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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

All that I want is this.

Right after I get a call I don't want, have another number that I can call. If I call that number, I'm telling the government, "My last call was an unwanted robocall."

Trace that call to its source (as best as that can be determined). If that source has generated a lot of calls recently, and is not on a white list, it is blocked. Any attempts from that number to make a phone call go to a recorded message saying that it is blocked, with instructions for how to get unblocked.

Any phone number that gets blocked several times in a week is permanently blocked.

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After I get an unwanted robocall, I want to dial "*RC" for "RoboCall". I get a credit on my next phone bill for 25 cents. The phone company charges the originator 50 cents. Now the phone company has an incentive to track all robocalls. And I have a little compensation for my time.

If the phone company is going to charge the originator, they'd have to verify that the call you reported was actually an illegal RoboCall. Some dishonest people might report people whom they know but don't want to hear from as RoboCalls. Others might erroneously report organizations that are legally allowed to call them, like companies with which they had a business relationship or political candidates. Verifying that each claim was valid would probably cost the phone company much more than 50 cents.

> If the phone company is going to charge the originator, they'd have to verify that the call you reported was actually an illegal RoboCall

If I'm getting unwanted calls, I don't really care whether the government thinks they are legal, I just want them stopped.

How about this solution: if the caller ID is on a whitelist, it goes straight through. If not, the caller gest asked a question (which should filter out robots). If there are determined human unwanted callers, a second line of defence would be to ask them to key in a 4 digit code (and I'd only give the solution to people who wanted to call me).

Google voice lets you do something along those lines. I personally found it incredibly tedious and quickly turned it off.

I think the grandparents idea of *RC is spot on. Verification can be done through volume; i.e. a one-off may do nothing but repeated reports indicate something is up. Just like reporting spam in email.

Along those lines, some sort of charge-to-call system may work. Like calling collect in reverse, but the receiving party can decide to not charge the fee if its someone they know (or flip it, hitting # within 30 seconds of an inbound call will capture the fee and disconnect)

That's a great suggestion.

I would improve it even further: Charge not $0.50, but amount depending on how many complaints that caller is getting. The more complaints - the higher is per-complaint charge. All the way to $10 per unwanted call.

First few complaints per month - no charges. After that fines go to $1 per reported unwanted call and up.

Phone company gets 50% or the charges. The remainder is deducted from call recipient bill.

If caller is legally allowed to harass call recipient (for example in debt collection case) - that could be solved by special amendment.

Whether the call is robocall or any other unwanted call - it does not really matter.

Maybe instead of blocking, put this caller on a "hellban" list, where the calls go through but are redirected to robolisteners. Perhaps patch two robocallers with each other.

Perhaps patch two robocallers with each other

</meta>

That's exactly the solution I imagined. Dial something like *69 and have the sender marked as a robocaller. It shouldn't be hard to find the people getting thousands of reports every day and shut off their phone service.

How to deal with 4chan style shenanigans?

You'd have to get the victim to call you before you could mark them as a robo-caller, so it's hard to see how there could be false positives for anyone who wasn't calling lots and lots of people.

There actually was a mechanism designed into the * 69 service for a situation like this, but it was meant more for threatening calls or things that required police action.

You could dial * 57 after hanging up on the caller and the calling number would be recorded at the phone company, where the police could obtain it if was determined to be necessary.

tldr; the mechanism is there, but probably will never be used.

Several months ago I was getting fax calls at 1am-2am repeatedly. The phone company told me to use this service to mark the calls. However, it turns out that since the nature of the calls weren't technically "harassing", they couldn't do anything about it. Apparently if someone calls me in the middle of the day and says "penis", that could get them in trouble; but waking my wife and I night after night is not harassing. Go figure.

So the police couldn't legally do anything, and the phone company wouldn't do anything. That's when I finally dumped traditional telephone service. If the phone company isn't interested in giving me a product with the features I want, I'll find someone else who will.

Now I've got VoIP service. I can see a complete record of who called me (subject to CID spoofing), and I can set up blacklists for incoming numbers according to my own whims.

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