Posted by aziaziazi 2 hours ago
Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.
In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
This kind of happens today, but I think the problem is too big. You'll need to employ thousands to process all the complaints and by the time you issue a fine, the company has closed and a new one has started.
What do you report to the police if the act isn't illegal?
I mean, everyone can call anyone and name any company already.
I haven't had too much trouble with telemarketers lately but there is a crowdsourced app in France called Saracroche that can be easily installed on your phone and blocks spam numbers by becoming the caller id service. You can also use the app to report a number and help build the huge database.
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).
I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling” The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important.
It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period.
I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.
All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers.
I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".
There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.
If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.
You don't.
That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
That is really great. I've had a lot of trouble with calls from spoofed numbers a couple of years ago (it ended when I installed a scam blacker on my phone), and when I looked into it at that time, my impression was that phone companies couldn't block spoofed numbers. On the other hand, if the scam blocking app can block them, there clearly must be some way to detect them.
Phone companies need to do a better job protecting their customers against this abuse.
The fact that the phone companies haven't done this or much else yet goes to show how little they care.
E.g. in Finland the relevant regulation (https://traficom.fi/files/media/regulation/M_28_L_EN.pdf) says (in section 10):
> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.
And if that is a company that offers service of lending number for such calls, they deserve to suffer too
Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally.
You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.
I'm 30+ and was trying to buy some wine yesterday, and was IDed and i'm clearly well over 18 yet they had to take the bottle back as I didn't carry my ID with me. Essentially the same thing with pubs/bars etc, you're clearly over 18 but there is a weird power trip yet in some raves/clubs you still see under 18s being let in.
And I don't think something being hard to enforce is reason enough to not do anything about it. If we truly care about something, we can always find a way.
Fun fact, Bloctel, the service that was supposed to allow us to ask not to be harassed, leaked last week... https://www.universfreebox.com/article/596529/piratage-de-bl...
Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
The SMS are getting out of hand too, they send you a pre-recorded MP3 in addition to the picture too. At least they don't have enough information to know I don't have a letterbox.
> Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
Yeah, more and more French people are getting annoyed at it, esp. when companies always say "no worries no payment info leaked". I don't care, I can change my credit card but I can't change my personal informations.
And literally last week it's Bloctel that leaked! It's the government managed list of phone numbers that don't want to receive telemearketing calls, where anyone can add its own number to be excluded. Great idea on paper, goldmine of a data leak.
It's a number out of not so big pool of numbers. Spam caller can iterate every number in the country in a month
So banning it is great, but you still need to enforce that law.
Especially on landlines mostly used by older people.
4-5 a day here.
However, the only way to solve this I believe is that you could once you get an unsolicited call to press a combination like ##01, and automatically this is passed to an agency that deals to punish whoever is behind the call in real time. At least if they call from a national number.