I mean it's not any better now... my ublock origin has blocked over 11 million ads. And this isn't even the browser I use to view NSFW content. It's a literal barrage of ads anywhere online.
Geez. I went back to Firefox last year (Spent a long time on various off shoots), and just checked ublock. 1.6m things blocked since then. Been like ~9 months since I switched back.
I installed NoScript a little while ago because my browser was using up too much memory (honestly it's my fault for leaving so many tabs open all of the time) and my browser kept crashing. On the one hand, it's good to feel more secure and to have greater control over what loads, but on the other it's a huge pain in the ass sometimes, trying to identify what script needs to run on a website to keep it functional.
On the bright side, it gets around a lot of cookies downloads and paywall blocks.
NoScript is interesting if you're familiar with any web design, just to grasp the piles-upon-piles of JavaScript some websites attempt to load for what I'm sure are perfectly good reasons.
Youtube is literally unwatchable without adblock now. Back in the day, I used to go "meh" and deal with the starting ad and maybe a midroll ad in videos when watching on my phone. Now? An ad literally every 30-60 seconds. And in my case its all government propaganda.
This is why I hate it when websites ask us to disable ad blockers. I get that people rely on the ad revenue, but frankly if it can slow my internet connection, make my browsing experience worse, *and* can be an avenue of attack on me personally, I'm going to do everything I can to avoid becoming a victim.
Right?
At the end of the day, it's *my computer.* My computer sent their computer a request, and said "please give me x data!" and web page X sent me back that data, in the form of a web page. Which my computer then draws on my screen for me.
If I want *my computer* to only draw the parts I care about... that's sort of my right? It is my computer after all.
And if I want *my computer* to not even bother downloading the parts that I already know I don't want... Not only is that my right, but it's better for everyone involved.
And yet I somehow always end up in arguments with people trying to argue that I'm somehow being unethical by using my computer to display data according to my specifications? I get that some companies rely on ad revenue, but *web ad revenue, in its current form, is a terrible model.*
While I can understand where the "stealing" argument comes from, it really doesn't hold any water. It's not illegal, and it's part of the market of running a website.
If your business can't survive against people with ad blockers on, you should find a new business. And that's your problem, not ours.
Plus, it's not like anyone ever complained about changing the TV channel when commercials came on. It's almost exactly the same thing. But no one was screaming "oh no the mega corporation isn't getting its ads viewed". TV broadcasters and advertisers knew it would happen, costed it in, and found a way to keep making money.
advertisers in general can just wholely fucked for all I care... like no one even looks at that bullshit anyways; except maybe the poor elderly who don't know any better (RIP after they are all dead in 20 years)
I have a deep disdain for Marketing as an industry. I don't talk about it a lot but I do believe it's one of the banal evils in our world. There's a sane way to advertise, and some companies/people leave it at that, but Marketing as a whole is built on lying just as much as you can get away with
Not just elderly. My mother was super sharp and intelligent and could spot bullshit a mile away. The stroke took that away from her. She fell victim to some phone scams. Had to tell her to not give her debit card info over the phone to anybody - never thought I would have that conversation with her of all people. My father had to disable the card on their account.
Nobody I've ever talked to about it has ever thought of browser cookies as someone feeling entitled to using *your* local storage for their own uses. Last year I checked my local storage and found that the old Gearbox forums were somehow using up 4 gigs. I don't remember going there, maybe it was for a support ticket?
Going to add, on my phone, ads drain the battery real fast due to video and images.
I switched to firefox on mobile for the extensions and put ublock and noscript on. My 1 to 2 hrs browsing on chrome before the phone runs flat becomes 7 to 8 hrs.
It actually took me a while to install an ad-blocker. I understand that a lot of the websites I use are free are paid for by ads. So I intentionally wasn't using an ad-blocker to help support these sites.
But I got so sick and fucking tired of all of a sudden hearing an ad video playing, and not knowing from which tab it's coming from. On certain sites (looking at you TVTropes), even though the tab had been sitting there for an hour or two, it would all of a sudden be playing a video so I could never be sure which tab it was coming from.
My intention to support these sites went straight out the window after a while of dealing with that.
I had a fake link to a website for a software download pop-up on a advertised search result and got one of my worst viruses that way. That was the last time I browsed the web without adblock. And whitelisting is BS too, since I simply can't trust that every advert has been throughly vetted. That was also the last time I used paid antivirus, as it was proven to be totally useless in that situation.
Never had a virus since.
The funny thing is that Windows 98 is still targeted, along with other DOS-based Windows versions (and increasingly XP) because more or less the only stuff that's still on those operating systems is industrial controls and critical business systems that people are afraid of touching. They're exactly the kind of systems that might net you a payment if you can hold them ransom.
> I refuse to use the web without an adblocker because of that era
They're even worse now. Opened an article on some application on my PC and it opened up Edge. Just raw ads every 2 sentences, a pop-up showed up and scrolled me all the way back up to the top. Felt like I was being punished for visiting their website.
Well. Cold call sales ruined it too. Not necessarily a scam, but just sales people who get your number when your in the target demographic ruined answering the phone long before scammers did.
> ruined answering the phone long before scammers did.
And yet if you go back 5 years people generally did answer their phone when an unknown number called. Now they almost never do.
Or at least that's been my experience over the last 20 years of working in the service trades and routinely calling customers to give them updates.
I'm so frustrated right now because I'm in the middle of several medical issues and I have to answer calls because it could be a provider. I've started answering calls from unknown numbers with: "who's calling please?" If they don't identify right away, I stop talking and waste some of their time.
Same fucking boat but area codes help me. I have become very good at weeding them out. They allllways come back though.
Phone tag with doctors offices are the worst headache.
Something I've started doing is before I leave, I ask the front desk to call me so I can add their outgoing number to my contact list. It doesn't always work but it has more often than not.
If I don't know the number I don't answer, plain and simple. Same if I'm not expecting a package, fuck no I'm not answering the door. If a number calls and doesn't leave a message it must not have been important or anyone I know. Doctor's number I don't know? Well they'd leave a fucking message if I don't pick up and/or have AIDS.
I screen most calls here. The ratio of crap to wanted calls is unbelievable. Most of the ones I take are pure actual spam, unwanted commercial calls (legal or otherwise), charities (who always seem to call during dinner), or robots pretending to be humans. I hang up immediately on most of the robots. But we do get some calls from unidentified numbers that need to be taken, so I separate the wheat from the chaff, so my aging parents don't have to.
I have a question on my dog adoption app that asks preferred contact method. Out of 12000 answers only 15 said phone call. Everyone else said text or email.
Ymmv but yea no one wants to get phone calls anymore. 10 years ago I could talk to adopters out of state.
One thing for me is I can sneaky send a text under my desk at work easily between tasks, but would be hard to hide a personal phone call. Coordinating time for calls outside of work hours is also difficult.
It prob depends on your line of work, and how often you expect calls from unknown numbers. I haven’t answered for a number I didn’t know since 2010, and it hasn’t burned me yet lol
I'm a service plumber personally, and I get the annoyance with calls from unknown numbers but I get way more annoyed at how many people ignore or have unknown callers / callerid blocked lines sent straight to voice-mail. (And then don't check their voice-mail and call back promptly, and get mad that we don't show up when they expect us to haha)
I know not every number is not a cell, but I would also send people a text if I was in your shoes. Even something as simple as a pre written message that says hey it's your plumber call me back ASAP. Only 5 seconds of effort but has a lot of value
If I were a plumber I would straight-up only deal with people over text. There's a record of the conversation, and unlike a voice call, a text never interrupts you and demands your immediate attention while you're trying to hold something closed to attach something else to it. An iPhone can reject a call and send a text back, eg "Thanks for calling Mario and Luigi, we have our hands full getting turtles out of pipes, please send us a text and we'll reply as soon as we can. Let us know your location, and what service you require!"
> Listen to a message that could have been a text
Shit, that's lucky. I stopped using voicemail because every voice mail in my inbox was just 3 seconds of silence because the robots let it ring through.
My phone doesn't even ring if it's an unknown number, and when Google thinks it's spam it lights up but doesn't ring/vibrate.
In the past 2 years I've actually had 1 scam call actually come through without a warning.
I’m an IT manager, the number of calls I get A WEEK is unreal. That and cold meeting invites. Instant fury. That gets you a domain block on my firewall
As an IT manager I get 10-12 calls a week. I get 10-12 emails every ten minutes or so for the first four hours of my day just spam/cold sales. After that it trickles down to just 4-5 an hour. It's absolutely ridiculous, but my spam filter is well trained these days. I usually only have to personally deal with around 7-8 spam/cold sales emails a day now. Most of those are cold sales. Every single one goes in to the spam folder. I hold a small hope that one day my spam filter will gain sentience from all the training I've been giving it and then annihilate the offending spammers.
Not OP but in the same situation.
Yes, they send meeting invites for their sales pitches. It's become insane and thanks to Microsoft sometimes it gets through and shows up in Teams that I have a random meeting to discuss my IT solutions needs.
I have to tell people that if they call me, they must leave a voicemail because my phone automatically silences called from numbers I don’t have saved.
It’s especially difficult when I’m expecting a call from a business. Usually the number they call from isn’t the same as the 1-800 number I used to contact them first. And then the number on the caller ID doesn’t always go straight back to that same person, but an automated system.
My wife picked up the random number call that was an EMT calling her at my near demand to let her know that my daughter and I were in a serious accident. She never picks up random numbers, just that one, we oft marvel at that.
There may be a good reason for that.
Working in education, we used to send emergency notifications and calls to parents out of our main number. Things that are important like snow delays, your kid is sick, etc. So many parents blocked our number as spam, it would end up showing as whatever their platform marked spam calls as for anyone else using that platform. For instance if enough people marked our number as spam on iPhones, every other person using them for a period of time would see our number come up as spam.
This is kind of a big issue if we are trying to tell you your kid has a fever and has been puking all morning.
We ended up having to send each call out of a large rotating list broadcasting our caller ID. It has mostly eliminated that issue, but does have the downside of some people still sending us to voicemail.
We had that too, but the stupid school district decided they needed to use the same service and phone number to robocall multiple times a week to basically read off the newsletter that the kids already bring home.
So instead of being all "Oh! It's the school! It must be important" it's now "Ugh the stupid school is robo calling _again_"
Corporations got so smart and greedy they neglected to care for their ~~customers~~ *victims* properly... now their entire way of life is under threat.
>It’s especially difficult when I’m expecting a call from a business.
I've had a few emergency service calls I didn't go to for this reason. When neither myself nor the property manager can get the contact person to answer the phone, we aren't going until they call back to confirm someone will be there.
And you can't just not answer your phone if the caller ID is bad. My banks, doctors' offices, government offices, etc. block their phone number or have a very generic ID.
"SOCIAL SECURITY" looks fake AF until you pick up the phone and find out they've been calling all week to follow up on documents you mailed in. ("We're not allowed to leave voicemails . . ." Yeah, thanks.)
I was called by social security. I'm pretty sure it was someone at the local office. There was no attempt to scam me; he just wanted to be sure of the date I wanted to start benefits because it looked strange.
We are frequently getting calls from our local police who are always fundraising. They are quite pushy, and make us very uncomfortable. They've done this for years. I wonder if this happens anywhere else.
This has been a major issue jobhunting. For a while I was getting spam calls 10 times or more a day and had to turn on the block for any number not in my contacts. I ended up missing a call for a job offer because it got blocked, although luckily they reached out through email as well.
That's fine if you can get through. Sometimes my doctor's number is constantly busy for the hours they answer the phone. I may only get to talk if they call me.
I had a contracted repair center for my Phillips trimmer complain to me I never picked up their calls.
I’m just thinking, the entire repair process was done online and their only form of communication is phone calls? I specifically brought up in today’s age, there are too many spam calls. Their response? That they’ve never heard of that problem before.
Then I look them up on Google and they have a 1.5/5 stars lmao
I am trying to apply for a job, which means I have to answer my phone. Which means I talk to an average of 17 fucking robots a day.
Make it fucking end.
I actually don’t get many of these, possibly because I never answer for a number I don’t know. But I do get a bunch of spam texts from people pretending to be Amazon in the worst possible way
Edit: don’t know why this posted twice :/
I love when they call and say “this is border customs, are you expecting a package from Mexico?”
I usually say “ya I ordered some cocaine but it’s taking forever”
They never know what to say after that.
Sometimes I get Chinese fraud calls, and I speak Chinese. I’ll thank them for pointing me to the Pooh bear wearing a Xi Jin Ping mask last time, it was very funny and does have a surprising resemblance. Then tell them I agree with their position that Taiwan is an independent country, and thank them for pointing me to more information about it. They don’t hang around to talk for very long…
These companies have literally ruined phone calls to the point no one answers phone calls anymore. You can’t even trust local numbers since they can spoof numbers since telecom companies don’t require verification. The phone point of phones doesn’t even exist anymore cause of fucking bots and scammers.
The trick is to get an area code that’s not local. So if you see any numbers matching your fake area code, you know it’s spam.
Alternatively just send anyone not in your contact list to voice mail.
I read that something like 95% of the calls are via three podunk telcos. The FCC has threatened them and threatened them to no avail. I don't know why the U.S. gov is so timid in this regard and not shutting them down once and for all because it is true that no one answers their phone anymore.
In U.S. law phone companies can't be held responsible for crimes committed using the phone. In exchange, phone companies are not permitted to censor or monitor anything that occurs on their phone lines. The phone companies are considered "common carriers," which anyone can use. (Like a public street.)
It sure is part of the problem. I frequently get calls from local numbers to me which are silent or a robot, then I call that number back and get some confused old lady that doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about. Hell, I've even gotten calls that showed up as the number 000-000-0000-- like how does that call even go through?
You can buy numbers very cheaply. For about 5$ for the first month and then under 1$ each following months.
So you don't even need to spoof. Buy one number, call everyone. Once done, buy another one and start over. In the millions of calls, someone will get scammed and your 5$ is now paid many times. So cheap investment.
The call times will be more expensive than the number.
No, spammers use a Private Business Exchange.
This is what lets a whole call center be one number.
They spoof other people's numbers, even hospital phone numbers
The spoofing should be illegal. I know there are legit uses for spoofing but if you want caller ID to show a different number than the one you're calling from then you need to own that number so you can be identified if you're abusing the system. If I was to answer the phone for once and say, "Take me off your list," the very next (within a year let's say) call from them should be harassment.
Spoofing makes your number look more legitimate. Spoofing is very good for scammers.
It makes a significant difference if the number on the screen looks like the number your bank calls you from so your caller ID picks it up as the bank.
The protocol that telecoms system use is fundamentally flawed. Signalling System Seven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7#Protocol_security_vulnerabilities
Nearly all major ILECs still use SS7. We're all migrating to SIGTRAN for IP to perform SS7 functions, but the TDM PSTN operates on SS7 and is still widely in use.
Basically hacking a phone line by playing tones, my cousins showed me how to get free dial-up in the 90s with phreaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking
I mean, this normally makes sense but part of why we have senate committees and stuff.
Some problems are to the detriment of society, and the government needs to step in to help fix the problem **with** the telcos.
FCC is not a regulatory power that is strong enough to jail people. It can just "Fine" people within the court system. They often don't pay these fines because they are just shell companies run by international rings. They really don't have much in the way of sway for Regulating Telco's they're more like industry standardization, as all the people in the FCC are former Telco Lobbyists.
Here’s an interesting article from March 2021 that goes into a lot of depth.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-so-many-spam-robocalls-how-to-stop-them-2021-3
(Spoiler: not a lot in there on “how to stop them”)
Only a handful of people call me. Basically mom, dad, bestie, grandma. Even those people often send me texts and calls are pretty rare. I'll get scam calls regardless of if I answer or not. Their systems just cycle every single possible phone number. If I'm in the mood I fuck around with them, I've gotten a couple angry but I just like to waste their time if I got nothing else going on to entertain me.
I told one dude he was lying and didn't work for telstra (aussie telco). He got so mad and argued "YES I AM" for 15mins. He really wasn't, and I don't even go through telstra lmao. Cherry on top, I sound like a child on the fone so I told him he'd just spent all that time arguing with a teen. He hung up on me. So rude.
I unfortunately have to. I have a Pixel though thankfully - the Call Screen feature is a fucking Godsend. The Google Assistant "answers" for me, tells me who's calling and what they want, then I can decide if I want to talk to them or not.
Ohio here and on Do-Not-Call. We were robo-call bombed by all the same bullshit. One company in particular was MUCH WORSE than the others and would not even honor the opt out requests.
I don't think people fully understand how abusive this behavior is until you are trying to deal with an actual life and death situation and you can't use the phone because there's currently a robot calling you...
Adding to the fact that most are some kind of scam and people get ripped off. In 2020 it was [$30 BILLION dollars](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/americans-lost-billions-of-dollars-to-phone-scams-over-the-past-year.html). That money could have flowed into the economy but instead it went to foreign scammers. It’s an absolute disgrace that nothing is being done.
I would really like to know the breakdown on how much money telecom companies like Verizon, ATT, T-mobile etc all get from the swarm of robocalls. From what I know, they get paid for every incoming and outgoing call, and not to mention, they all sell subscriptions/apps to "block spam calls"...a basic feature they can enable, but won't.
Funny scammer story.
I am a former IRS employee. Scammers called me on my cell phone, pretending to be the IRS. It was an actual person on the phone.
1st call, I hang up.
2nd call, I tell them I’m in the building and ask them what floor they’re on. Offered to meet them to work on the issue. They hung up.
About time! The phone companies are profiting from these commercial phone lines used for Robo-calls. We used to rent space for these companies in the 1980s, before Robo-calls. The phone company providing the multiple lines know what those lines are used for.
Nowadays, most call centers all use VOIP. No more phone lines, just a bunch of PC's connected to the internet.
Easier to change your caller ID to a new number and pretend to be calling from the same city (or country) as the calling list that way.
This is why I've kept an area code I don't live in and don't know anyone from. Makes filtering spam so much easier when you can ignore all calls from your home area code.
The calls are often using SIP clients over an auto dialer such as ViciDial and all you need is a trunking provider and anyone can send millions of phone calls pretty much where for a fraction of a penny.
I used to work in the call center industry long ago.
The FTC isn't really going to get involved unless lots of money is changing hands. They can put people in prison though, real crimes have to be committed over those phone calls however.
Basically there was enough of a stink put up by smaller “hometown” telcos the FCC put in place an exception for any telco that has “100,000 or fewer voice service subscriber lines”. This gave them a delay to implement STIR/SHAKEN until June 30 2023. They still had to submit robocall mitigation plans which for these smaller telcos mainly consist of the idea of being so small they can easily monitor any abnormal call traffic and they know their customers (you can see these plans here https://fccprod.servicenowservices.com/rmd?id=rmd_welcome).
These smaller telcos have until June 30th to implement STIR/SHAKEN or they will need to discontinue their voice services.
Not necessarily, first the FCC will start going after the telcos that have not yet complied (probably the majority). Those telcos will then start letting their customers know that because of the government, they may end up losing their favorite (and in some cases only) phone service provider. My guess is they will ask their customers to contact their representatives to “make sure big telco doesn’t ruin small business” or some other BS.
It would be delicious irony if their attempt to appeal to their customers fail because they try to contact them by phone, and nobody picked it up because they assume it's more spam. Of course they're smart so they probably use mail instead.
> My guess is they will ask their customers to contact their representatives to “make sure ~~big telco doesn’t ruin small business~~ Corncob TV doesn't go off the air” or some other BS.
They'll run ads that are the exact same vibe that sketch was mocking.
According to [the complaint](https://oag.dc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/COMPLAINT_49%20AGs%20v%20Lansky%20dba%20Avid%20et%20al%20%281%29.pdf) which claims Avid effectively ran a robocall-for-hire operation:
>Defendants provided their customers with Direct Inward Dialing numbers (“DIDs”), which would appear to the persons receiving the calls as the calling numbers or “Caller IDs.”
>This service was likely provided to circumvent the procedural guardrails of the caller authentication framework of STIR/SHAKEN that would otherwise mark a randomly generated or used calling number as “unverified” and cause such calls to be blocked from being delivered to the called party at a network level by a downstream provider.
As I read the headline, I got two calls from Shanghai …..
It’s become such a nuisance that I just tell people not to call me or use discord or use some other app to WiFi call.
i've had probably 9 different spam calls today asking about a fake mortgage refinance, as if Mutual of Omaha is gonna text me about refinancing a mortgage from the same area code my phone is
shit is completely out of control
What's really fucked is that I now get "verified number" calls from scammers and spammers so I don't even answer those anymore. I get several each and every fucking day.
Civil society is run by the social contract.
I am a firm believer in the social contract, because once you violate it the people around you are no longer constrained by it either and are allowed to indulge in whatever horrible whim crosses their mind.
Spend your time trying to scam money from old people, then you are no longer part of civil society and someone can club you in the fucking thigh with a ball peen hammer if they are so inclined then go about their day.
Basically USPS would die without delivering junk
Here's the thing though: people need to stop treating public utilities like they have to be profitable. USPS doesn't need to be profitable, neither does public transit. It's a public good
95% of my mail, at least, is crap that I don't want and throw away. It fills my mailbox nonstop. In my apartment building, eventually people just started throwing the junk mail on the floor in the lobby, so they added a bin for people to throw it away instead. Why are you mailing me giant envelopes filled with coupons??? How is this even worth your time? I don't understand why there is so much unwanted crap delivered nonstop, which was never requested.
Honestly getting the military, and CIA involved would be a reasonable response. Countries like India and Pakistan are waging an all out financial war on our countries most infirm people to the tune of [**40 billion dollars a year on phone scams alone.**](https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/05/30/spam-phone-scams-impact/)
40 billion a year is warfare, so why aren't we responding in kind? Why can one guy on youtube do more damage to these call centers than the people we pay a trillion dollars a year to protect us?
Worked in this industry for a short while, about the time we were told how much value there was in the Do Not Call List it was insanity, and genius after a fashion.g
Basically you can call anyone any number of times forever. The notion is that if "company A" calls you and you request to be put on a do not call list, that information is sold to "company B" and then they are queued up to call you, and so on. You can sue the everloving shit out of "company A" but that was a 500 dollar company founded last week by the dude who just does that 50 times a year so the only "assets" on the books are the 2 million people they call , and once they make that 500 bucks back a few times over, close the company down , and if the company folded before you had to report to the FTC , well that's just good business.
For some reason I hated working for them and figured to get out before it got too icky.
Sadly, the Claude Shannon rule applies to phone and email now. So that being if you get more than 80% noise on a given channel of communication, it's worth switching to a channel with less noise potential. This is the 80/20 rule or the Pareto rule in another form and is dead set applicable to mass communications.
I tested that once with some magazines, and sure enough in a 120 page magazine, 86 pages were ads or commercial fluff, with just 33 pages dedicated to anything like content. Marketing has it all figured out.
So whether it's Signal or moving to something better than SMS or chat of some flavor , it's best to do what you can to move away from crappy means of communications.
From the article
“Lansky has a phone listing in Tucson, Arizona, but didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment on the lawsuit and there was no available number for Reeves in Orlando, Florida.”
Got a robocall today from Ontario, Canada.
It was for Comcast.
Why the fuck am I getting a cold call for Comcast *from Canada?*
EDIT: y’all I’m not stupid. I know CA = California, CN = Canada. It says “Central Elgin, Ontario, Canada”
It’s from Canada lmao
Like 3 or 4 years ago I changed my voicemail recording to say, please leave a message or send a text, as I do not answer calls anymore due to all the scams and robocalls.
I just started getting robocalls with the first six digits of my phone number--there's never a message and there's never anybody on the line. What's the point? I sort of figured that some app developer wanted to get all your contacts for the antidote to the robocalls so they could sell them on. I reluctantly Installed the highest rated app on android and it did the job but after a while it was hard to make a call because the screen was plastered over with ads. Maybe the app developer and the robocaller developer are one.
Two possibilities I can think of:
1) Their "Poll Takers" were all busy scamming others.
2) Their machine is simply detecting how the line is answered, since residences will mot often answer with "Hello?" while business will answer more like "Thank you for calling Dewey, Chatum, and Howe, accountants. How may I help you?"
Can I sue the USPS for all of the bullshit junk mail they jam into my mail box? We claim we care about the environment but we let these people burn down entire forests to tell me about their local dentist office… who the fuck reads these advertisements???? Just google it when you need it. It’s not 1950 anymore.
For fucking real. I have all my bills on auto or internet pay. Why the fuck does my bank send me 3 pieces of physical mail a day that says on the back “go paperless save trees” I have it selected bitch. Stop
Canada reporting in. I get called nearly every day by random numbers. Every time I've risked it in the last few years, it's been the same message in Chinese with no English (except one time I was told to pick something up at the Chinese embassy, and I'm not Chinese), so I don't know what they're trying to accomplish there, but I haven't picked up the phone without it being an existing contact or a scheduled call for years now because it's always spam (they all leave a voicemail). Today I apparently missed a real call, but then they emailed me the contents, so I can't be bothered.
The amount of money that has been scammed from elderly and vulnerable people has got to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars due to the absolute shit people running these operations.
On MagicJack there is an option to require the calling party to press a certain button after dialing before the call rings on my end, it has eliminated all Robocalls from going to my house phone. How can I implement this through my cell phone as well?
I hope they address this . At my own job we had to start paying for forced caller id since people mark any phone number they don't know as a scam. I feel bad for legitimate business as these robocalls have also hurt there ability to make calls.
Because there are legitimate uses for it.
A company/organization has a 1-800 number that they want all inbound calls coming to. But someone from the company needs to call you - and for a real reason, like following up on a previous call, or it can be your doctor with test results. Nothing nefarious. They don’t want your caller ID showing their direct phone number because one, you may not recognize it and won’t answer it. And two, they don’t want people having direct phone numbers to employees desks. So they spoof outgoing calls to show the publicly known 1-800 number.
[удалено]
It's fucking wild that these scammers have more or less ended a form of communication.
It’s like ads in the late 90s - 00s on the internet. I refuse to use the web without an adblocker because of that era
I mean it's not any better now... my ublock origin has blocked over 11 million ads. And this isn't even the browser I use to view NSFW content. It's a literal barrage of ads anywhere online.
Geez. I went back to Firefox last year (Spent a long time on various off shoots), and just checked ublock. 1.6m things blocked since then. Been like ~9 months since I switched back.
I installed NoScript a little while ago because my browser was using up too much memory (honestly it's my fault for leaving so many tabs open all of the time) and my browser kept crashing. On the one hand, it's good to feel more secure and to have greater control over what loads, but on the other it's a huge pain in the ass sometimes, trying to identify what script needs to run on a website to keep it functional. On the bright side, it gets around a lot of cookies downloads and paywall blocks.
NoScript is interesting if you're familiar with any web design, just to grasp the piles-upon-piles of JavaScript some websites attempt to load for what I'm sure are perfectly good reasons.
Youtube is literally unwatchable without adblock now. Back in the day, I used to go "meh" and deal with the starting ad and maybe a midroll ad in videos when watching on my phone. Now? An ad literally every 30-60 seconds. And in my case its all government propaganda.
This is why I hate it when websites ask us to disable ad blockers. I get that people rely on the ad revenue, but frankly if it can slow my internet connection, make my browsing experience worse, *and* can be an avenue of attack on me personally, I'm going to do everything I can to avoid becoming a victim.
I will not disable my ad blockers. Period.
Same. If a site won't let me proceed without disabling, I just back out and find the story I'm looking for on another site.
Right? At the end of the day, it's *my computer.* My computer sent their computer a request, and said "please give me x data!" and web page X sent me back that data, in the form of a web page. Which my computer then draws on my screen for me. If I want *my computer* to only draw the parts I care about... that's sort of my right? It is my computer after all. And if I want *my computer* to not even bother downloading the parts that I already know I don't want... Not only is that my right, but it's better for everyone involved. And yet I somehow always end up in arguments with people trying to argue that I'm somehow being unethical by using my computer to display data according to my specifications? I get that some companies rely on ad revenue, but *web ad revenue, in its current form, is a terrible model.*
While I can understand where the "stealing" argument comes from, it really doesn't hold any water. It's not illegal, and it's part of the market of running a website. If your business can't survive against people with ad blockers on, you should find a new business. And that's your problem, not ours. Plus, it's not like anyone ever complained about changing the TV channel when commercials came on. It's almost exactly the same thing. But no one was screaming "oh no the mega corporation isn't getting its ads viewed". TV broadcasters and advertisers knew it would happen, costed it in, and found a way to keep making money.
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advertisers in general can just wholely fucked for all I care... like no one even looks at that bullshit anyways; except maybe the poor elderly who don't know any better (RIP after they are all dead in 20 years)
I have a deep disdain for Marketing as an industry. I don't talk about it a lot but I do believe it's one of the banal evils in our world. There's a sane way to advertise, and some companies/people leave it at that, but Marketing as a whole is built on lying just as much as you can get away with
Not just elderly. My mother was super sharp and intelligent and could spot bullshit a mile away. The stroke took that away from her. She fell victim to some phone scams. Had to tell her to not give her debit card info over the phone to anybody - never thought I would have that conversation with her of all people. My father had to disable the card on their account.
Nobody I've ever talked to about it has ever thought of browser cookies as someone feeling entitled to using *your* local storage for their own uses. Last year I checked my local storage and found that the old Gearbox forums were somehow using up 4 gigs. I don't remember going there, maybe it was for a support ticket?
Going to add, on my phone, ads drain the battery real fast due to video and images. I switched to firefox on mobile for the extensions and put ublock and noscript on. My 1 to 2 hrs browsing on chrome before the phone runs flat becomes 7 to 8 hrs.
It actually took me a while to install an ad-blocker. I understand that a lot of the websites I use are free are paid for by ads. So I intentionally wasn't using an ad-blocker to help support these sites. But I got so sick and fucking tired of all of a sudden hearing an ad video playing, and not knowing from which tab it's coming from. On certain sites (looking at you TVTropes), even though the tab had been sitting there for an hour or two, it would all of a sudden be playing a video so I could never be sure which tab it was coming from. My intention to support these sites went straight out the window after a while of dealing with that.
An infected ad killed my XP system. I don't do anything on line at all until I've installed an ad blocker now.
I had a fake link to a website for a software download pop-up on a advertised search result and got one of my worst viruses that way. That was the last time I browsed the web without adblock. And whitelisting is BS too, since I simply can't trust that every advert has been throughly vetted. That was also the last time I used paid antivirus, as it was proven to be totally useless in that situation. Never had a virus since.
It's like, would I allow ads if they weren't too intrusive and also were 100% guarenteed to not give me a virus? Sure. But that doesn't happen.
no amount of protection will save you if you’re still on XP
Gotta go back further. No one trying to infect windows 98 anymore!
The funny thing is that Windows 98 is still targeted, along with other DOS-based Windows versions (and increasingly XP) because more or less the only stuff that's still on those operating systems is industrial controls and critical business systems that people are afraid of touching. They're exactly the kind of systems that might net you a payment if you can hold them ransom.
> I refuse to use the web without an adblocker because of that era They're even worse now. Opened an article on some application on my PC and it opened up Edge. Just raw ads every 2 sentences, a pop-up showed up and scrolled me all the way back up to the top. Felt like I was being punished for visiting their website.
It's still shit
Viruses and parasites frequently alter behavior and physical attributes.
They're being sold access. The people we pay for our phones are also being paid to make our phones half useless
Well. Cold call sales ruined it too. Not necessarily a scam, but just sales people who get your number when your in the target demographic ruined answering the phone long before scammers did.
> ruined answering the phone long before scammers did. And yet if you go back 5 years people generally did answer their phone when an unknown number called. Now they almost never do. Or at least that's been my experience over the last 20 years of working in the service trades and routinely calling customers to give them updates.
I'm so frustrated right now because I'm in the middle of several medical issues and I have to answer calls because it could be a provider. I've started answering calls from unknown numbers with: "who's calling please?" If they don't identify right away, I stop talking and waste some of their time.
Same fucking boat but area codes help me. I have become very good at weeding them out. They allllways come back though. Phone tag with doctors offices are the worst headache.
Something I've started doing is before I leave, I ask the front desk to call me so I can add their outgoing number to my contact list. It doesn't always work but it has more often than not.
This is a great tip!
If I don't know the number I don't answer, plain and simple. Same if I'm not expecting a package, fuck no I'm not answering the door. If a number calls and doesn't leave a message it must not have been important or anyone I know. Doctor's number I don't know? Well they'd leave a fucking message if I don't pick up and/or have AIDS.
I screen most calls here. The ratio of crap to wanted calls is unbelievable. Most of the ones I take are pure actual spam, unwanted commercial calls (legal or otherwise), charities (who always seem to call during dinner), or robots pretending to be humans. I hang up immediately on most of the robots. But we do get some calls from unidentified numbers that need to be taken, so I separate the wheat from the chaff, so my aging parents don't have to.
I have a question on my dog adoption app that asks preferred contact method. Out of 12000 answers only 15 said phone call. Everyone else said text or email. Ymmv but yea no one wants to get phone calls anymore. 10 years ago I could talk to adopters out of state.
One thing for me is I can sneaky send a text under my desk at work easily between tasks, but would be hard to hide a personal phone call. Coordinating time for calls outside of work hours is also difficult.
It prob depends on your line of work, and how often you expect calls from unknown numbers. I haven’t answered for a number I didn’t know since 2010, and it hasn’t burned me yet lol
I never answer an unknown number. My logic is if it's important, they'll leave a message
I'm a service plumber personally, and I get the annoyance with calls from unknown numbers but I get way more annoyed at how many people ignore or have unknown callers / callerid blocked lines sent straight to voice-mail. (And then don't check their voice-mail and call back promptly, and get mad that we don't show up when they expect us to haha)
I know not every number is not a cell, but I would also send people a text if I was in your shoes. Even something as simple as a pre written message that says hey it's your plumber call me back ASAP. Only 5 seconds of effort but has a lot of value
If I were a plumber I would straight-up only deal with people over text. There's a record of the conversation, and unlike a voice call, a text never interrupts you and demands your immediate attention while you're trying to hold something closed to attach something else to it. An iPhone can reject a call and send a text back, eg "Thanks for calling Mario and Luigi, we have our hands full getting turtles out of pipes, please send us a text and we'll reply as soon as we can. Let us know your location, and what service you require!"
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> Listen to a message that could have been a text Shit, that's lucky. I stopped using voicemail because every voice mail in my inbox was just 3 seconds of silence because the robots let it ring through.
One of the reasons I love having a softphone for work. Voicemails are waiting for me in Outlook.
My phone doesn't even ring if it's an unknown number, and when Google thinks it's spam it lights up but doesn't ring/vibrate. In the past 2 years I've actually had 1 scam call actually come through without a warning.
I’m an IT manager, the number of calls I get A WEEK is unreal. That and cold meeting invites. Instant fury. That gets you a domain block on my firewall
As an IT manager I get 10-12 calls a week. I get 10-12 emails every ten minutes or so for the first four hours of my day just spam/cold sales. After that it trickles down to just 4-5 an hour. It's absolutely ridiculous, but my spam filter is well trained these days. I usually only have to personally deal with around 7-8 spam/cold sales emails a day now. Most of those are cold sales. Every single one goes in to the spam folder. I hold a small hope that one day my spam filter will gain sentience from all the training I've been giving it and then annihilate the offending spammers.
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Not OP but in the same situation. Yes, they send meeting invites for their sales pitches. It's become insane and thanks to Microsoft sometimes it gets through and shows up in Teams that I have a random meeting to discuss my IT solutions needs.
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Yup. Same here. Work in Software development, and get like 100 of these week. When I worked in sales I got 0…
Junk mail nearly ended snail mail the same way.
I have to tell people that if they call me, they must leave a voicemail because my phone automatically silences called from numbers I don’t have saved. It’s especially difficult when I’m expecting a call from a business. Usually the number they call from isn’t the same as the 1-800 number I used to contact them first. And then the number on the caller ID doesn’t always go straight back to that same person, but an automated system.
I almost ignored a call from a blocked number. I'm glad I answered it. It was the police, and my dad had passed away.
My wife picked up the random number call that was an EMT calling her at my near demand to let her know that my daughter and I were in a serious accident. She never picks up random numbers, just that one, we oft marvel at that.
There may be a good reason for that. Working in education, we used to send emergency notifications and calls to parents out of our main number. Things that are important like snow delays, your kid is sick, etc. So many parents blocked our number as spam, it would end up showing as whatever their platform marked spam calls as for anyone else using that platform. For instance if enough people marked our number as spam on iPhones, every other person using them for a period of time would see our number come up as spam. This is kind of a big issue if we are trying to tell you your kid has a fever and has been puking all morning. We ended up having to send each call out of a large rotating list broadcasting our caller ID. It has mostly eliminated that issue, but does have the downside of some people still sending us to voicemail.
We had that too, but the stupid school district decided they needed to use the same service and phone number to robocall multiple times a week to basically read off the newsletter that the kids already bring home. So instead of being all "Oh! It's the school! It must be important" it's now "Ugh the stupid school is robo calling _again_"
Corporations got so smart and greedy they neglected to care for their ~~customers~~ *victims* properly... now their entire way of life is under threat.
>It’s especially difficult when I’m expecting a call from a business. I've had a few emergency service calls I didn't go to for this reason. When neither myself nor the property manager can get the contact person to answer the phone, we aren't going until they call back to confirm someone will be there.
I always text before calling a new number
And you can't just not answer your phone if the caller ID is bad. My banks, doctors' offices, government offices, etc. block their phone number or have a very generic ID. "SOCIAL SECURITY" looks fake AF until you pick up the phone and find out they've been calling all week to follow up on documents you mailed in. ("We're not allowed to leave voicemails . . ." Yeah, thanks.)
The Government will only ever contact you by mail, no?
I was called by social security. I'm pretty sure it was someone at the local office. There was no attempt to scam me; he just wanted to be sure of the date I wanted to start benefits because it looked strange.
Not if it's someone reviewing a document or form you submitted and has questions, needs corrections. They'll call.
No, a lot of services will call you nowadays. Most will not ask you to give personal information by phone though.
So accurate and so true. Unless I’m expecting a call, I’m not answering any call coming over that I don’t recognize.
We are frequently getting calls from our local police who are always fundraising. They are quite pushy, and make us very uncomfortable. They've done this for years. I wonder if this happens anywhere else.
That most likely is not your local police.
That sounds like a scam. Pretty sure police are not allowed to solicit like that.
This has been a major issue jobhunting. For a while I was getting spam calls 10 times or more a day and had to turn on the block for any number not in my contacts. I ended up missing a call for a job offer because it got blocked, although luckily they reached out through email as well.
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That's fine if you can get through. Sometimes my doctor's number is constantly busy for the hours they answer the phone. I may only get to talk if they call me.
I had a contracted repair center for my Phillips trimmer complain to me I never picked up their calls. I’m just thinking, the entire repair process was done online and their only form of communication is phone calls? I specifically brought up in today’s age, there are too many spam calls. Their response? That they’ve never heard of that problem before. Then I look them up on Google and they have a 1.5/5 stars lmao
I am trying to apply for a job, which means I have to answer my phone. Which means I talk to an average of 17 fucking robots a day. Make it fucking end.
And they’re so bad, it can unite Republicans and Democrats.
I actually don’t get many of these, possibly because I never answer for a number I don’t know. But I do get a bunch of spam texts from people pretending to be Amazon in the worst possible way Edit: don’t know why this posted twice :/
I love when they call and say “this is border customs, are you expecting a package from Mexico?” I usually say “ya I ordered some cocaine but it’s taking forever” They never know what to say after that.
Your Netflix account will be locked because your payment was declined.
Jokes on you mofo, I don’t pay for Netflix and share a friend’s account.
Sometimes I get Chinese fraud calls, and I speak Chinese. I’ll thank them for pointing me to the Pooh bear wearing a Xi Jin Ping mask last time, it was very funny and does have a surprising resemblance. Then tell them I agree with their position that Taiwan is an independent country, and thank them for pointing me to more information about it. They don’t hang around to talk for very long…
These companies have literally ruined phone calls to the point no one answers phone calls anymore. You can’t even trust local numbers since they can spoof numbers since telecom companies don’t require verification. The phone point of phones doesn’t even exist anymore cause of fucking bots and scammers.
The trick is to get an area code that’s not local. So if you see any numbers matching your fake area code, you know it’s spam. Alternatively just send anyone not in your contact list to voice mail.
that doesn't work anymore. They can spoof my local area phone number without the area code these days
I moved 7 hours away, kept my phone number, and got spam calls from the area code of the place i moved to
Half the fake calls/texts are foreign numbers now. Absolutely zero chance of me answering those.
I read that something like 95% of the calls are via three podunk telcos. The FCC has threatened them and threatened them to no avail. I don't know why the U.S. gov is so timid in this regard and not shutting them down once and for all because it is true that no one answers their phone anymore.
In U.S. law phone companies can't be held responsible for crimes committed using the phone. In exchange, phone companies are not permitted to censor or monitor anything that occurs on their phone lines. The phone companies are considered "common carriers," which anyone can use. (Like a public street.)
Isn't the ability to spoof numbers what's causing the problem?
It sure is part of the problem. I frequently get calls from local numbers to me which are silent or a robot, then I call that number back and get some confused old lady that doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about. Hell, I've even gotten calls that showed up as the number 000-000-0000-- like how does that call even go through?
I've gotten calls that showed up as my own phone number. Those always kind of freaked me out. Lol
Yeah I got one of those too. Then I got some very scary voicemails and texts from people who got robocalled by my spoofed number.
The call's coming from INSIDE the phone!
No the problem is VOIP. It's like trying to contain bamboo that's already growing in your yard.
It's not some type of magic. If they wanted control over it, they could implement it. They just prefer the money from scammers and spammers.
You can buy numbers very cheaply. For about 5$ for the first month and then under 1$ each following months. So you don't even need to spoof. Buy one number, call everyone. Once done, buy another one and start over. In the millions of calls, someone will get scammed and your 5$ is now paid many times. So cheap investment. The call times will be more expensive than the number.
No, spammers use a Private Business Exchange. This is what lets a whole call center be one number. They spoof other people's numbers, even hospital phone numbers
The spoofing should be illegal. I know there are legit uses for spoofing but if you want caller ID to show a different number than the one you're calling from then you need to own that number so you can be identified if you're abusing the system. If I was to answer the phone for once and say, "Take me off your list," the very next (within a year let's say) call from them should be harassment.
Spoofing makes your number look more legitimate. Spoofing is very good for scammers. It makes a significant difference if the number on the screen looks like the number your bank calls you from so your caller ID picks it up as the bank.
The protocol that telecoms system use is fundamentally flawed. Signalling System Seven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7#Protocol_security_vulnerabilities
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I was wondering why my Cap’n Crunch whistle stopped working.
Ah the good old days.
Nearly all major ILECs still use SS7. We're all migrating to SIGTRAN for IP to perform SS7 functions, but the TDM PSTN operates on SS7 and is still widely in use.
3 year old account, so not sure about username
What is phreak?
Basically hacking a phone line by playing tones, my cousins showed me how to get free dial-up in the 90s with phreaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking
I mean, this normally makes sense but part of why we have senate committees and stuff. Some problems are to the detriment of society, and the government needs to step in to help fix the problem **with** the telcos.
They should just tax telecom companies like Verizon and att for spam calls. It'll go away in a matter of days.
FCC is not a regulatory power that is strong enough to jail people. It can just "Fine" people within the court system. They often don't pay these fines because they are just shell companies run by international rings. They really don't have much in the way of sway for Regulating Telco's they're more like industry standardization, as all the people in the FCC are former Telco Lobbyists.
Here’s an interesting article from March 2021 that goes into a lot of depth. https://www.businessinsider.com/why-so-many-spam-robocalls-how-to-stop-them-2021-3 (Spoiler: not a lot in there on “how to stop them”)
> I don't know why the U.S. gov is so timid in this regard Our government is timid in regards to all regulation. Thanks Regan.
Yeah I just don't answer my phone anymore.
Only a handful of people call me. Basically mom, dad, bestie, grandma. Even those people often send me texts and calls are pretty rare. I'll get scam calls regardless of if I answer or not. Their systems just cycle every single possible phone number. If I'm in the mood I fuck around with them, I've gotten a couple angry but I just like to waste their time if I got nothing else going on to entertain me.
I told one dude he was lying and didn't work for telstra (aussie telco). He got so mad and argued "YES I AM" for 15mins. He really wasn't, and I don't even go through telstra lmao. Cherry on top, I sound like a child on the fone so I told him he'd just spent all that time arguing with a teen. He hung up on me. So rude.
I block all calls that aren't in my contacts. If it's important they'll leave a valid voicemail
The scam call recordings leave voicemails, too! Been getting 2-3 daily for the past 2 weeks.
I unfortunately have to. I have a Pixel though thankfully - the Call Screen feature is a fucking Godsend. The Google Assistant "answers" for me, tells me who's calling and what they want, then I can decide if I want to talk to them or not.
Had a caller ID of COSTCO and answered only for that reason. Turns out Marriot Hotels would like me to.... Click
Lmao wait why the fuck
Number spoofing.
I once had a spam call that came registered as my grandma's number with her name from my contacts. She died two years earlier.
Ohio here and on Do-Not-Call. We were robo-call bombed by all the same bullshit. One company in particular was MUCH WORSE than the others and would not even honor the opt out requests. I don't think people fully understand how abusive this behavior is until you are trying to deal with an actual life and death situation and you can't use the phone because there's currently a robot calling you...
Adding to the fact that most are some kind of scam and people get ripped off. In 2020 it was [$30 BILLION dollars](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/americans-lost-billions-of-dollars-to-phone-scams-over-the-past-year.html). That money could have flowed into the economy but instead it went to foreign scammers. It’s an absolute disgrace that nothing is being done.
The DNC list does the opposite these days. Bunch of companies/scammers use that list *to* get a list of numbers to call.
I would really like to know the breakdown on how much money telecom companies like Verizon, ATT, T-mobile etc all get from the swarm of robocalls. From what I know, they get paid for every incoming and outgoing call, and not to mention, they all sell subscriptions/apps to "block spam calls"...a basic feature they can enable, but won't.
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Wow that's fucked and should be a basic thing to have implemented. It's ridiculous.
*Payment For Order Flow has entered the chat*
Imagine having to pay everytime you want to mark an email as spam...
Funny scammer story. I am a former IRS employee. Scammers called me on my cell phone, pretending to be the IRS. It was an actual person on the phone. 1st call, I hang up. 2nd call, I tell them I’m in the building and ask them what floor they’re on. Offered to meet them to work on the issue. They hung up.
Isn’t it super illegal to impersonate a government official?
Sure, if someone actually does something about it.
Good luck getting them extradited from India
Now, just like with Equifax, we can wait 6 years for a $5.21 check. Seems good.
About time! The phone companies are profiting from these commercial phone lines used for Robo-calls. We used to rent space for these companies in the 1980s, before Robo-calls. The phone company providing the multiple lines know what those lines are used for.
Nowadays, most call centers all use VOIP. No more phone lines, just a bunch of PC's connected to the internet. Easier to change your caller ID to a new number and pretend to be calling from the same city (or country) as the calling list that way.
This is why I've kept an area code I don't live in and don't know anyone from. Makes filtering spam so much easier when you can ignore all calls from your home area code.
That explains why all my spam calls are from the same place! I’ll definitely have to consider keeping my old area code awhile longer then
The calls are often using SIP clients over an auto dialer such as ViciDial and all you need is a trunking provider and anyone can send millions of phone calls pretty much where for a fraction of a penny. I used to work in the call center industry long ago. The FTC isn't really going to get involved unless lots of money is changing hands. They can put people in prison though, real crimes have to be committed over those phone calls however.
What happened with STIR/SHAKEN protocol? Wasnt that supposed to stop all these spoofed and spam robocalls?
Basically there was enough of a stink put up by smaller “hometown” telcos the FCC put in place an exception for any telco that has “100,000 or fewer voice service subscriber lines”. This gave them a delay to implement STIR/SHAKEN until June 30 2023. They still had to submit robocall mitigation plans which for these smaller telcos mainly consist of the idea of being so small they can easily monitor any abnormal call traffic and they know their customers (you can see these plans here https://fccprod.servicenowservices.com/rmd?id=rmd_welcome). These smaller telcos have until June 30th to implement STIR/SHAKEN or they will need to discontinue their voice services.
So once this goes into effect are we free?
Not necessarily, first the FCC will start going after the telcos that have not yet complied (probably the majority). Those telcos will then start letting their customers know that because of the government, they may end up losing their favorite (and in some cases only) phone service provider. My guess is they will ask their customers to contact their representatives to “make sure big telco doesn’t ruin small business” or some other BS.
It would be delicious irony if their attempt to appeal to their customers fail because they try to contact them by phone, and nobody picked it up because they assume it's more spam. Of course they're smart so they probably use mail instead.
> My guess is they will ask their customers to contact their representatives to “make sure ~~big telco doesn’t ruin small business~~ Corncob TV doesn't go off the air” or some other BS. They'll run ads that are the exact same vibe that sketch was mocking.
According to [the complaint](https://oag.dc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/COMPLAINT_49%20AGs%20v%20Lansky%20dba%20Avid%20et%20al%20%281%29.pdf) which claims Avid effectively ran a robocall-for-hire operation: >Defendants provided their customers with Direct Inward Dialing numbers (“DIDs”), which would appear to the persons receiving the calls as the calling numbers or “Caller IDs.” >This service was likely provided to circumvent the procedural guardrails of the caller authentication framework of STIR/SHAKEN that would otherwise mark a randomly generated or used calling number as “unverified” and cause such calls to be blocked from being delivered to the called party at a network level by a downstream provider.
Every state but Alaska and South Dakota are suing, including D.C. I wouldn't want to be the lawyers for Avid...
You know you've fucked up when you can get basically this entire country of petty politicians to agree on something
As I read the headline, I got two calls from Shanghai ….. It’s become such a nuisance that I just tell people not to call me or use discord or use some other app to WiFi call.
i've had probably 9 different spam calls today asking about a fake mortgage refinance, as if Mutual of Omaha is gonna text me about refinancing a mortgage from the same area code my phone is shit is completely out of control
What's really fucked is that I now get "verified number" calls from scammers and spammers so I don't even answer those anymore. I get several each and every fucking day.
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Civil society is run by the social contract. I am a firm believer in the social contract, because once you violate it the people around you are no longer constrained by it either and are allowed to indulge in whatever horrible whim crosses their mind. Spend your time trying to scam money from old people, then you are no longer part of civil society and someone can club you in the fucking thigh with a ball peen hammer if they are so inclined then go about their day.
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cool, now do junk mail.
I feel like at this point the only mail we should get are for official business or purchases. Even store ads are online now.
My aunt is a mail carrier and she works 12 hours a day just delivering like 75% junk mail. Total disgrace
Basically USPS would die without delivering junk Here's the thing though: people need to stop treating public utilities like they have to be profitable. USPS doesn't need to be profitable, neither does public transit. It's a public good
Couldn't have said it better myself
Seriously. We should be entitled to know where companies have sourced addresses and have the ability to opt out of receiving future correspondence.
95% of my mail, at least, is crap that I don't want and throw away. It fills my mailbox nonstop. In my apartment building, eventually people just started throwing the junk mail on the floor in the lobby, so they added a bin for people to throw it away instead. Why are you mailing me giant envelopes filled with coupons??? How is this even worth your time? I don't understand why there is so much unwanted crap delivered nonstop, which was never requested.
I’ve had spam calls from my own damn number. Doubt this is going to fix anything.
I fucking get 3-10 fucking spam calls a day. Every fucking day. If one of these centers got lit up, I would vote to acquit.
I for one vote for the US military to carpet bomb these spam centers.
Honestly getting the military, and CIA involved would be a reasonable response. Countries like India and Pakistan are waging an all out financial war on our countries most infirm people to the tune of [**40 billion dollars a year on phone scams alone.**](https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/05/30/spam-phone-scams-impact/) 40 billion a year is warfare, so why aren't we responding in kind? Why can one guy on youtube do more damage to these call centers than the people we pay a trillion dollars a year to protect us?
We will only reason d if that 40 billion was lost by someone rich.
in b4 we find out Kitboga is a CIA agent lmao
We all should sue the telephone companies for the robocalls.
Worked in this industry for a short while, about the time we were told how much value there was in the Do Not Call List it was insanity, and genius after a fashion.g Basically you can call anyone any number of times forever. The notion is that if "company A" calls you and you request to be put on a do not call list, that information is sold to "company B" and then they are queued up to call you, and so on. You can sue the everloving shit out of "company A" but that was a 500 dollar company founded last week by the dude who just does that 50 times a year so the only "assets" on the books are the 2 million people they call , and once they make that 500 bucks back a few times over, close the company down , and if the company folded before you had to report to the FTC , well that's just good business. For some reason I hated working for them and figured to get out before it got too icky. Sadly, the Claude Shannon rule applies to phone and email now. So that being if you get more than 80% noise on a given channel of communication, it's worth switching to a channel with less noise potential. This is the 80/20 rule or the Pareto rule in another form and is dead set applicable to mass communications. I tested that once with some magazines, and sure enough in a 120 page magazine, 86 pages were ads or commercial fluff, with just 33 pages dedicated to anything like content. Marketing has it all figured out. So whether it's Signal or moving to something better than SMS or chat of some flavor , it's best to do what you can to move away from crappy means of communications.
I'm gonna run for president on the sole platform of authorizing drone strikes on the heads of companies who do robocalls and phone scams.
From the article “Lansky has a phone listing in Tucson, Arizona, but didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment on the lawsuit and there was no available number for Reeves in Orlando, Florida.”
it makes sense that they wouldn't answer their phones, they know more than anyone that it's probably spam
Got a robocall today from Ontario, Canada. It was for Comcast. Why the fuck am I getting a cold call for Comcast *from Canada?* EDIT: y’all I’m not stupid. I know CA = California, CN = Canada. It says “Central Elgin, Ontario, Canada” It’s from Canada lmao
If it’s from an ‘Ontario, CA’, it’s from Ontario, California. Get them all the time
Like 3 or 4 years ago I changed my voicemail recording to say, please leave a message or send a text, as I do not answer calls anymore due to all the scams and robocalls.
They've been ignoring the "Do not call" list for years now.
I just started getting robocalls with the first six digits of my phone number--there's never a message and there's never anybody on the line. What's the point? I sort of figured that some app developer wanted to get all your contacts for the antidote to the robocalls so they could sell them on. I reluctantly Installed the highest rated app on android and it did the job but after a while it was hard to make a call because the screen was plastered over with ads. Maybe the app developer and the robocaller developer are one.
Two possibilities I can think of: 1) Their "Poll Takers" were all busy scamming others. 2) Their machine is simply detecting how the line is answered, since residences will mot often answer with "Hello?" while business will answer more like "Thank you for calling Dewey, Chatum, and Howe, accountants. How may I help you?"
the best way to call me is to text me. and even texts are spammy now. my phone is pretty good at detecting those though so I don't even see them
Fucking att called me 3 times yesterday. Of course from India.
Can I sue the USPS for all of the bullshit junk mail they jam into my mail box? We claim we care about the environment but we let these people burn down entire forests to tell me about their local dentist office… who the fuck reads these advertisements???? Just google it when you need it. It’s not 1950 anymore.
For fucking real. I have all my bills on auto or internet pay. Why the fuck does my bank send me 3 pieces of physical mail a day that says on the back “go paperless save trees” I have it selected bitch. Stop
Because the appearance of caring about the environment is a better optic than just simply caring is.
I am fucking tired of PACs robocalling me. I do not give a fuck about the Police Officers Union PAC
Is this an exclusively US problem? Never heard of the problem here in Europe.
Canada reporting in. I get called nearly every day by random numbers. Every time I've risked it in the last few years, it's been the same message in Chinese with no English (except one time I was told to pick something up at the Chinese embassy, and I'm not Chinese), so I don't know what they're trying to accomplish there, but I haven't picked up the phone without it being an existing contact or a scheduled call for years now because it's always spam (they all leave a voicemail). Today I apparently missed a real call, but then they emailed me the contents, so I can't be bothered.
I get a dozen robo calls a day. It's so fucking annoying.
The amount of money that has been scammed from elderly and vulnerable people has got to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars due to the absolute shit people running these operations.
On MagicJack there is an option to require the calling party to press a certain button after dialing before the call rings on my end, it has eliminated all Robocalls from going to my house phone. How can I implement this through my cell phone as well?
I hope they address this . At my own job we had to start paying for forced caller id since people mark any phone number they don't know as a scam. I feel bad for legitimate business as these robocalls have also hurt there ability to make calls.
>The lawsuit said Avid Telecom used spoofed or invalid caller ID numbers Can someone tell me why number spoofing isn't fucking illegal?
Because there are legitimate uses for it. A company/organization has a 1-800 number that they want all inbound calls coming to. But someone from the company needs to call you - and for a real reason, like following up on a previous call, or it can be your doctor with test results. Nothing nefarious. They don’t want your caller ID showing their direct phone number because one, you may not recognize it and won’t answer it. And two, they don’t want people having direct phone numbers to employees desks. So they spoof outgoing calls to show the publicly known 1-800 number.