Texas man wins $75K suing telemarketers for illegal robo-calls | Hacker News Reader

Texas man wins $75K suing telemarketers for illegal robo-calls

chron.com

191 pointswalterbell52 comments

> "If people knew how to push back and started doing so, we could make this kind of endless spam unaffordable for the people who do it," Graham told Doost. "The hope is that there's enough of us who stand up, start pushing back, that it becomes more expensive for companies to negligently hire these telemarketers and participate in these telemarketing practices."

Is there a tutorial with templates for suing robocalls?

There was a parking ticket chatbot which expanded into other template-driven legal interactions, https://donotpay.com/. Looks like they have workflows for robocalls, including a honeypot virtual credit card number, https://donotpay.com/learn/robocalls-cash/ & https://donotpay.com/learn/robocall-revenge/

It's not obvious from their website if they still offer free services, maybe we need OSS templates that can be improved over time. There's an OSS framework for generating legal documents from a template and interactive interview.

https://docassemble.org & https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble

I'd like to know this, too. They spoof caller id. When you try to ask them about anything that could be used against them, they hang up. I'd seriously like to know how he did this.

Or one could just change the phone system so if you press "5" during a call, the caller gets charged 25 cents (going either to you, the phone company, or charity, it matters little). Phone spam would stop instantly.

It would require some technical changes, but nothing impossible.

Then phone spam would be replaced by fraud, similar to what already happens with premium number fraud: https://www.twilio.com/learn/voice-and-video/toll-fraud

A bot tricks a voice service to call them, then rakes in fees.

To be vulnerable to the 25 cent charge, you have to make a phone call. Why is anyone setting up a bot to make huge number of phone calls? The phone system is meant for people to make phone calls to other people.

For types of 2FA, sadly. AWS also does it to verify your phone number when you create an account.

So the worry is that some fraudster would set up numerous AWS accounts with a number for 2FA which AWS would call, and then they'd ding them for the 25 cent charge?

If actually a problem, having the charge go to charity rather than the recipient would eliminate any monetary incentive. I suppose one is left with someone who has a grudge against AWS trying to bankrupt them 25 cents at a time...

2600 magazine published a how-to but as telemarketers started to switch numbers every call afterwards so it's more difficult to sue.

I think there are many middle-men involved in these robocalls. The pattern I’ve seen personally is:

1. Offshore screeners asking basic information to pre-qualify the called party

2. Commission sales people adept at identifying actually interested people vs people just trying to waste their time

For some companies it stops there as they try to close their offer (ex: extended car warranty) with you directly but for others they seem to then sell the lead to:

3. Third parties that buy the leads

Impossible going after #1. Slim chances going after #2. I think the best bet is to go after #3. I actually feigned interest long enough with one to get to a local Allstate insurance agent. I explained the leads she was paying for were contributing to the 20+ spam calls I get per day.

She didn’t care. She said the leads the company provided were good so she was going to keep buying them. I think that’s the person to go after. According to the law, they’re as guilty as anyone else in the chain.

Also, semi-legitimate companies have affiliate sales programs. So the person making the call may be removed from the company ultimately offering the service. And you'll never find out who they are.

I see that some of this hinges on the federal Do Not Call list. I wish you could do the same for political spam. I want to vote in primaries, and I want to not get spammed with “vote for X” all the time. But as far as I can tell that’s not possible anymore since I stupidly gave my phone number when registering to vote.

So remove your number from your voter registration.

It's probably in a database somewhere. Have you ever tried to remove or change something in a database you don't have access to?

Do you have any realistic, actionable resources of how to do this effectively in real life?

My state doesn’t collect phone number with voter registration. But if it did, I assume that I would need to do the same thing that I do if I want to change my location, name, or registered party. To do that, I just go to my state’s voter registration site (find it at https://vote.gov/), click “edit voter registration”, provide some information about myself to identify me (name, DOB, zip code), then edit the thing I want to change and submit.

It’s a trivial process assuming your state lets you do it. If it doesn’t though, I would first contact the state office that manages it (the Secretary of State in my state) and ask them to remove it. It’s their job to help people do bureaucratic steps like this.

My state (NJ) doesn’t seem to collect phone number, and either way does not seem to allow one to update their registration record.

That doesn’t stop political parties from blowing up my SMS inbox with daily garbage during election season.

Even if your state allows this edit, why would anyone believe that these scum would respect your wishes and stop spamming the old number?

Do you ever reply with the word STOP?

I am finding it hard to believe that you are getting so much even during election season.

How many candidates could possibly be running in your district? You got Congress, Senate, Presidential and possibly low level positions (typically most of those are so unorganized/poor that they usually don't even have a website, just a facebook post).

A candidate has to pay money to acquire a list of contacts from their party. Most smaller upstart campaigns are operating on almost no money. (For example AOC had a ~300k budget her first run vs her opponents 3 million. Most of that 300k arrived in the last month or so after she started getting momentum in activist circles). Most candidates are operating on FAR less than that throughout the whole campaign.

So I was a volunteer on multiple campaigns (some in NJ). The participation rate in primaries before texting was abysmal (like upper single digits) texting and other GOTV efforts have brought up the rate to double digits (12-15%). Thats enough to swing some elections but it is still terrible participation.

All this crap is a result of people not caring whatsoever who gets elected. Something has to be done to try and enact change in this damn country. If you really hate it then remove your party registration/don't donate. Im a registered Democrat and have never once received Republican inquiries and for Democrats reaching out, texting STOP reduces the rate until I receive at most one or two new inquiry per election cycle(essentially 0).

Honestly, no, I haven't tried "STOP" out of fear that any response will be taken as a confirmation that a human reads the messages, worsening the spam. That's what happens w/ email and phone spam and its impossible to know if this one is different.

I don't think I registered a party affiliation, so it's not exactly like I opted in to this.

I appreciate that this is an effective way to get people to vote, and more voters is a good thing. I vote. Unfortunately it's hard to sympathize with a party when the message is delivered as an unsolicited faux-personalized distraction in a way that I can't easily block.

I suspect they will follow the STOP command to the dot since they are American and you know, traceable to an entity.

The law states that all robotexts are forbidden except for political messages that were sent manually.

[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/rules-political-campaign-calls-and-texts

I don't think any political entity wants to mess with the FCC.

>I don't think I registered a party affiliation, so it's not exactly like I opted in to this.

Possible that the list is derived from state databases indicating that you are registered to vote. This is separate from party databases. Just throwing out that possibility as well.

>I appreciate that this is an effective way to get people to vote, and more voters is a good thing. I vote. Unfortunately it's hard to sympathize with a party when the message is delivered as an unsolicited faux-personalized distraction in a way that I can't easily block.

Well now you know that they are being sent by a human being and how to stop them for a campaign so hopefully they won't be such a nuisance in the next election cycle.

Was wondering if I could get your opinion on some of these things.

I have been thinking of ways to increase voter turnout. Currently the three ways are

1. Go door to door and have a friendly chat with people. (The most effective way bar none) 2. Send out a handwritten letter to people across the country. This is something that seems to get less likely voters to be more likely to come out, a handwritten letter discussing how the election matters to the person writing it. I guess it humanizes the election and helps some people understand that these election helps/hurt their fellow citizens. (kind of effective) 3. Send out text message/phone call to get a conversation going. There is someone on the other side and you can text/converse with them. (least effective)

What do you think should be done to change the needle? Which ones of the above would you respond to positively?

Presumably a hybrid of #1, #2, #3 is most effective - there are audiences that will respond best to each. I assume the targeting data is out there.

Personally, though, I find the handwritten aspect of the letter, and the from a human being part of the text messages, to be the awkward parts. I've never met the folks texting me, yet they know my name and want to convince me of things. Its advertising, it feels pushy. Being channeled through a real human (even if they truly align with the message) doesn't change that. I might agree with the message, but I still don't want it to barge into my day like that.

>Personally, though, I find the handwritten aspect of the letter, and the from a human being part of the text messages, to be the awkward parts. I've never met the folks texting me, yet they know my name and want to convince me of things. Its advertising, it feels pushy. Being channeled through a real human (even if they truly align with the message) doesn't change that. I might agree with the message, but I still don't want it to barge into my day like that.

Honestly though then it seems like there is no effective way to really reach you then?

I like to think there aren't many of you out there since Americans are typically personable and are very open to talking. But the numbers show that participation is still very low...just not as low when no outreach was done. It is a depressing state of affairs.

Update the register with a fake number

Or just have public/private numbers. VOIP numbers are very cheap. I use jmp.chat for mine.

If you just need one number, Google Voice is free

This sounds like a joke but I can assure you it’s not.

I got on some list somehow, and like you started getting unwanted texts. I simply started replying with Eugene Debs quotes. They stopped, sometimes with an angry reply of some sort.

Might be worth a try.

Unfortunately, in San Francisco at least, there are so many groups who contact me that getting off of just one of their lists at a time doesn’t make any real difference.

I reply "buy bitcoin" and that seems to work too.

At this point I think the only reasonable thing to do is whitelist phone numbers that are allowed to actually call you. It sucks, and there are certainly legitimate services that will be more difficult because of it, but once again advertising and marketing has demonstrated that they are the reason we can't have nice things.

I take advantage of the dual-sim support on iPhone. I have one number I only give to family/friends and another for everyone else. I receive less than one spam call/text a month. If it ever gets bad I can just swap the second number out. Make sure to keep a list of all services you give the number to.

I just respond that I will not vote for them because they texted me. Often a real human responds very apologetic. Maybe it will affect their behavior.

They'll just send texts to other people on the list of people they're being paid their grocery money to text...

Many of them are unpaid volunteers.

Source: I volunteered for multiple campaigns and texted people.

I'm curious. What were the ratios of:

- people who ignored the text

- people who were annoyed

- people who changed who they were voting for after receiving a text

GOTV efforts increase turnout without a doubt.

The biggest problem is that people don't even know who is running in a given election season(obviously does not apply to presidential given they get untold amounts of free advertising on TV). Turnout is abysmal for anything other than Presidential, (even then there is like what ~40% of people not participating?)

Because of this, text campaigns help spread the word. Even more effective is actually knocking on peoples doors and having a friendly conversation with them. COVID minimized that last election but I suspect future campaigns will go back to that in favor of mass texting.

That sounds like dodging the question, to be honest.

He will almost certainly collect none of it which makes the process largely useless unfortunately. These are shell companies that will never pay up.

Shell companies cost money to fold up and move on. He’s probably just inside the cost of business side of thing right now.

Do they though? You want to stop using your LLC? My state’s advice is “don’t renew the registration next year.” It’s called “administrative dissoluton” and requires no money.

This isn't ubiquitous.

More than USD$75K? I find it hard to believe.

No one company got a 75k bill.

I know it’s a correct title but for some reason I don’t like “win” in cases like this.

It feels like it should be “criminals found guilty and must pay damages to state and victim”, e.g. put emphasis on the people committing crimes rather than the victim beating the criminals in court.

Sadly, the story here is that the existing law is rarely enforced, requiring outlier efforts to even acknowledge that a law was broken. Any 'win' here is against flawed systems.

You might be interested in what I like to think of as "the Karen manifesto" https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/2020-arbel.pdf

Fascinating article, thanks for the pointer.

> Sellers, however, do not remain passive. They have long tried to minimize the legal and reputational risks posed by nudniks. The advent of big data and predictive analytics provides sellers with a game changer: the ability to identify which consumer is a potential nudnik (that is, which consumer is likely to complain publicly and draw attention to seller underperformance), before that consumer even sets foot in their store. Sellers can then silently disarm nudniks or avoid selling to them altogether. This development benefits sellers, as it reduces the legal and reputational risks from nudniks. It may even benefit nudniks themselves, to the extent sellers disarm them by offering them preferential treatment. Yet the development poses a large risk to the greater consumer body, as it deprives consumers of a valuable source of information on seller misbehavior, thereby reducing the effectiveness of market discipline.

> It may even benefit nudniks themselves, to the extent sellers disarm them by offering them preferential treatment.

How is that different from simply complying if they complain, and offering them a modest compensation?

Maybe it avoids the need to offer the same quality of service to all consumers?

Sounds like automating personalized sales to me. Marketeers would love to get some kind of AI capable of this. I would personally love to see those “Hi! Any questions about anything?!” bottom-right corner chat dialogues go away forever, but alas.

> put emphasis on the people committing crimes rather than the victim beating the criminals in court.

The sense of "win" here doesn't involve defeating anyone. It's the same sense in which you "win" money at a casino or "win" someone's heart.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/win

> 1a: to get possession of by effort or fortune

> 1b: to obtain by work: EARN

> Many of his early attempts failed, but eventually, he began to win decisions that resulted in thousands of dollars in penalties for the offending companies.

I'd love to know what the strategy is to succeed.

Very frustrating how vague this article is. And searching "Dan Graham telemarketers" on Google returns countless nearly word-for-word syndications of the same exact article.

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