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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

I have a question, why are robocalls such a problem in the U.S.A.? As far as I know, they aren’t in Germany (or if they are, not on that level, I never got one).

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There are a lot of people living outside the USA who can speak English. Both legitimate and fraudulent English-language call centers are easier to set up internationally than German-language call centers. The robo part of the call can obviously be automated from anywhere but there are actual humans pretending to be from "Apple Support" when a target responds.

That raises another question: are other Anglosphere countries flooded by scam calls like the USA?

Oddly, in Canada, many of the spam calls I receive aren't in English. (Mostly Mandarin, though Google indicates it's a problem in the US too: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/10/609117134/chinese-robocalls-b...)

Yep, I'm one of the people in the US that gets those. It's about an even split between those and calls about my bank account (for a bank I have no account at), with only a tiny number of others.

Canada definitely is. It is clustered, but there are days when there are a dozen scam calls (a recent one outright spoofs the governments phone number, and then calls you back with a spoofed police number).

I get some of it in Norway. English speaking call centers running scams. A lot of it comes from foreign numbers though, so it is easy enough to at least ignore.

Yeah, I get questionable foreign country numbers as well, but I never accept those.

They're rare in Australia (though I haven't had a fixed line for years now, so maybe mobile phones have a different targeting profile).

Interestingly, there's been an uptick lately but the recorded messages are all in Chinese.

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/bc8p2w/chinese_r...

So it’s possible to show a local number when the call is arriving from another part of the world? That seems strange or rather insane, but would explain how the problem happens ;)

Sometimes they show up spoofed to a local area code. Sometimes they show up as from the 800 area code, which is not specific to any geographical region in the United States and is also used by legitimate call centers. My bank's customer service number is an 800 number, for example.

I don't know if easily spoofable phone numbers are unique to the US. But even if they are not, international scam-calling operations are going to predominantly target English speakers since English offers lower language-understanding barriers and a lot of high income potential victims.

Yeah, but when the call is originating from outside the US? Why would that be allowed?

Do you know what an Indian call center is?

A huge amount of international phone traffic comes to the US every day

Hm, guess that would be the pro/con with us not being able to easily set up virtual numbers here. But otoh I wonder why the UK doesn’t seem to suffer in the same way. Same lack of easy virtual numbers?

I might be mistaken but are not mobile numbers in the UK in their special area code/exchange so calling them costs extra? Calling landlines does not seem to be profitable anymore (my home landline gets almost 0 calls now, my work phone gets maybe 3-4 calls a week) so the scammers only want to call mobile numbers and in the US it's not different from calling a landline while it might cost extra in the UK.

They'll buy tons of phone numbers from all over so they always have local numbers to call from. They just use VOIP software to route it to wherever the call center is located. As far as their provider is concerned, they're probably just a local business. Or, at most, a local number for a foreign company.

Phone numbers can be spoofed, anyway. If you call back a robocall spam number, you'll reach a very confused human. And I've received a bunch of robocalls from my own number.

As I said in another comment, why allow international numbers to spoof national numbers?

In the parent's description, it's not spoofing at all. They've purchased real american (local) phone numbers, and are routing calls through them through other means (like internet...). There's no telephone network level trickery or spoofing going on.

Not always. They will spoof legitimate numbers that they don't own. If you call them back you'll usually get some very confused person who just got a bunch of calls accusing them of making spam calls.

Ah. Any idea why it wouldn’t be a problem (from what I’ve heard) in the UK then?

I live in NZ and I've received maybe 1 or 2 in my lifetime. I'm not aware of any particular legal/technical measures in place here to stop them.

I'm in the US and have gotten a non-trivial percentage of spam calls in Spanish and Mandarin. I don't think it's just the language issue.

UK... no. Sometimes to landlines, rarely to mobiles. I have never personally got one.

It wasn't too much of a problem, but it has escalated quickly in the last couple of years, especially with people figuring out how to change or spoof CNAM data, which is what shows up on caller ID. For a while, they'd use numbers only a couple of digits off from yours, or have a set pattern (like add 4 to each of your last 3 digits). Now people don't answer local calls, so they've moved on to neighboring area codes.

I assume that some sort of software has hit the market automating the process, but I don't know.

So it’s purely the spoofing?

I looked at Wikipedia, and we have "CLIP" (Calling Line Identification Presentation) and "CLIP no screening" (essentially spoofed numbers). Spoofing a number that you don’t own the rights for is a crime.

So it looks like we have spoofing but only in a sane way, is the other kind of spoofing legal in the US? Or is there some other underlying problem?

No, there's an increase in not-spoofed (afaik) calls too. Plus some of the callers have figured out different tricks, like multiple brief calls to bypass do-not-disturb settings, or as an attempt to get the person to call back the caller ID number.

For me, at least, the calls also seem to be highly clustered, whether spoofed or not, for whatever reason.

As far as I know, spoofing is left to phone company policy, which says it needs to be an associated number, like the same company or same address. I think part of the problem is they don't have a way to actually verify this for out of system calls. And technology has made setting up spam lines on small remote systems feasable.

This is speculation, but I suspect it would be considered criminal fraud if it's done as part of a bigger crime. I don't think it's a crime in-and-of itself, but other than that, idk.

Could be a matter of population. 300 million residents vs 83 million means they have a larger pool of gullible people to target. I don’t mean that to sound mean, really. It’s just a fact that this is a numbers game for these scammers and they want to find the most number of people who will fall for what they’re peddling and milk them for everything they can.

Probably also much more likely to hit a boomer as an easier target than your average British citizen.

Because of the fines you can get it's not worth it.

As an American, I’m curious as well.

because old people are easily scammed

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