STIR?SHAKEN is here (supposedly). A news release from the FCC dated June 30, 2021, is headlined “STIR/SHAKEN BROADLY IMPLEMENTED STARTING TODAY.”
“At last, STIR/SHAKEN standards are a widely used reality in American phone networks,”said Rosenworcel. “While there is no silver bullet in the endless fight against scammers, STIR/SHAKEN will turbo-charge many of the tools we use in our fight against robocalls: from consumer apps and network-level blocking, to enforcement investigations and shutting down the gateways used by international robocall campaigns. This is a good day for American consumers who – like all of us – are sick and tired of illegal spoofed robocalls.”
I’ve had 3 or 4 car warranty calls since June 30th, and I have a spam-blocker on my phone, so I’m guessing STIR/SHAKEN isn’t proving as effective as expected.
At this point, let us all pause for a bit of spammer entertainment and read, or re-read, the sad tale of Releasha Jones, the spamee who could never escape:
One day, maybe a year ago, my iPhone showed a call as being from “Spam Risk”. I appreciate them doing that, as those are more than half my calls, and it’s so empowering to ignore Mr. Spamalot Q. Risk …
(my friends text me, they never call without a “Hey, can you talk?” text first)
That was a thing of beauty. Releasha Jones Shall Live Forever!!
A few posts later in the thread, dougie_monty described doing the same thing I’ve done a couple of times - the scammers seem to think that Thomas or Lesley Rogers has my phone number (judging by the scam texts). The texts, I largely ignore - though they’ve gone from assuming I’m a Democrat to assuming I’m a Trumpist.
But when I’ve gotten a call asking for one of the two by name, I’ve gotten tearful and announced the death of Tom (in the very car they are trying to sell me a warranty for), or Lesley (that one was a roofing company, I think). Sadly for the entertainment value, THOSE calls have tended to stop - I guess when you’ve got a live humanoid placing the calls, they get horrified and pass the word about the death in the family.
Oooh - just remembered I must change my phone message. This isn’t quite the “scam call” realm, but certainly a nuisance. Last fall, we started car shopping. Unfortunately, to get any kind of pricing info (even when going through services like Costco or the credit union) you have to give them a phone number to reach you.
This, naturally, resulted in my getting inundated with call after call after call from desperate car salesmen.
I finally changed my outgoing message to say something like “This is Mama Zappa. Please leave a message. If you are calling from a car dealership, please leave only one; multiple messages will not increase your chances of getting through to me and WILL increase the odds that I block the phone number”.
Pretty sure I never changed that back…
I was still getting spammed with emails for several months afterward.
Yeah, that is one clever woman. She’s in a city covered by two area codes and both are blocked in case she borrows a phone. We don’t know anyone else who would be calling from those areas.
Legally, she’s not supposed to contact us at all and that was her idea.
This exists. I have an app on my iPhone called WideProtect which you can set to block any series of numbers. There was a while when I kept getting multiple spam calls a day from numbers where only the last few digits would change, fake example: 818-707-3510, then 818-707-3511, and so on. So I can set it to block every number from 818-707-35xx.
After reading this, I decided if Bennie called, I’d call him back. Nice guy, he said my car was ready, so I said “Great, Bennie, thanks! Um, which car…?” “It’s the Chevy.” Well, that wasn’t exactly exciting, but I was curious, so I said “Oh, of course. I’ll be right over.”
It was a Camaro SS !
2011 or 12, I think… anyhow, there’s a V-8 in there. On the way home, I did 0 to 60 on the freeway on-ramp in less than 6 seconds!
Definitely not true. I’ve gotten six calls from “The Stade Center” (I assume the real thing behind the spoofed number) in the past two days. No idea of the scam, since NoMoRobo blocks it. I’ve gotten multiple calls from another spoofed number also.
My understanding is that bigger carriers have signed on, but smaller ones haven’t. Eventually the bigger carriers are supposed to block all traffic from carriers who haven’t implemented STIR/SHAKEN, which will either kill the small carriers or force them to use it.
The number of spam calls has dramatically increased in the past week or so, and I wonder if the spammers are getting desperate as they see their easy path to their victims might be taken away.
That Planet Money episode is interesting, but the narrator doesn’t seem to realize that she is not talking to a human, but a robot programmed to pretend (badly) to be a human, sort of a poor Liza. It IS a robocall, but masquerades as not. Fools a lot of people.
It could also be a human on the other end, except the human is merely playing back prerecorded messages on a computer to hide the fact that they have a foreign accent.
Though that was 2013. “Conversational AI voicebots” are definitely a thing now. Although this blog claims they’re not the same thing a robocalls.
You know how our elected officials can’t pass any bill without a catchy name/acronym? It’s a convoluted & forced acronym by some bureaucrat that was a James Bond fan. Seriously!
It stands for STIR , short for Secure Telephony Identity Revisited & SHAKEN system, short for Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs