But that blocking expires, and of course it doesn’t stop them from spoofing another number next time around.
I’ve gotten the call from a number close to mine, but what really pissed us off was the time it claimed to be from the county emergency notification number. :mad:
Many scams target the elderly, and recently vets and active duty and their families have been targeted. Not sure if laws have been enacted in response, but enforcement agencies can prioritize their resources to try to protect more vulnerable or targeted demographics.
The elderly can be naive, lonely, or mentally deminished, making them easier marks. Vets get suckered by promises of special “veterans only” deals, some of which are presented as government backed.
Hi spammer. (offline12)
Reported.
I’m surprised that the mods haven’t pounced on our guest yet!
Anyway, for the 2014 crowd in this thread, get the real deal at nomorobo.com.
As long as you have a phone service that allows multi-ring, you can configure your phone to use nomorobo, and it’s free (and the FCC likes it).
They have a huge database of junk caller numbers, and they simply pick up the phone before you do. Since the CID info gets in after the first ring, you hear the phone ring once and then silence. I smile each time this happens (almost daily), as I realize that nomorobo zapped another scammer. They theoretically have some kind of Turing test or audio captcha that they present suspected false positives, but I don’t even know how to hear it from the caller’s point of view.
To augment this, one can add a call blocker device (I use this one). The nomorobo folks don’t block all calls, as their name implies, they are more about robocallers, so when I get some person asking for me by name, and the discussing bank loans or solar power, I hit the button and they go away. No need to interact with them any more than that, since that number is now blacklisted.
The Achilles heel of both of these techniques is CID spoofing, but it is amazing that even today most scammers send some nonrandom CID info that can be blocked.
This, but what really needs a good pitting is the Caller-ID (CID) protocol and the numskulls in the telecommunications industry who designed it in such a way that CID-spoofing is even possible.
What in the ever-loving fuck were they thinking? Or smoking?
The CID protocol should never ever have allowed the caller to have any control over what originating phone number goes out in the CID. The phone company (at the caller’s end) should be the one that places that information in that field. It makes sense for the caller to be able to put whatever he wants into the Caller Name field, but his phone company should maintain full control over the Caller Number field.
They way they did it instead is a total clusterfuck. The entire body of annoyed telephone customers should riot in the streets until the FCC sues the collective telecommunications industry to force them to fix this disaster.
My solution: I NEVER answer my phone until I hear the caller talking to my answering machine first and I know who it is. Period. My answering machine is my gatekeeper. Anybody who wants to talk to me, talks to my answering machine first. I don’t even have a phone that displays the incoming CID, and I wouldn’t pay a dime extra for one that does, because the whole protocol is totally shitfucking useless, the way they did it.
I realize it has turned into a massive clusterfuck and I agree that telemarketers that spoof CID should have all their fingers broken slowly and painfully, but my understanding is what they were thinking was that spoofing would allow businesses to set the CID info for all their lines to one central number rather than letting customers see the specific line the employee was calling from.
The CID number wouldn’t necessarily have to be the same as the number the caller is actually calling from. It can be an arbitrary number, BUT, the customer should advise his phone company what number should go there, and the phone company should inject that into the data field. The phone company should have some responsibility to validate the number. And the customer should not be able to change the number at will other than by asking their phone company to do it.
This may have been workable at some point in the past, but IP telephony has changed the meaning of “customer” and “phone company.” I suspect that very few, if any, shady robocallers are using traditional telecom phone service to generate their calls.
At some point, close to the call originator, the call has to be connected to a real phone network via an established telecom phone service (shady or otherwise). If the protocol required that the CID-originator-number be injected into the data at that point, then it would presumably be possible to trace scam calls with their phony CID’s back as least as far as that point. That phone company could then be held responsible for allowing phony CID’s.
When i get one of these scam calls, i immediately speak in broken Portuguese…after a few minutes, the guy usually gives up.
Our company owns a variety of phone numbers, and for convenience purposes will select the nearest-matching-area-code number for the CID when outbound calls are made. While calling any of these numbers will end up back with us (and ideally with the nearest appropriate salesperson), not all the area codes could be purchased through our primary VOIP company. (They’re purchased through a different phone provider, and re-routed to our primary VOIP provider). Meaning we’ll on occasion ask our VOIP provider to use a CID that they can’t confirm that we own.
Not that I’m saying your idea is impossible, or shouldn’t be tried… it’s just a bit more complicated than that in practice.
IMHO phonecalls should be more like emails back before SPF records and such… the headers indicate a history of travel for the information, back to a point where it’s clear someone’s oversight is lacking, and they can [del]be beaten with sticks[/del] have their upstream shut off.
and then be beaten with sticks
I agree with the first part, but I believe the second part is incorrect. My personal theory is that the scammers use the do not call list as a DO CALL list.
A couple of years ago, after I’d received a few scam calls I added my number to the do not call list. Within the next couple of weeks the volume of scam calls I received ballooned to five or six a day.
Earlier this year I installed NoMoRobo which blocks most scam calls after one ring.
Anyway, I recommend avoiding the do not call list as it not only doesn’t work, it seems to encourage the criminals.
In response to the OP, yes, I’ve noticed that more of the scam calls seem to be coming from my area code lately.
I have also noticed that no CID calls seem to be getting through NoMoRobo. All I see is “out of area”. I’ve set up my line with my provider to block all non-CID calls, but I understand the caller can get through by simply dialing *82 first. So I either have to listen to six rings or pick up and immediately hang up.
Some may, but it’s much simpler for an auto-dialer to dial all possible digits from 000-0000 to 999-9999, omitting the obvious, useless blocks like 411-, 911-, etc., and that way they miss no one. I think some systems even keep track of which ones didn’t answer or were busy, and dial them again later, or maybe they just dial everything over and over again every few days, regardless of response. Volume is what brings the money in, since their scam-response rate must be extremely low.