FCC to remove companies from robocall database for non-compliance [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

FCC to remove companies from robocall database for non-compliance [pdf]

docs.fcc.gov

416 pointsnobody9999234 comments

Thank god, at least some sort of enforcement.

At least 90% of phone calls I get are robocalls or spam. But, as the head of a large household, I can't disable unknown callers; who knows if that urgent care I took my kid to 6 months ago needs to call because I put my email address in wrong and they couldn't bill me, and I don't want the account to go to collections. Or maybe some random clerk from the city needs to contact me about property taxes?

I just do not have a definitive contact list of every number that might call me with critical information, and I'm not confident they would leave a voicemail. Or even if they leave a voicemail, it's often impossible to return a call because the caller is originating from some complex web of VOIP systems and when I call back I get a machine asking for an extension, which the caller forgot to leave in the voicemail!

I mean, a legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you. I normally have unknown callers disabled and don't have any problems. I had to turn it off this week because we have a few maintenance things going on and need to answer calls about when people are going to be coming and going for repairs. But otherwise, I turn it off and have never had any issues with not getting critical calls. You can always turn it on if you know you'll be getting an unknown call in the next 24 hours.

I have indeed tried this turn it on, turn it off, strategy. Every time it has ended because I forgot to turn it off and I ended up missing a critical phone call; some service person called before coming for a home maintenance appointment to make sure we were present so they could enter the premises, and the call goes to voicemail which I only notice an hour later after they've decided to reschedule fixing my AC to 3 days later and now we have to endure the sweltering 98°F weather for 3 more days all to avoid the nuisance of robocallers.

If you have something that urgent it's better to preemptively turn it off. Yeah yeah, easier said than done, but as a habitual Do Not Disturb user, this has worked well for me.

What's the connection to Do Not Disturb? I still haven't explored that functionality fully, and it seems Apple has built it out significantly. I suspect I could benefit by using it better to establish a "at work mode" and a "at home mode", in addition to my current simple usage of "you sure as hell better not wake me up at 3 AM with a notification".

That’s exactly what they’ve been adding, actually. You can also set a schedule for which mode is active or trigger them with automations.

I do "Do Not Disturb" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No calls, no texts, no notifications, no nothing. Yes, Apple has indeed built it out recently. At least on iOS, you can add exceptions if you want, like your favorites, or your contact list, or even specific people. You can also put it on a schedule if you think 24/7 is too extreme.

Honestly, I don't worry about the "urgent call from the doctor" scenario, and I have a family. If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail. For 99% of the calls I get, it's not even remotely important. I don't structure my life around outlier scenarios. Not having a phone constantly dinging and buzzing for my attention is worth missing the extremely rare emergency.

You can also have all numbers (calls) not in your contacts just go straight to voicemail via the "Silence Unknown Number," feature within the phone settings.

> If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail.

How do you test for this?

Why, if they don't leave a voicemail, it must not have been an important call!

I don't know if this is some sort of convention or just a lot of coincidences but it seems when it is an urgent call, everyone calls twice. And they leave voicemail on the second call. This includes stuff like people running late, calls from daycare, etc.

For non-urgent matters like payments, they call once and leave a voicemail.

I think that depends on the greeting. If it doesn't clearly say your name (and or the LLC you're owning), they might not be sure it's the right number and not leave a message for privacy reasons.

SPAM calls are annoying but not to the point where I'm willing to basically significantly reduce the utility of owning a phone. I get that some people basically don't take phone calls. But others have elderly relatives, service people for their house, etc. and "just make them leave a voicemail" isn't always a satisfactory solution.

I personally get 50+ spam calls on some days.

I’m not in the parent posting chain, but what other option do I have?

The law changed around a year ago with shaken/stir authentication being required. You can enable call filtering with your carrier to block most robocalls based on this data.

There are iphone and android app based solutions that will block more, based on previous reports, on information about the number, the timing. Like HIYA.

You can configure all unknown callers to go to voicemail. Setup an exception if the same number calls you twice.

If you are getting 50+ spam calls a day changing your number is another option. And if you change your number you can more easily block caller ID spoofers that use a very similar number that isn't really local.

While I agree that this might be a practical and effective step... changing my number costs me a lot of money in terms of lost revenue and expenses, I have business cards to reprint and contacts (business and personal) that I'll need to update. Considering phone companies could simply block these calls if they so desired I don't see why I, the customer, need to absorb such a large cost just to keep my life sane and, after absorbing such a cost the robo calls might just find me again.

I receive more spam calls than spam emails and, being familiar with the underlying technical details of each system, that is absolutely ridiculous. Email was built in a time of pure optimism, there is no central switching authority for emails and there is no cost to sending an email other than jiggling some electrons - telephone calls are highly metered and monitored, they generally pass through several organizations that have been endowed with a high measure of trust to police and shepard them to their final destination. There is no reason other than the monetization of the system that these spam calls are allowed to exist.

Yes, the change your number response is total BS. Not just for all of the reasons you mention which are totally valid, but for the simple fact it is just a cat&mouse game.

Phone numbers are not some cryptographically generated string that would take a while to randomly create. You can literally just start at a number and increment until you've reached them all, so that the spammer doesn't even need to know your number. Your number just got reached because it was the next one in the list.

There is definitely more to that - I'm on a pretty common 650 area code, and my spam calls have gone down from 1-2 / day a year ago to less than 1 every couple weeks.

The numbers they call are not necessarily random. I was torturing one “reduce your credit card fees” guy by giving him 3 wrong credit card numbers in a row. He got mad and started threatening me with terminating all my credit cards - which was hilarious because just the moment before he was asking their numbers. But then to substantiate the threat he disclosed what knows about me. My address, my phone, my car make… the only thing they got wrong was my name - they used my son’s name instead of mine.

And other callers called me my son’s name a couple other times. So there seems to be some database that some of them share.

Phone number often yields address, which often yields street view for the car make. Doesn’t sound like they had thaaaat much.

Well, I have 3 cars, 2 sons and 1 daughter (and me and my wife are still alive too, you know). But robocallers are stuck with the same car and the same person: 1/15 one occurrence, 0.0000013 five occurrences.

I would expect a phone company to throttle multiple failed dial attempts to nonexistent numbers. Otherwise you could DoS the system.

Shoot, in the old analog days, you could literally get the physical tumblers in the telco's switch to stick in an incomplete state and create a party line. DoS'ing the phone from too many wrong numbers is the least of the issues here.

Spammers have currently defeated SHAKEN/STIR. A signed call is more likely to be a robocall than not a robocall. This is thanks to shady phone companies that will sign calls for anyone or intentionally cater to scammers. https://transnexus.com/blog/2022/shaken-statistics-september... This is like when DKIM was first being deployed spammers adopted it first.

It significantly increases their costs though. As in the parent ruling here, a shady phone vendor that doesn't take steps to prevent spammers they will no longer be able to route calls to the US.

But once enough people lodge complaints about these calls the shady company will shape up or get their keys revoked, right?

I thought shaken/stir would help too. I receive a lot of spam calls- and now I receive backscatter calls from people who I “called” (my number is now being used as outgoing cid for robocalls- yay.)

It’s infuriating and undermines the utility of the phone system. Might as well give up and try again at this point.

I would change your phone number. I've had the same 650 area code since 2003, and I'll go a couple weeks, sometimes more without a spam call. (or any phone call for that matter - except for maybe the pizza delivery person?)

I don't believe I've received a single spam call in the last 45 days - so your phone number is on some horrible list, I feel for you.

If you are diligent in telling every single one of them “take me off your call list“ it does make a difference.

I started receiving spam calls again (after a very long time without a single one) because one of the weasels I had to deal with to buy a house apparently sold my information. I ignored them for a while, mostly because they call when I’m sleeping during the day, but then started answering to get off the lists and haven’t had one in a while. Seems like one company is responsible for the bulk of them and once you get off their list things get significantly better.

All of which I shouldn’t have to do because I’m on the (completely worthless) do not call list.

If by “it makes a difference” you mean more people will call you once someone has verified your number is real, sure.

Never pick up spam calls if you can help it.

They'll know your number is real as soon as it starts ringing. Tells them that the number not only exists, but your phone is switched on and accepting calls. If it goes straight to voicemail, they still know it exists.

Plenty of numbers that will ring and not be answered by a human

RoboKiller app! Works great for me.

You’re not in a sweet spot. When my dad had a stroke, the various medical providers and contractors sell/share your data which makes you a target.

My mom is a former investigator and is pretty organized. At peak she received over 80 calls a day, mostly for various Medicare scams followed by typical tech support and other grifts. Eventually political donation calls took over, and then slowed down in 2021 again.

Try to see if they can text you instead

So let’s not use a phone for calling anymore?

sure just not the old telephone system (especially for inbound calls) rather text me or audio or video chat with me through an app where I've added you as my contact.

Ive never received a spam call through a chat app like Messenger before. I have to add them as a contact first. In 21st century the old telephone system doesnt work anymore.

That’s basically where we are at, with the exception of big businesses and institutions often refuse to deal with you except for in-person or over the phone.

Can we? Sometimes a conversation can be handled in a couple succinct texts without the need to be dragged out vocally.

Other times it can't and by all means call, but do I ever get tired of the awkward chit chat that some people insist on.

That was probably supposed to be sarcasm, but yes, absolutely, let's not use a phone for voice calls anymore. That nonsense should have sailed 10 years ago.

I personally have found interfacing with businesses dysfunctional at best today. Auto-mated prompts that send you in infinite loops, email and text services that create async communication making it 10x as long to address my query. The idea that speaking to someone on the phone should cease is laughable.

I wish you could apply it to specific area codes. The area code of my phone number is not an area I have lived in for several years now. 98% of my spam calls are from this area code but none of the important unknown callers are calling from this area code.

I tried to do this manually for a filter on the last four digits. Phones don’t really handle a 10,000 number blocklist well.

Switch to a SIP VoIP provider with a powerful control panel. Create a rule that same area code callers have to press a digit to ring through. Since spam comes from random area codes I have this applied to all non-contact list callers.

"A legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you."

Unfortunately so do the scammers - both bots and actual people. At least my phone will sometimes text-transcribe the VM so I can quickly scan it and delete it w/o being forced to listen to it.

I’d like a calendar appointment feature where I specify when to disable/enable allowing unknown numbers to ring.

Approximately 100% of my voicemails are from spammers or scammers.

Not sure if your an iOS user but i'd love to be able to quickly toggle "Silence Unknown Callers," like i can with wifi, bluetooth, airplane mode, the flashlight and etc (swipe up from the bottom menu). Right now I have to drill down three to four steps (menus) to turn it on and off.

You can make a shortcut that takes you right to the screen, but you still have to toggle the setting. It’s a half measure but reduces the frustration a little.

This approach just doesn’t work when you have a significant number of outside parties and things to deal with. Doctors’ offices in particular often have calls coming from many different phone numbers and you just can’t rely on white listing them all. Once you get to an age where health issues happen more frequently than an annual checkup, it just doesn’t work.

I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean. My spouse has a very severe and very expensive chronic illness, and has several doctors visits a month with different doctors. We have had no problem with our doctors reaching us via phone. (And it works way better than any of their "healthcare portals" where nurses actually read your messages and deem all of them non-urgent and don't respond.) We absolutely do have their numbers in our contacts so their calls come through. On those rare occasions when they call from some general number behind a call switch, they leave an appropriate voicemail and we call back. They are sometimes vague with the details on voicemail because they can't be sure who will listen to it, but we are always able to get back to them. FWIW, we're in our 50s and have very frequent health issues, so this is not unknown to me by any means.

I’m glad this works out for you, but your experience is not universal.

I have a chronic condition I am stuck with a hospital system that seems to play PBX roulette. I have a dozen of their phone numbers white listed and still miss an important call coming from a new number from time to time.

I hate it, it’s completely out of touch, but it’s not something I have any control over.

If you are dealing with a doctor who won't leave a "This is Dr. So-and-so. Please call our office." voicemail, find a new doctor. Seriously.

This is not even in the top ten criteria for selecting a doctor. If I find a doctor who knows what they are talking about, actually listens, and actually lets me make an appointment, I'm not walking away from that unicorn just because their front office has trouble with voicemail.

Well sometimes it’s not just if they can get to you but when. For instance, I needed to see a cardiologist and the first appointment was three months out. The office offered to place me on a list where if someone cancelled, they go through this list and offer up that appointment. If they don’t reach you, however, they just keep on going through the list. Having my phone to filter calls meant I couldn’t take advantage of this as they had already moved on. These lists seem commonplace and maybe an example of what parent meant in their post as you can’t simply save the office number because the office has several outbound extensions.

My doctor's office has a privacy disclosure and preference section on their forms. Contacts who can be told info. Ok to leave voicemail Y/N. Full details in VM or brief.

Thats what I do, if I don't know the number I have voicemail and if they don't leave a message I just block the number. I have thousands of blocked numbers, to be fair the phone experience in 2022 is just horrible due to the FCC and telcos not doing their job in regulating these criminals.

I try to use voicemail. The reason it doesn't work is that although my phone has 128Gb of storage, for some reason my provider's voicemail system can only store like 10 seconds of audio before it runs out of space and asks me to delete messages. My landline's answering machine is like this too.

Apparently there's a special kind of memory just for recording telephone messages and it's as precious as a diamond.

The calls that I did not answer all go to https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ They’ll send email notification immediately after recording a voice message.

(The main reason I’ve subscribed to Jolly Roger was to torture robocallers with roboanswers. They had a collection of rather hilarious conversations on their web page. In real life robocallers seem smarter now and drop much sooner, but voicemail feature works ok and I have not noticed any limits - messages are attached to emails and my gmail account is still at 5% or so.

I was thinking of implementing the same idea with better technology, like on the fly voice recognition, which seems possible and should lead to tons of funny results, but I’m too lazy now).

Callers with blocked caller ID get screened by Google for me, and I rarely ever hear from them -- but I get a ton of calls from people who either have spoofed numbers or who have temporarily picked up a "source" number based in my area code.

It's gotten to the point where if it's a local call I almost always assume it's spam, but I still need to answer.

If it's a doctor's office trying to make an appointment, for instance, then getting through to the same person who knows why you're trying to make the appointment so you don't need to give them 100x as much information yet again? Yeah, at that point it's much better to just answer a few spam calls instead of ignoring all of the unfamiliar numbers.

I have a kid in college and another in high school. A dead phone could mean I could be getting a call from one of them from any number. I just can't ignore them all.

I'm happy for you that your life is simple enough that you can just ignore anything you don't recognize, but try not to act as if the rest of us are doing something wrong because we're happy that the FCC is attacking the underlying problem and ignoring the pain we need to deal with.

You can disable unknown callers? Which countries support this?

I’m Australia, some government agencies hide caller ID, it’s incredibly frustrating.

We'd be better off with only text communication allowed between unknown parties. It's much easier for us, as humans, to quickly parse text and it's far less disruptive to our lives. I'd like it if calls only occurred between parties who already agreed to that form of communication.

Everyone else, leave a fucking note.

In my family, text communication is difficult for the elderly and/or English as a second language people.

I feel like the doctors office scenario should be handled like we do with TLS. They apply for a certificate, and that’s signed and offered in their outgoing calls. Their verified name shows up in Caller ID, and the nature of their business is burned into the certificate (medical, government, auto repair, etc.).

"secure" phone could be done relatively easily, the phone companies don't want to because it would cost them money and reduce revenue.

Would it cost them though? hardly any bill per call anymore. Lump sum billing would mean they have to support less volume for the same money.

There is a lot of effort going into this sort of thing: https://www.bandwidth.com/regulations/stir-shaken/

I’m aware, but I don’t think it quite goes far enough. It’s not enough to merely know it’s not a spoofed number. I’d like classification, so I can let any medical practice punch through do not disturb overnight (emergencies involving loved ones), allow others to call during normal business hours (voicemail otherwise), etc., etc.

A great many Dr’s offices can’t even provide a billing estimate or handle the mess of insurance. Do you think they’ll handle something like that on top of it?

I happen to have an obscure health condition, and good insurance. I have a cardiologist, a rheumatologist, a pulmonologist, and a urologist whose offices all tend to periodically call me from unknown numbers. They have a clear economic incentive to periodically poke and prod at me, and bill my insurance.

Taken to an extreme, an incompetent medical practice isn't entitled to stay in business. Not that I am in favor of making businesses more complicated to operate, but I sure would appreciate fewer spam phone calls.

That would require a critical mass of customers to accept some standard ‘good’ call and deny all ‘not good’ calls. Which with all the chaos right now, good luck without some kind of central action at least as strong as that required to kill the spammers normally.

No, I don’t. But when you order phone services for your business, they’re more than capable of acting on your behalf.

The whole reason HIPAA grandfathers fax machines is that it was (and still is) too expensive for the medical industry to purchase, deploy, and train employees on modern telecom.

This exists but is not widely supported. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/09/08/google-phone-will-s...

I ignore all calls I don't know. I've never had a billing issue that didn't go into physical mail first. I don't have any plans to take time to receive calls from the government, they will absolutely mail you. They want 100% of the money if they can get it, they don't want to send you to collections; where they're only going to get a cut of the original sum.

It might just be me.. but phones are the ultimate in "false urgency" that our society foists on people.

Meanwhile.. it's 2022 and there's no way for me to give an "emergency code" or authorization to people I know which gives them the ability to ring me directly with some kind of emergency flag or icon showing on the call screen itself. That's baffling.

My physical mail situation is far worse than my phone situation. I missed one bill apparently and got sent to collections. It was from some place that demands that payment be made in full during the visit, so I probably thought it was just junk at the time.

My desk phone is logged into a SIP VoIP provider that does allow very powerful rules. I can create a phone menu and provide each contact with an extension that must be dialed to ring through. But nothing like that is available for my cellphone. So I ignore all unknown callers.

The trick, which I only implemented by mistake, is to have a phone number from an area where you have no business. I live in Boulder but have a number from North Dakota because I got to pick my phone number and liked the look of one.

Now, if I get a call from a 303(Denver/Boulder), I'm almost sure it is real. If I get a call from 701, it is almost certainly a fake.

I gave up - family of 5, but I do the following: my iPhone auto-silences unknown callers (system setting) and I only share my Google Voice account publicly (ie, only friends/family have my direct line). I also have scam-block from my carrier.

It seems to work quite well. I miss an occasional call but have progressively whitelisted (add as contacts) all numbers from school/doc/programs as well.

It does take some diligence but it feels better than getting sideswiped by some rando.

For home users, there is a simple solution to spam...

Anyone not in your contacts gets sent to voicemail. The voicemail 'greeting' message says "Hi, if you need to contact me, send me an email to [your email address] and I'll call back. If it's urgent, put 'urgent' in the subject and I'll call back immediately.". Set a rule so that urgent emails make your phone vibrate/make noise.

Robocallers won't do that. Most real humans will. Marketers usually won't. Collections agencies usually will.

It's the perfect filter.

Perhaps there are some fundamental problems here if it's legal for you to be extorted by debt collectors because some office worker decided to not leave a voicemail. And O The Irony! that one reason you're forced to make yourself available at a publicly known phone because of the threat of someone extorting you who is themselves not available at a publicly known phone number.

I have this same problem and concern, and it doesn't work to use voicemail because the robocallers end up filling my voicemail within hours of clearing it out.

The most effective way I have found for dealing with it is horrible but it seems to work. A lot of the robocaller people that I actually end up talking to often sound like they are from a particular nation, not naming any names here. I also happen to know many people from the aforementioned country are quite prejudiced against those of another country that shares a border with them, so when I get a call I do my best accent of a person belonging to the other country and start rambling nonsense about how I just immigrated to America, and I own a shop that sales a particular ethnic food and start offering it to them. Usually I get about 3 minutes in and they hang up. So far of everything I've tried, including using the "Remove me from the list" button this has been the most effective way I've experienced of reducing calls.

It may be terrible but it works, and here's the thing every minute they are spending speaking to an irate man of a particular ethnicity is a minute of their time wasted not speaking to someone who is going to talk to them.

P.S

For those who are really curious the countries anonymized about are Scotland and England. ;)

> robocallers end up filling my voicemail within hours of clearing it out.

This does not match my experience at all. For me, I get a robo call to voicemail maybe once every 2-3 weeks.

This is compared to the maybe 3-5 per day I receive (but don’t make it to me, since I have non-contacts silenced).

This sounds like a good opportunity for a start-up that uses AI/ML to answer your calls and screen them using a human-sounding voice.

What the US really needs is enormous fines and strict enforcement, similar to Germany. I have read so many posts on HN by people who live in Germany that say their robo-calls are almost zero. And plenty of stories about enormous fines to companies for robo-calls.

> This sounds like a good opportunity for a start-up that uses AI/ML to answer your calls and screen them using a human-sounding voice.

I think for 95% of incoming callers, this is functionally equivalent to just not picking up. If I call someone and suspect I'm talking to a robot, I'll just hang up.

Any legit person or company will leave a voice mail. I only allow my contacts list through. Anything else goes straight to email.

> I'm not confident they would leave a voicemail

> the caller is originating from some complex web of VOIP systems

> when I call back I get a machine asking for an extension, which the caller forgot to leave in the voicemail!

Is this really a risk? If it’s that important, they’ll leave a proper VM.

I’ve had my phone set to silence non-contacts, and aside from the occasional call where I prefer they didn’t have to leave a VM, I almost never have problems.

The few times it’s caused me problems, it’s been just an inconvenience. But about 0.1% the inconvenience of dealing with all the robo calls making it through.

For those as confused as I was by the title. FCC will remove providers from the "Robocall Mitigation Database." This is a database of providers who are certified as complying with robocall mitigation requirements. Failing to demonstrate compliance results in removal from the DB, which in turn, results in your calls no longer being routed.

Yeah, this is basically a death sentence for those companies. AFAIK, this will be the first time the FCC has done this. In the past they have allowed other providers to stop carrying calls from non-conforming providers, but they haven't required other providers to to stop carrying these calls before.

Not sure if it works the same way, but a lot of the robocalls that I get are from spoofed mobile numbers, if you call the number back its usually some random dude who is confused to why he's getting so many angry calls.

Wait, it's possible to spoof phone numbers?! Does anyone know how this works?

When you make a phone call, your phone sends metadata containing your phone number to whomever you are calling. That's what the recipient sees as your caller ID.

Of course, since you control your own device, you can make that metadata contain anything you want.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

It's absolutely trivial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

> Providers which market "wholesale VoIP" are typically intended to allow any displayed number to be sent, as resellers will want their end user's numbers to appear.

I've gotten calls from banks' 1-800 numbers that were 100% definite scams this way.

..and there are plenty of non-nefarious reasons to want to spoof numbers. I used to have a VOIP setup at home that, when I dialed out, the call would appear to come from my cellphone[0]. Google Voice used to be able to do that too (no idea if it still does). Businesses often use this to have all their calls appear to come from the main office line or a 1-800 number. Or, when forwarding a call, you could make the 2nd leg outbound call appear to come from the original caller instead of the forwarder, things like that. Unfortunately as with so many things, bad actors are going to ruin it for everyone.

[0] I also found out that if I dialed my cell phone voicemail number from this VOIP phone, it bypassed my security code and went straight to my mailbox - since the outgoing number matched my cellphone number, it assumed it was me calling. A quick experiment showed I could then access anyone's voicemail (on that carrier at least) by simply setting my outbound number to appear as their cell number...

Such cases could be handled if there were a way to verify that a spoofed number is an authorized use. Your cellphone number belongs to you. Some bank's 800 number does not. What we need is a mechanism that prevents the scammers from lying while still permitting setups like yours.

I mean, that's what STIR/SHAKEN do.

> plenty of non-nefarious reasons?

aren't they all variations of "both numbers are provably yours"?

Define provably and yours.

When forwarding a call, the origin is not yours. When calling "in the name" of the company's switchboard, the number is not yours. When I use a number which is actually mine but comes from another country, it's not really provable.

Every provider should be responsible for verifying that their downstream customers are legitimate. If they deliver junk on behalf of their customers, they should get banned. That's how this problem gets solved. Your provider doesn't want to get black-holed, and now has an incentive to make sure your VOIP system is legitimate.

I fully support this behavior, however from what I read about Australias wiretap laws, they can't check the source number without a warrant :|

It is insanely easy to spoof "caller ID", it is slightly harder to spoof whatever the "real source" thing is that's just below it.

But both are not hard, and if you have the right VOIP provider you're off to the races.

one way is with ANI abuse.

the 2nd is abusing callID transmitters and protocol. i think the 2nd way may have been mitigated. it was kinda like butting into line before anyone notices.

if you've ever had a call when your at the phone, and you see a brief flash of a number, that instantly changes to another number, this 2nd method is likely in play

Fairly long video [1] to show how to operate a VOIP app, but yea, pretty simple. Should be harder whenever STIR/SHAKEN [2] goes into effect.

1. https://odysee.com/@cybering:1/spoofing-call-id-using-voip:2

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

STIR/SHAKEN is already in effect for 99% of people. That's what this order is about. These seven small VoIP companies are the only ones who haven't implemented it. (Presumably, their whole raison d'être is for spammers.) Those seven companies are currently providing service for all remaining spoofers, so they have two weeks to fix it or they're done.

Presumably if they are illegitimate, they will lose most of their customers if they do comply, or they lose network access by not acting. Sounds like this will put the illegitimate ones out of business.

Here is an excellent video of McAfee doing it to a fox news anchor: https://mobile.twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/13053832859...

Yes there are ways to spoof caller id numbers but the network isn’t confused about where the call is coming from

All you need to do is follow the money. Someone is paying for that call, cheap as it may be. And there is no way the telcos would allow anyone to spoof that.

There's language in the directive about "shaken/stir" implemented "over TCP/IP."

"STIR is an acronym for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited, while SHAKEN stands for Signature (based) Handling of Asserted Information using tokENs."

They're possibly the most tortured backronyms I've ever seen.

All to sound like James Bond's "shaken, not stirred" quote. It's a bit lame, really.

Ah yes, the legendary 007 wit, or at least half of it.

At the carrier level, number spoofing doesn't mask where the call originated from. It's simply a mechanism for a caller to convey to the receiver who is calling.

It's allowed to be spoofed to enable legitimate things like all call center lines to report as the same 1800 number of a business. The problem is that it's been on the honor system.

With stir/shaken it's a matter of proving identity.

Carriers are required by law to connect calls, it's a monopoly thing to prevent an AT&T from refusing to connect competitor's calls to damage their business.

The FCC hasn't just given them permission to not connect calls, it has ordered them to cease connecting those calls.

I was confused too. At first I wrongly assumed the database in question was National Do Not Call Registry (https://www.donotcall.gov/). But it's not that at all.

yes its talking about a whitelist/auth database

Good.

A lot of “legit” organizations will be affected by this.

I get a lot of legitimate calls blocked by NoMoRobo and RoboKiller, because the dialers they use moonlight as spam-callers.

I try to explain to them, why they couldn’t contact me, but to no avail.

There are one or two phone companies that seem to be 100% dedicated to scammers. Can’t remember them, off the top of my head, and it would be irresponsible to guess in a public forum.

Robocalls are a scourge. I really wish politicians wouldn’t use them, because I’m sure that’s why enforcement has been so anemic.

I'm sure those companies will escape unharmed. This is America after all.

I don’t think they will be. This seems to affect a few specific companies who have avoided implementing STIR/SHAKEN.

Well what the heck? This was an option? What took so long?

It's been possible forever and effectively that's how non-us deals with the issue. Call your representative to real enforcement, I guess?

I hope they don't stop at small time companies. There should be a credible threat to any, including Verizon, T-Mobile, ATT of removal if they do not fix this problem. It's the only way to see progress.

So the law requiring all carriers to connect calls, combined with the exception to stir/shaken given to small carriers is what's created a loop hole.

Monopoly laws force AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to connect these calls from small carriers even if they know the caller id is spoofed.

The FCC hasn't just given them permission to block those calls, they have required it.

I originally came across this news from a different article source which said that such big carriers have already made the changes necessary to be in compliance that these smaller companies have not.

These steps work like a charm to stop SPAM calls and junk postal mail:

- Stop unwanted postal mail https://www.usa.gov/telemarketing#item-35222

- Stop credit and insurance offers https://www.optoutprescreen.com/selection

- Stop "direct mail" for $4 https://www.dmachoice.org/

- For everything else, collect your junk mail and occasionally go through each piece individually and enter it into https://www.catalogchoice.org/

This doesn't ring true to me at all. The majority of junk calls I get are not from legitimate businesses that would have anything to do with the links you provided.

The above is for orgs that play by the rules. Here is a tale of one org who didn't: They called me 8x w/ some awful requests of SSN and shit like that. Knowing California law labels >2 (I think) unsolicited calls without consent = harassment, and _each_ violation stands alone, I did not press 2 to opt out, because I'm a gambler. A year later, I got a class action lawsuit parcel which I signed and returned. I got $1,065.

Your second link is broken

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

> Consumers can register at DMA's consumer website: www.DMAchoice.org for a processing fee of $4 for a period of ten years. Registering online is the fastest way to see results. DMAchoice offers consumers a simple, step-by-step process that enables them to decide what mail they do and do not want.

I'm going to start a business that delivers several one ton concrete blocks directly in front of the front doors of the offices of firms associated with the DMA. They can opt out for 40 thousand dollars or simply spend a few dozen hours with a pickaxe and wheelbarrow to dispose of the blocks when they arrive unasked for.

I like where your head is at, but heed my experience: I once gathered a couple months of junk mail and wrote "Return to Sender" on all of them and tossed them in a blue USPS box. I walked away dusting off my hands thinking I had stuck it to the man. Little did I know that 2 days later all of that mail was delivered, en masse, back to my front doorstep. Might as well have left fish heads as a warning! My friend explained, though, "See, _you_ were the sender, so they sent it back to you."

I just checked that first link, and it turns out I registered my telephone number on the Do Not Call registry in 2007. I get at least one spam call or text message every day. I am not totally convinced these measures are bulletproof.

This is great. Everyone hates robocall and these companies that still allow robocall do not deserve to be connected to our data/voice networks.

I agree, this should have happened years ago.

""" What’s New: Today’s Enforcement Bureau orders demanded that Akabis, Cloud4, Global UC, Horizon Technology Group, Morse Communications, Sharon Telephone Company, and SW Arkansas Telecommunications and Technology show cause within 14 days as to why the FCC should not remove them from the database. Removal from the database would require all intermediate providers and terminating voice service providers to cease carrying the companies’ traffic. If that were to occur, all calls from these providers’ customers would be blocked and no traffic originated by the provider would reach the called party.

“These and other recent actions reflect the seriousness with which we take providers’ obligations to take concrete and impactful steps to combat robocalls,” said Loyaan A. Egal, acting Chief of the Enforcement Bureau. “STIR/SHAKEN is not optional. And if your network isn’t IP-based so you cannot yet use these standards, we need to see the steps taken to mitigate illegal robocalls. These providers have fallen woefully short and have now put at risk their continued participation in the U.S. communications system. While we’ll review their responses, we will not accept superficial gestures given the gravity of what is at stake.” """

Also, FFS, FCC please have press releases on normal HTML pages, not PDFs, so the pagination is client side and no one has to fix your hard wrapped lines or make things display properly on differently sized devices.

>Also, FFS, FCC please have press releases on normal HTML pages, not PDFs, so the pagination is client side and no one has to fix your hard wrapped lines or make things display properly on differently sized devices.

That would be nice.

In the absence of such niceties, I chose PDF for the submission because it was the least obnoxious format available. The press release (as well as the specific orders for each provider affected) can also be had in docx and txt formats[0].

[0] https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-companies-robocall-d...

At this point I take the PDF over many "modern" webshits

At least a PDF isn't going to try to do some infinite scroll thing that screws up all linking and makes it nearly impossible to find something again.

So (still trying to understand exactly what's what)... those companies are the ones providing connectivity to the actual scammy robocallers? Or what is it that they do?

I think these companies are failing to implement STIR/SHAKEN and are running into expiring grace periods. That's not necessarily evidence of guilt - they might claim that as a small business they cannot afford these changes - but it seems like the only option to clean up the mess caused by spammers.

The protocols are meant to allow tracing which network originated a call - at their root is an attestation by the network that a call they are originating for one of their customers is allowed to use the number in caller ID. If you're a network who wants your originating calls to be carried across other networks, you can't just set up a promiscuous attestation system that allows your customers to just slap on any random caller ID that they want, or else you'll get blacklisted real quick.

> The protocols are meant to allow tracing which network originated a call

... to make tracing easier

We could always trace the calls - you just had to ask each telco in the path to provide those details. There realistically wasn't any enforcement to do that though.

Yeah, I suppose you're right. Ultimately in such a tracing effort I imagine they probably would encounter a bunch of telcos passing the buck until it gets to a dissolved overseas entity who cannot be held responsible for anything.

I'll keep repeating this one forever, but - that's not an issue. This would end spam calls immediately: "if you can't tell who's the source or if the source is international, you're responsible and will be fined per spam call".

Telcos are not clueless or powerless. They can put pressure on international peers to not send spam, but have no incentive currently. No real telco wants to lose partners.

yes, or else they are the scammies themselves using a shell.

so, due to not taking mandated security measures thus allowing blackhats into your system, [company] is banned from the network.

I don't know why, but in the last couple of weeks the number of spam calls I get has ramped way up. Perhaps they were trying to get it all in before the cutoff? It used to be 3-4 per day to both landline and cell phone, and in the last few weeks it's gone up to about 10-15 on each per day. And it's almost always the same 2 calls - either "... wants to give you $10,000 in clean energy upgrades ..." or "... This is the social security disability administration on a recorded line..." Yeah, whatever. Fuck off.

You need an automated answer service:

"Type 121 to be connected or hold the line for endless cat facts at $5/min ... Did you know cats on average have just under 4 legs ..."

With the code being randomised and an actual pay service.

Someone in the UK did something like this, apparently, and made money.

I would like to know more about this exciting income opportunity.

The robocalls I get these days ask you to press a button to continue, hearing more about your expiring warranty, etc. If you don't respond in a few seconds it disconnects.

So have it press a button. It’s just a DTMF tone. (Is that a redundant acronym phrase?)

> a DTMF tone. (Is that a redundant acronym phrase?)

Technically not, since "DTMF" is a proper noun referring to the overall encoding system, and is used as a adjective indicating that this particular tone is associated with that system. Compare "That farm raises KFC chickens. (That is, chickens intended for use by the resturant (chain) that calls itself "Kentucky Fried Chicken".)". Or "The left is what a MacOS window looks like, and the right is what a Windows window looks like.".

I love your answer + examples and concur wholeheartedly.

My point was that they're already deploying counter measures. They also tend to use a two tier system where the first person you talk to is an idiot who reads lines. If you bite, they second you to a second tier to close. If you're not a real person, they hang quickly at the first tier. I've gotten to the second tier and really pissed someone off (mission accomplished) insisting that I was the old lady they were calling, when I clearly had a man's voice.

I use to use Google's call screening, and was foiled by this when I wanted to screw around with them by pressing buttons to speak canned messages. Google really needs to update that with a DTMF keypad.

Search for "Hello this is Lenny".

Over the last couple of months I went from maybe one per day to dozens. I am lucky that my phone's area code is 1200 miles away from where I live so for the most part I can ignore everything from that area code. In addition, I changed my default ring tone and then went into each of my contacts and set my normal ring tone. This lets me know if I should be motivated to answer the call or let it go to voicemail.

For me the increase correlates to buying a car so I thought that the dealer was at fault but maybe it is just a coincidence.

Oh, it's very likely it could be the car dealership.

I bought a vehicle from a major dealership, their paperwork had my name mispelled, but I didn't say anything or correct it.

I registered the vehicle with the state with the correct spelling of my name.

I started getting snailmail car warrenty spam with my mispelled name shortly after I bought the car.

The dealership said those spammers must have got it from the state's vehicle registry. I told them my name is mispelled on their paperwork and is mispelled exactly the same way on the spam, but is spelled correctly on the vehicle registration. *crickets*

The biggest loop hole is for political-adjacent communications which get a complete pass on all restrictions and can send as much spam as they please. Expect a huge increase around midterms, as even non-political communications draft in the wake of the loophole traffic.

That used to be at least manageable, as most of them were via 5-6 digit short codes, and those additionally respected the STOP keyword.

Lately, I've been getting SMS spam from individual peoples' numbers, because politicians have realized they can say "hey go send this text to these numbers" to individual volunteers (SMS version of the old phone banking technique) to get around even that. STOP keyword doesn't do anything on a regular person's cell phone number.

> "hey go send this text to these numbers" to individual volunteers

I have direct knowledge that a lot of this is automated via services like Twilio which allow you to programmatically pick local numbers (relative to the receiver) as well as message templates that make the message more human.

Im sure its still being done manually, but a lot of this is fully automated at scale (going back to ~2015).

Short-code numbers are also quite expensive relatively, or were back when I was working in adjacent technology.

Sometimes, but text banking is definitely a big thing.

https://www.demandthevote.com/text-banking

https://act.betoorourke.com/signup/bft-volunteer/

I can usually tell based on how long the response to the STOP keyword comes back. Some are a day later from a human; “Sorry, will update the list” sort of stuff. Others are instantaneous and clearly canned.

Also if you send STOP it confirms that someone is reading the text message and its a live number.

In my experience most message sending services (re: Twilio) offer webhooks to consume replies which can then trigger a response template appearing like an actual person.

>As most of them were via 5-6 digit short codes, and those additionally respected the STOP keyword.

I just counted and I have sent STOP to 26 5-6 digit numbers this year and they still come, all for one specific political party I've never donated to. It seems like they technically respect the STOP but your number is already passed on/gets passed on to other PACs/politicians regardless.

Yes. If you do anything even slightly related to a political campaign - donate, sign a petition, fill out a form - that list gets sold over and over and over. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/email-list-for-sale...

It's often the most valuable asset a campaign has.

Have you tried responding with something offensive? A porn gif, for example.

I suppose this was a good start. My heavy handed preference would be they use eminent domain after 3 strikes and liquidate the business to augment pay for the agencies that deal with fraud.

The list:

* Akabis - VoIP for call centers, apparently.

* Cloud4 - some general SaaS provider. Bank as a service, etc. Voice seems to be a minor part of their business.

* Global UC - seems to be an anonymous phone service. Pay US$15 a month and make calls from any IP device. So they don't know where you are or who you are.

* Horizon - "HTG origination services provide your business with access to numbers in the United States and other countries. Experience flexibility and unlimited potential in international markets."

* Morse Communications - Another VoIP service for businesses.

* Sharon Telephone Company - small rural telco in Wisconsin. Web site is so out of date it tells you to sign up for long distance with MCI or Sprint. "Credit card payments are now available!"

* Southwest Arkansas Telephone Cooperative - another small rural telco, but they offer gigabit fiber, so they're keeping up.

What I really want is an advanced caller id system that encompasses the whole process, in which the "caller" or "sender" never actually has my phone number (or email or mailing address).

I can generate contact-ids on the fly, which I can give out to anyone - public or private. I can generate them for each person I give them to, or for posting on a billboard if I'd like.

When a person adds that id to their contact list, the "system" would notice that I've never set that up the caller to contact me, so I get a notification that "[Caller] would like to contact you". I can set the method and schedule they can contact me:

* Text / Email - Weekdays between 9 and 6pm (work)

* Phone / Text / Email - Any time, Always, Until Disabled (family, friends, etc)

* Phone / Text / Email - Any time until Summer (my kid's school)

* Text-Only - For the next 3 days (maintenence, etc)

* Snail Mail Only - 3 Weeks before election (local politicians)

* Snail Mail Only - Once per month (local grocery)

The caller gets a notification that they can contact me, how, and when, and from then on, they look me up on their devices / apps and hit the "Contact" button. They are then presented with the options I've given them "Sorry, You can only call or text during work hours". "This person only allows text messages at this time".

Some interesting bits about this:

* No contact info for spamming

* No possibility of harassment

* No distractions outside of what I've personally defined as available.

* Commercial / Political entities aren't cut out from people who want to hear from them

* Mail can be forwarded to me anywhere in the world, since the sender would just be sending a package / letter to my id, and not to my actual address. The PO would then send it to whatever address I've most recently set. (no more forwarding address or crap for the people who used to live where I do).

Requires massive centralization of data and complicated logic for access control enforcement, which now has to happen for every call.

What about these edge case scenario.

My family member gets lost/confused/hurt whatever, and needs to borrow a strangers phone to call me to help them. I don't know that number and perhaps the family number has memorized my phone number since it hasn't changed in 20 years. Maybe they are a small child 5 years old.

How do they get thru this system?

The only thing I could think of is if they have an extra 'password code' (4-6+ digits) that they'd need to memorize in addition to the phone number?

Alternatively in this system, someone compromises your contactid. And a place that says they are calling your 'auto insurance contact' isnt actually your legit auto insurance contact but a scam auto insurance company? You'd need to be able to easily "reset" these values which could be a big burden on small businesses.

It's pretty bizarre how, at least in the US, we've allowed robocalls and spam to basically make phone calls useless. Everyone I know gets multiple spam calls a day, most people just don't answer their phones anymore unless it's someone they know. Everyone hates this yet no one in power seems to even care.

“no one in power seems to care”

Isn’t this an example of the exact opposite? The people in power and in charge of our communications network are preparing to block providers who aren’t following their robocall policy.

Maybe they care now, but for a good 2 or 3 decades they sure didn't seem to mind.

In fairness, this robocall surge has only become a real problem in the past maybe 5ish years.

Before that, you did receive robocalls, but they were infrequent. Now, I don't know anyone that doesn't receive at least one per day... I often receive multiple. My phone has become useless because of this...

The FCC has been going after robocallers all this time. E.g., here's one from 15 years ago that I happened to remember, Cardholder Services: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-07-977A1.pdf

The problem they're solving now is securing the phone network, which is a harder problem. Important barriers included 1) decades of history where it wasn't necessary, 2) entrenched industry players not wanting to change anything, 3) an ill-considered opening up of telephone system interconnection, 4) a quasi-religious deregulatory/free-market credo popular among a segment of politicians, and 5) politicians who are more sensitive to the concerns of rich execs.

I think the reason it is happening now is that a lot of the people arguing against this have finally realized that it's dooming the telephone call, so their businesses are feeling it.

I'm confused. Historical robocalls by legit marketing firms were largely eliminated by the rule banning making such calls to cell phones, combined with the do-not-call registry.

That largely fixed the problem from legitimate robocallers (except the handful of exceptions made in the relevent laws).

The more recent robocall problem (that this order is trying to address) is from literal scammers, who are knowingly operating illegally, hence why they spoof Caller ID, etc. These have mostly only been been a major problem in the past 5 or so years, perhaps a bit longer.

Decades late. Probably only because the people in charge are getting fed up themselves.

I feel that it is too little too late. Until we pin down one of the heads of the scammy companies that do this and publicly execute them, I don't think anyone will feel justice has been served. Like, 4k-streaming-hanging-in-times-square public, not lethal-injection-with-limited-viewing-space.

> I feel that it is too little too late.

Keep in mind who was the previous chairperson of the FCC, and who appointed him. Jessica has been moving at breakneck speed since she was appointed.

Disallowing connections from the company is effectively executing them, would you engage with a telecom business (legitimate or not) that is unable to connect to the average American?

It depends on how long it takes (and how hard it is) to setup a new telecom company connection like this.

If hard and takes awhile, yeah it will help. Otherwise, they’ll just churn through shell companies.

Yeah, after like a decade or more of inattention. Even if they somehow block all robocalls, it's going to be years before people begin to trust their phones again, if ever.

They (telecoms and regulators, all) really screwed up hard on this one. I have to wonder who really benefitted from this broken status quo, besides the spammers themselves.

> ... it's going to be years before people begin to trust their phones again, if ever.

This is a very strong point. It's helped me arrive at the conclusion that phone communication is largely an unnecessary luxury. Of course, I believe that having the option of calling someone important to me (or receiving their call) in an emergency situation is difficult to overrate but I've also pretty much entirely limited my verbal phone conversations to that sort of situation. Just about any other situation where I might be expected to have / use my phone is actually a problem with the other party's expectations.

I think a lot of people would have stopped answering their phones regardless. Letting random people interrupt you with a conversation may have been the best UX available 100 years ago, but I don't think that's the case now. I note that 81% of millennials "sometimes have to summon up the courage to make a phone call", and 75% will avoid calls that are "time consuming". https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/why-millennials-ignore-calls...

I don't prefer phone calls either, but you do have legitimate need to receive calls from people you don't already know: prospective clients if you have a business, hospitals/doctor's offices, etc. It's just frustrating that we've allowed the system to go from "this unknown caller may be something important or something I want to answer" to "this is almost certainly spam".

I agree it's frustrating for the people who still answer their phones. I'm just saying that spam calls may not be the primary reason the phone call is becoming useless. As comparison, fax machines did get a lot of spam, and there are still people who depend on faxing. But spam is not the primary reason fax machines died out.

In my experience, it seems like most spam calls that I receive are using a spoofed number over VOIP. Reporting the number as spam, basically reports the number they are spoofing, rather than the people making the call. Is that correct? Will this new action have any effect on these spoofed VOIP calls? It seems like there is no way for people receiving these calls to report these callers without having the carriers recording the source IP addresses of these calls. I don't know all of the inner-workings of the phone network, so maybe I am making incorrect assumptions.

Yes that is exactly what this is about. A few years ago the FCC mandated[1] that all voice providers implement a set of standards called STIR/SHAKEN that are essentially cryptographic signatures that a call originated with them and that the Caller ID information is valid. They have since been gradually increasing penalties for providers that are not in compliance with those standards. This move is the strictest yet - completely disconnecting some providers that are not in compliance. The companies in question aren't an exhaustive list of providers that still allow spoofed Caller ID, so it won't end the problem. I'm still curious as to how far they will be able to go with foreign services. At the least they should eventually be able to prevent spoofing of domestic numbers.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication

Thank you for the clarification. Yeah, most of the down that I get stems to originate from other countries. Hopefully they can crack down on those.

I have done CNAM lookups on the numbers and contacted the originating VOIP companies, and they just say "we won't let that number contact you again". It's infuriating. Don't let that customer contact me again, they can change their number at will. Scumbags.

Yeah there really isn't much that victims can do at this point until the carriers are held more accountable. Hopefully this will help.

Right before my spam call problem got out of hand, I called back a number and it was a backdoor to some community's 911. The 911 operator had her ass on the dashboard demanding to know how I got the number. I felt like a kid in the principal's office.

At some point I had this idea that this could be stopped by simply charging for phone calls. This concept isn't fully worked out in my mind; in rough strokes, it goes something like this:

Everyone charges $1 to receive a call. You can setup a system whereby anyone in your address book isn't charged or receives a credit immediately.

For those not in your address book, receiving a call-back balances out the transaction. In other words, if your plumber leaves you a message and you call them back, nobody incurs a cost. It is my guess that, on average, for legitimate players, this per-call charge would be minimal. For others it might end-up being a reasonable cost of doing business.

Another method: On a smart phone it would be very easy to display a screen once you hang up with the question "Charge for this call?" and two buttons "Yes" and "No". Simple.

The idea is that garbage calls from marketing operations or scammers who today can make millions of calls for virtually nothing, would now incur real and significant costs.

Like I said, not fully hashed-out. I just think that without a non-trivial cost associated with making millions of calls, they will continue to happen.

There's a guy who did exactly that by making his number a paid one.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23869462

I've muted all phone calls for anyone not on my contact list because of robocalls. It's absurd that this is a problem in 2022.

Minor, but I'd rather click to a web page than have a PDF auto download. Consider this link https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-companies-robocall-d... instead of the PDF.

Some countries in Asia seem to have a simple solution to prevent robocalls: the person who makes the call, pays for the call. They also seem to have functioning DND (do not disturb) registries.

Doesn't completely stop robocalls, but does reduce them by a lot.

That’s the rule here too (except for limited exceptions like toll free), but clearly the cost isn’t stopping them.

Phone calls are dirt cheap to make after all. (Tiny fractions of a cent a minute even at retail rates)

It's only very few countries where the receiver pays [part of] the cost of the call: USA, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore.

I get about one spam call per year in Denmark, and my work number is listed on the company website. However, I doubt it's only the cost of calls that deters spammers, there are probably other regulations in play.

In Europe it's the mix of all laws. Mainly two made it dangerous to have a robot calling:

- you can get fined 220k per unsolicited call and

- fined same ranged amount for data leaks or selling without written consent (which often is a part of contracts but can be striked through by you. The other party have to decide then hehe)

Also, there are regulations that call centers must use real numbers and what's more important: they aren't allowed to hide them.

The mobile/landline Providers can be fined too if they do not cooperative with the local enforcement office and one does not want to have an argument with the office.

I get 1 spam call in 10 years. The last one I got, even "helped" helped me filling out the forms for my country's enforcement office. I said like 4 times I'm not interested in getting sold something -> DIE IN PRISON!!!!

I’ve gone a completely different route and only allow whitelisted calls to my phone - and just to make sure there is no confusion if I received a call or not I’ve disabled voice mail on my line as well.

Anyone who wants to contact me and is not on the whitelist sends postal mail, which is significantly more expensive then a phone call, and that has proven to be a huge deterrent.

Debt collectors chasing down long dormant charge-offs will happily ring my phone off the hook if given a chance but they won’t spring for first class postage or proof of delivery.

is it just me or has the FCC actually been doing useful things for regular people the last ~2 years?

Getting there. Would love to see more!

I cannot understand why my iPhone, which can both id spam likely calls, and mute calls from unknown numbers cannot mute spam likely calls. This is exactly what I need

Well, it's not the cell phone (iPhone or Android) that is doing the spam ID, it's a service being queried as the phone call is being placed. Something like, Alice (the originator) calls Bob (the terminator). Just before the phone network causes Bob's phone to ring, it requests (via the network) a service that says "classify the originating number" and that service might return both a name "Alice" and some form of reputation (like "normal" or "potential spam") which then gets sent to the phone that causes it to start ringing (I know, because I worked at a company providing such information).

What I found works for me is to assign "silence" as the default ring tone, and give each of my contacts a non-default ring tone. If someone not in my contact list calls me, they can leave a voice mail message. Yes, it means I might miss a critical "deal with me now" call, but that's a chance I'm taking.

This is what the pixel phone screen feature does for me.

The difference between my partner and I's phone frustration is obvious. My unknown calls that are questionable get sent to voicemail nicely with a bot asking them what their name is and allowing me to pick up in the middle if I notice something I need to pay attention to, her iphone just rings with a pop up as "SPAM RISK" and she has to mute it, or she blocks unknown numbers and misses calls.

I love this feature on my pixel, but I always have to turn it off when I'm expecting important calls from places like medical offices and such.

I don't know if I'm just lucky, but I've rarely gotten unsolicited (bot)calls in the 10+ years that I've had a google voice + tmobile number. Anything online related I use gv#, for immediate family I use tmobile#. GV, from what I've seen, usually filters out spam calls by default so maybe that's why I haven't noticed.

It’s Google (Voice), not luck. The anti spam is what I miss the most. While using Voice and later Fi and was always wondering if “robocalls” are really as big of a problem as they are made out to be. Now on T-Mobile way more crap gets through so I ended up silencing unknown callers…

For the benefit of receiving less robocalls, I support this.

However, what interested me is the ability of the FCC to govern who can interconnect with whom. Could the FCC say that network providers aren't allowed to carry traffic originating from certain IP addresses or hosts? That would certainly have a profound cooling impact on the internet if they could.

The law that facilitates this action is specific to telephone:

https://www.fcc.gov/TRACEDAct

Since this is the old-school phone system, even though IP is used as a transport, SS7 is the actual protocol being used to interconnect providers. That would be the affected protocol I think.

Not so much anymore. I worked (last day was yesterday) at a company that had services on the call path. The legacy product, supporting CDMA, is on SS7. The newer stuff, supporting LTE, is Internet based (SIP over UDP to us).

I've a free Google Voice number I use as proxy. If I've to use a phone number for one time use (maintenance person, Online waiver forms etc) I give the google voice number. For friends, families, banks, office, I give my ATT number. So far it has kept me away from spams. My Google Voice number gets all the spam and I care less.

Unfortunately whats more annoying these days is getting spam texts claiming to be Amazon saying I’ve won something or have some package that can’t be delivered or whatever, the message includes a shady link I have to click to resolve the issue. I feel like investigating these links and seeing if I can hack the scammers in retaliation.

Reading the announcement, the threats sound like a stretch of the FCC's mandate. Do they really have the authority to remove carriers from the phone network? I'm sure that would be challenged up to the supreme court.

I have a couple thoughts/assumptions, and love feedback on from someone who's more knowledgable than me;

1. Twilio is used for most/many robocalls.

2. If #1 is True, why isn't Twilio on this list of companies?

You can read the documents being sent to these companies, which explain exactly what's going on:

- https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-1032A1.pdf

- https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-1033A1.pdf

- https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-1034A1.pdf

- https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-1035A1.pdf

- https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-1036A1.pdf

- https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-1037A1.pdf

- https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-1038A1.pdf

Tldr:

If you navigate to https://fccprod.servicenowservices.com/rmd?id=rmd_listings and look these companies up, they've submitted nonsense as their explanation of how they're mitigating robocalls.

Oh, and re. Twilio: https://fccprod.servicenowservices.com/rmd?id=rmd_form&table...

Option 1 is checked, so every call that their service originates can be traced back to them, so they are more than compliant with regulations here.

if you're not texting me or emailing me i am ignoring you...most of the calls i get are from recruiters talking about a stupid java job or something that i don't want

I have noticed that my robocalls have fallen off a cliff the past couple of years, I'm not sure exactly has happened. I have even gotten a new number last year.

Just throwing this out there, that when I get spam calls, I answer it and tell them im answering it to waste their time.

I am not getting a lot of spam calls compared to past years.

Texts however.

Awesome, the FCC has finally decided to stop helping scammers to call me.

I did not know they were helping scammers to call me in the first place.

Tangential side note: I get that it's the original source, but linking directly to a pdf is not ideal, especially on mobile.

Viewing PDF isn't too much of a problem on mobile - just a little more zooming and panning than on desktop.

You have to download it and open it in another app. I find that pretty painful.

What browser doesn't have a built-in PDF reader?

Also especially important that a compromised PDF is usually an easy vector point for exploiting systems.

PDF Transcription: "-WASHINGTON, October 3, 2022—The FCC’s Robocall Response Team today announced first-of-their-kind Enforcement Bureau orders to begin removing seven voice service providers from the agency’s Robocall Mitigation Database. Providers must take key robocall mitigation steps – including implementing STIR/SHAKEN throughout their IP networks – and if they fail to demonstrate that they have met these requirements, they can be removed from the database and other networks will no longer take their traffic.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel: “This is a new era. If a provider doesn’t meet its obligations under the law, it now faces expulsion from America’s phone networks. Fines alone aren't enough. Providers that don't follow our rules and make it easy to scam consumers will now face swift consequences.” What’s New: Today’s Enforcement Bureau orders demanded that Akabis, Cloud4, Global UC, Horizon Technology Group, Morse Communications, Sharon Telephone Company, and SW Arkansas Telecommunications and Technology show cause within 14 days as to why the FCC should not remove them from the database. Removal from the database would require all intermediate providers and terminating voice service providers to cease carrying the companies’ traffic. If that were to occur, all calls from these providers’ customers would be blocked and no traffic originated by the provider would reach the called party."

Full version: https://pastebin.com/xDLxLxv4

My personal phone is also my business phone which means a potential customer could be calling me from anywhere. My project is software that is in open beta, so the calls could originate from anywhere in the world. If I simply ignore any calls that are not in my contact list, I risk alienating a customer. Some might leave a voicemail, but I certainly can't count on it.

are robocalls illegal in the UK? I’ve never got one

About once a year I get a "I heard you were in an accident" robocall. But the main reason they're not a problem in the UK or Europe is that the caller pays for the mobile airtime; which is standardized at something like $0.20p/minute. Robocalling 1 million people would cost you £200k -- not generally cost-effective.

In the US, the callee pays for airtime; so the cost to the robocaller is fractions of a cent, and the 1-million-person robocall thing is a lot cheaper, and thus more cost-effective. Literally all the US has to do to make the problem go away is to charge people who call mobile phones $0.30 per minute. For legitimate callers, this will be nothing; generally included in their monthly plan; but it would cripple the entire robocalling industry.

>In the US, the callee pays for airtime

that is literally shocking. so not only are robocallers irritating, they’re also costing you money? America needs to get its shit together

This is rarely true 2022. Most phone plans have unlimited (unmetered) minutes. Back when people had to pay for their minutes there was a LOT more pressure to keep spammers off of cell numbers.

My first spam call on a cellphone circa 1998 had the poor girl on the other end literally crying after I started going off about how much money that call was costing me. I didn’t mean to make her cry but it was costing me money after all…

Mobile numbers in the US are also assigned geographically alongside landlines. So it's not possible ahead of time to know if a number is mobile or not, making caller pays very unpredictable.

Very light response but it's something.

>Very light response but it's something.

The FCC is going to block all access to other telecoms from these companies unless they implement STIR/SHAKEN, essentially putting them out of business unless they comply with the FCC's order.

Granted, it's not a firing squad for the C-suite or a cruise missile on their offices, but it's essentially a corporate death penalty for the non-compliant telecoms. I wouldn't call that a "light" response.

Or am I missing something?

I misread.

That seems reasonable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com