year due to such scams? Maybe 50 cents?

> At a minimum, one could switch cell phone billing so that only the caller pays, not the recipient.

Are there any countries besides the US that charge the callee? It's completely unheard of in Europe.

I did spend some time in the US about ten years ago, and I do remember being very surprised at being charged for calls received, and even for texts received, although you have no influence on accepting them! Such a weird system.

What if you use your mobile phone to receive a million texts per day and the sender uses a different service provider. Your service provider has to pay for all that data moving through its network one way or another...

I don't know exactly how inter-provider billing works, but I assume the sender's network pays the receiving network. The sender caused the traffic, why would anyone else pay for it?

http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/

Answering their calls make them more likely to call you the future. I don't answer any calls I don't recognize.

For one data point, spam calls pretty much stopped when I switched over to Project Fi for my carrier.

Outside of that, "Do Not Disturb" 24/7, whitelist all your contacts, change your voicemail message to "I don't check my voicemail because it's constantly spam, text me", and ignore your voicemail.

https://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/540515367/familiar-looking-nu...

I get a lot of these calls, and I figured out the pattern very quickly. Since I don't happen to know anyone with the same areacode/prefix as my cellphone, I just let all these calls go to voicemail, and none of them ever leave a message. (My area code is an overlay area code that has mostly mobile numbers.)

I do too! It's very frustrating, to the point that I've considered just getting a new phone number. The problem being I've had this number for >10 years and like the idea of an old high school friend being able to reach me without Facebook. Someone online suggested I make a complaint to the FCC but it went nowhere. I never pick up anymore but it's still annoying.

I wouldn't expect that getting a new phone number would help. I'm guessing that these scammers sequentially call all the phone numbers in an area code rather than targeting specific individuals. (If they were targeting me, they'd probably stop wasting their time after the hundredth time I didn't answer their call.)

I don't know how to stop it, but I think someone should go to jail for doing this.

Try nomorobo

Not a great solution for bulk calls but you could always divert to Lenny - https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

You may not be able to stop them, but you can certainly annoy them to all hell: http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/

Sometimes, it's repeated calls from the same number. In those cases, both Android and IOS have some solution to block it. If it's truly random incoming numbers, then, yeah, you're stuck.

I get two or three calls a week where they hang up as soon as I make a sound, even a little clapping will do. If you call them back it is of course "my bank" with urgent info about my account.

Scam robocalls happen to me almost daily. I've tried blocking one of the numbers, but the calls from that number still ring on my phone. The calls appear to be using bandwidth.com's API.

Same issue here. Unless I am expecting a call I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb. My friends and family know how to reach me.

easy, tell them you are under 18, they wont call again

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