John Oliver Fights Robocalls By Robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC (arstechnica.com) 265
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners. In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners. "Hi FCC, this is John from customer service," Oliver's recorded voice says on the call. "Congratulations, you've just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today... robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes -- here's some bagpipe music."
When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said. "It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls." Under U.S. law, political robocalls to landline telephones are allowed without prior consent from the recipient. Such calls to cell phones require the called party's prior express consent, but Oliver presumably directed his robocalls to the commissioners' office phones. Oliver told the FCC commissioners: "if you want to tell us that you don't consent to be robocalled, that's absolutely no problem. Just write a certified letter to the address we buried somewhere within the first chapter of Moby Dick that's currently scrolling up the screen... find the address, write us a letter, and we'll stop the calls immediately."
When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said. "It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls." Under U.S. law, political robocalls to landline telephones are allowed without prior consent from the recipient. Such calls to cell phones require the called party's prior express consent, but Oliver presumably directed his robocalls to the commissioners' office phones. Oliver told the FCC commissioners: "if you want to tell us that you don't consent to be robocalled, that's absolutely no problem. Just write a certified letter to the address we buried somewhere within the first chapter of Moby Dick that's currently scrolling up the screen... find the address, write us a letter, and we'll stop the calls immediately."
90 minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nah, do every 90 (m/n)s. ;)
Re:90 minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
They have been, but those calls have exploded in volume in the last 2 or 3 years.
Embrace the healing power of AND (Score:2, Informative)
They have been, but those calls have exploded in volume in the last 2 or 3 years.
That is true, but I know for a fact I installed my robo-call blocking apps way before Trump was elected.
It is ALSO true it was enough of a problem when Obama was president, the FCC should have been doing something at that point.
Doesn't mean they shouldn't do something about it now as well.
One fun new trick I've just started seeing in the last few months - calls from *international* numbers where the number ends up looking like
Re: Embrace the healing power of AND (Score:3)
Re: Embrace the healing power of AND (Score:5, Interesting)
On my iPhone, 90% of scam calls say "Scam Likely". The false positive rate seems to be 0% (No legitimate call has been falsely flag as a scam).
If Apple can detect these calls, why can't the FCC require the telcos to block them? They have at least as much info about the calls as Apple does.
Re: Embrace the healing power of AND (Score:3, Informative)
That is a feature of t-mobile, not Apple.
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I wonder if this will help (Secure Telephone Identity Credentials: Certificates):
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8226
(I just learned of it this morning; I know next to nothing about it, but it sounds potentially relevant.)
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I'm just curious, but do you want the FCC to have the power to block phone numbers? These things always start with noble ideas.
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Maybe a few spammers wake up to a Seal Team 6 visit, or inside a CIA black site?
That would be a pointless waste of energy. Even if you executed every spammer who robocalled you today, there would still be thousands more waiting to call you starting tomorrow - none of whom would give the slightest shit about the dead ones. In other words: Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( XXX) vigilante
approach to fighting (robocalls) spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and
Re:Embrace the healing power of AND (Score:5, Informative)
It is ALSO true it was enough of a problem when Obama was president, the FCC should have been doing something at that point.
If you had watched the Last Week Tonight episode you would know that under Obama the FCC tried to block robocalls. Current FCC chair Pai was on the FCC back then and voted against it. What a surprise.
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It's been discussed here on /. many times. Unless you believe that phone companies have no idea who to bill when someone makes a call, spoofing CAN be stopped.
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Let that soak in fo ra bit - calls are so cheap that even if you start doing something about U.S. numbers. spammers may just move to international lines.
:facepalm:
So, the callers aren't moving shit. They use a VoIP phone system that lets them send any outbound number they put in.
what CAN the FCC actually do to stop this?
Require that the number provided by VoIP services accurately reflect the originating country, and require phone providers to verify ownership of the caller ID number by the person claiming it. If either of these are false, don't relay the call.
Re:Instead of down-modding, explain what is wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
"But the phone companies can't do that due to $TECHNICALITY"
This is 2019, and they can't keep track of 20 bytes of information? Give me a break. They always seem to know who to bill for a call. With this financial incentive in place, they'd figure it out right quick.
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Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
And if this results in a negative phone bill, your phone company has to pay YOU - thousands and thousands of dollars every month, if necessary.
Watch the robocall problem vanish overnight.
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I'm actually working with phone switches for a living. There are so many legitimate reasons to change the caller ID, that I really doubt you can come up with a working definition for "misrepresentation".
A hint: Just because the line a call goes out has a phone number assigned to it, it does not mean that the number of that line should ever be used in a call. It could be that this line is
Re:Instead of down-modding, explain what is wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
As usual, a bunch of excuses.
The ID misrepresented if the person making the call is not entitled to use the number displayed. It's as simple as that.
You people have known about this problem for decades, but have done jack squat about it so far. But I'm sure at $10 bucks a pop, smart people like you would figure out a solution in no time. After all, protocol handshakes, whitelists and the like aren't exactly rocket science anymore.
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A T1 trunk has 30 lines. Those lines are not physical numbers, just possible phone connections. Normally, the T1 lines are assigned round robin to the calls (you can also assign them linearly, meaning always use the lowest free line number). So whenever station 43 calls, and the last call was assigned to line 14 on the T1, the call of station 43 will now go out on line 15. And an incoming call to station 198 will then get line 16. It
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Why not just make it illegal to even store your phone number without your permission, like it is in the EU?
GDPR means that companies have to get opt-in permission to store your phone number and use it to call you.
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Just because you made an excuse, or cited a "reason," doesn't mean what you did was also true, or honest.
You deserve to sit in prison with all the other people making this happen; one minute in prison for every minute of people's time you wasted, and a $1 fine for every $1 you cost people in airtime. I don't mean total, I mean every person who made this happen should each be held to account for the entire cost. As a deterrent.
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Let me present you a phone switch system I helped building a few years ago. It is the phone switch of an organization with locations in several counties. In each county, you have a local gateway connect
Re:Instead of down-modding, explain what is wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
I nearly never get robocalls in Germany, none of my friends watching LWT does.
I guess we're using a completely different phone network or technology in Europe.
That must be why universal healthcare works here, too, and cant work in the US :-)
$TECHNICALITY = "They make a LOT on those calls." (Score:2)
Part of the $TECHNICALITY is that it would cost some of the carriers a lot of money to block them. Not spent on the effort, but lost revenue from the robocallers (who DO pay for network use, even if it's a pittance per call).
As long as that perverse incentive is in place, don't expect a lot of action from phone companies to block phone spam.
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I don't think it is the network use that is driving the profit, but that they sell the ability to fake the caller ID numbers. They're entirely complicit, not just bystanders who refuse to do anything because of some passive benefit.
There are definitely perverse incentives.
What has often been proposed in the past is to force them to limit the caller ID choice to only other numbers on the same account. That would solve the whole thing, and they'd still be able to offer the legit part of the service. They refu
Re:Instead of down-modding, explain what is wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
please explain what the FCC can do?
The FCC should ban number spoofing, unless the company doing it has full legal control over both the calling number and the spoofed number.
Any spoofed call should be required to have a live human available to handle callbacks on the spoofed number, and that human should be required to provide the full name and legal domestic address of the entity that made the call.
There are legitimate reasons for spoofing. There is no legitimate reason for anonymous spoofing without accountability.
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The FCC should ban number spoofing, unless the company doing it has full legal control over both the calling number and the spoofed number.
Sounds great (and I don't mean that sarcastically), is that better accomplished through the FCC or Congress? Not sure myself. I am sure we need some kind of action.
Re:Instead of down-modding, explain what is wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Congress should set broad guidelines and leave the technical details up to the regulatory agencies.
So this should be done by the FCC.
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It can only reasonably be achieved by Congress, because details.
If the FCC does it directly, it takes a lot longer, is more expensive to make happen, and then sits in purgatory while a bunch of lawsuits wind through the Courts. And then the telcos use all that time to search for ways around the rule. As long as it never really takes effect, people don't get used to the change, so it is under threat of reversal.
Whereas if Congress does it, by telling the FCC exactly what to implement, it goes into effect rig
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I'd say the FCC. It requires a shift in technologies, to handle bundling the phone numbers of a customer and forcing Caller-ID to only use that list. I'm afraid the technologies were deliberately designed _not_ to support restriction of spoofing Caller-ID's.
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It isn't enough to say they have to control all the numbers, that leaves a barn-door-sized hole where they promise to their telco that they really control the numbers.
Better is to restrict it numbers on the same account at the same telco. That way the telco has the info they need, and there are no excuses.
If they want to pool numbers beyond that, this is 2019, they can just set up an office PBX and bridge the pools themselves. For companies with a legit use case this is not a big deal to do.
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And the means of achieving this imperative?
Allow consumers to directly sue the telcos for spoofed calls in small claims court, with a minimum penalty of $500 per call.
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So what next, are you going to complain bitterly that nobody ever pestered George Washington about fracking?
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It's because congress made robocalls illegal unless it's political. So now all the robocalls are political and growing rapidly in number.
Congress should have NEVER exempted political calls from the robocall ban, it left a loophole you can drive an aircraft carrier through and it's being exploited just like everyone said it would be. The only way you will stop robocalls is for the FCC to actually put some teeth into a ban through enforcement and severe financial penalties, oh and they have to ban ALL robocal
Re: 90 minutes? (Score:2)
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A decade?
Dude, they were a thing in the 80's. You're technically correct, but...
Re: 90 minutes? (Score:3)
Obama was no saint, and he certainly doesnâ(TM)t currently have the power to do anything about the current situation.
We want the current administration to do something, because they appear to have the means to do so, by simply being in power.
So how do previous presidents and candidates help in resolving current issues?
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Should have a US Freedom PAC do the calls (Score:2)
Nothing better than using a PAC to do the robocalls.
Make sure you get his five burner cells we're not supposed to know about. And all his kids.
Har har har har !! (Score:2)
That is actually funny, lucky for those idiots he is not calling their home phone.
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That may get done next week for the next episode, or at least, I hope that happens!
Not just funny, it's brilliant! (Score:2)
Good for him! (Score:2)
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I have a collection of thousands of recorded bagpipe songs, and I'd like to point out; there is a good reason, a very good reason, that Scotland the Brave and Amazing Grace make up 95% of the bagpipe music played in public.
If you really want to torture them, play something like Duart's Castle. The first minute or so will have you wanting to dance, but that's just about when the song falls into Duart's Moat for the kill.
Nemo me impune lacessit!
If you're going to post a region-locked link.... (Score:2)
Re:If you're going to post a region-locked link... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know it's annoying, but it's quite likely that the person who linked to it did not know it was region locked. I know that in many cases I would have no way of knowing and no reliable way to test if it was.
robocalls getting earlier? (Score:5, Informative)
Is this happening to anyone else? About two weeks ago we started getting regular robocalls at 6 AM local. (Usually they've waited until 8:30 AM local time.) And then, late last week we got one robocall at 5:15 AM. (I'm on call, so I *have* to answer the phone.) And this is to a cell phone! (We haven't had a land line for a couple years.) This is going beyond annoying, to the point where I'm going to start calling FCC commissioners myself.
Later for me (Score:2)
I've never had an early Rabo-Call that I know of, but I have had a handful come at 9-10pm at night... that's new.
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"Is this happening to anyone else?"
My wife is starting to get that this week. And ofc it doesn't matter what location the phone shows as that is trivially spoofed.
I can't imagine that anyone thinks this is a good sales technique. FarmersOnly dot com clients perhaps.
NEwayz I think they are scouting for phone nums with real peeps on the end so they can sell verified fon lists to the folks who *do* want to sell the latest penis enhancer or whatever.
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It will get worse. Eventually 24/7. :(
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Which timezone are you in? Is your phone number's area code from that timezone as well?
Great questions, as often people who move from the east coast keep their old number.
But in my case, pacific time zone, and my number is also pacific.
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ditto
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When I moved I kept my old phone number + area code. Makes it REALLY easy to tell who is spamming you when you get an "out of state" call. 99% of the time is is spam, with 1% a wrong number.
Of course these bastards have resorted to spoofing my phone number when they phone me but that makes it even easier to tell that it is spam. "Oh look, I'm phoning myself, yeah right!" **Click.**
YouTube video was taken offline? (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Video unavailable
This video is not available.
Why can't telcos require ANI to match DIDs? (Score:3)
Basically ingress filtering. If you are accepting an inbound call from a subscriber, any calling party ANI you pass should match DIDs for which you are the owner.
They know what numbers belong to what carriers so that they can terminate calls to them correctly. I mean, we have number portability and that doesn't work without a database that says which carrier each number belongs to.
If you do this you can go a long way towards killing off robocalling and other scam calls with forged numbers.
I'm sure the more legitimate call center business will get upset, many of them forge ANI for legitimate reasons but this can be pretty easily handled either administratively (by some form or signature from the number's owner) or on the back end with communication between the owner and their provider (so that the owner physically routes outbound calls).
Ordinary business phone systems shouldn't be affected, they're already associated with the DIDs they send out as ANI as well as any base numbers assigned to their phone circuits.
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Are there a lot of carriers who can terminate calls on the PSTN accepting random inbound SIP traffic? I feel like there is an account verification step involved here and that open SIP relays make as much sense as open SMTP relays, and that ultimately there is some level of gatekeeping to the PSTN by real carriers where it's gonna cost you to reliably terminate calls at arbitrary numbers. Thus somebody's got the ability to demand ANI get passed or the call gets rejected.
Fuck small time, fly by night SIP pr
Hi Congress (Score:2)
Re:Hi Congress (Score:4, Insightful)
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They already did. They banned _all_ robocalls and exempted political calls. In doing so they carved a huge loophole.
Want to make an illegal robocall legal? Stick a one sentence political message at the end, you've now got a perfectly legal robocall, even if 99.999999% of callers never hear that final sentence. You can't ban something and then carve an exception that's so broad it basically unbans the ban you just passed. That's what congress did here, the symbolically banned robocalls then carved the bigges
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Howabout doing your freakin' jobs and passing legislation to outlaw robocalls... oh, except of course during your campaigns. We wouldn't want to miss those /s.
Most of these robocalls are already illegal, and robocalls for political campaigns are already exempt from having to check the do not call list. But the government places more emphasis on going after victimless crimes like cannabis offenses than it does on things where there's actually a victim, like robocalling.
Crowdsource fix (Score:2)
If I had time, I would write an app that would let me add a number to a list to target for return robocalls. The way it would work is that I get the call telling me that there is nothing wrong with my credit, and I hit a button. From the next week, I return the call every half hour or so, and kindly inform them that there is nothing wrong with their credit either (aren't I helpful).
This sound innocuous, until you consider that they are bothering enough people who have the free app to have someone calling
Re:Crowdsource fix (Score:5, Informative)
Robocalls LIE about their number. They use random numbers in the same area code as you (often) to encourage you to pick up. They do NOT own these numbers.
What you're advocating would be punching a random person named "Frank X" cause two days ago someone hit you in the dark and yelled "I'm Frank X". Not the most reliable source of information there.
Robocalls are a symptom, not the problem (Score:2)
The problem is there's no reliable way to figure o
I read all the comments ... (Score:2)
... and, generally they just suck.
Here's the best one:
Tell me how I can make a robo caller so I can join in reindeer games and call those motherfuckers, too.
Thanks.
[John, from the IRS department of arrest yo ass]
Stop immediately? (Score:2)
It should have been "Within the next two to three weeks" to be more authentic.
Robocalls is now too common. (Score:2)
I get 4-5 a day. Disgusting.
Have robot; will talk (Score:2)
With a little voice recognition we could turn this into a killer app.
Only in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
If this problem were really so hard to resolve, it would be an issue in every country. But it's not. The volume of robocalls in European countries is orders of magnitudes lower than in the US. I get maybe one every couple of months. That suggests to me the issue is much more one of political will and regulatory teeth than it is about technical challenge.
Just use a better app (Score:2)
Why obsess about Ajit Pai or whomever when the problem can easily be solved by using an app with better authentication - like Facebook Messenger or Skype or Duo or whatever? You get to control who calls you and confirm their identity much more reliably. We are holding on to technologies like paper mail and numeric phone numbers that have long be superseded with better solutions that need no government to regulate them.
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"Why obsess about Ajit Pai or whomever when the problem can easily be solved by using an app with better authentication - like Facebook Messenger or Skype or Duo or whatever? "
That has to be the most stupid comment on this entire page.
My bad, didn't see more of the episode (Score:2)
My bad, it is an old episode. Who would have thought, you can't trust people on the internet! :D
Why is a wrong link tagged "informative"? (Score:2)
Re:Actually, John, this is a crime (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't you dare bring up a first amendment right that cannot be squashed by claiming that it constitutes "harassment" of a public official to contact them on their office phone. Next you'll be telling me that these calls are expressly authorized by the FCC's own consumer guidance [fcc.gov], and I simply refuse to believe it. It's criminal -- some goober on Slashdot can constru
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TV stations you have to pay for
A) are mostly not regulated by the FCC
B) are excepted from most of the rules about captions
It is the free over-the-air broadcast stations that are required to follow those sorts of rules. The authority of the FCC to regulate them comes from the fact that broadcast bandwidth is a limited public resource.
Re:Actually, John, this is a crime (Score:5, Interesting)
They DO have a legitimate purpose. The people being called are public officials. They are the natural recipients of petitions for the redress of grievances WRT communications in the United States. No law may abridge that right.
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Have [nbcnews.com] some links [arstechnica.com].
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They're political robocalls, and as such they do not need a business purpose.
Re:Actually, John, this is a crime (Score:4, Insightful)
Who do I trust to have a better handle on it, John Oliver and the lawyers at HBO, or random anonymous internet guy?
And I don't even doubt you're a lawyer. It is just that your swollen head won't make your opinion as important as the opinions of the lawyers who are involved. They put a lot of work in to make his show even possible.
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Most cellphone companies charge extra if you want caller name ID.
Also Verizon for example doesn't support it on all devices that use VoLTE so for example all of their customers using their wireless home phone replacement will lose access to caller name ID at the end of the year unless they do something to fix it.
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I love the way my phone company (CenturyLink) gets to charge me $10 per month per line for caller ID... and yet is apparently under no obligation that the strings that show up on my caller ID display bear any relationship to reality. If that isn't a scam in and of itself, I don't know what is.
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The reason they report incorrect caller ID is because the exchange that the call is coming from is falsely reporting it.
The only way I can imagine to correct this would be to perform an end-to-end reverse lookup on the phone number that is claiming to be the one calling you and ask the exchange that is directly connected to that particular number if that number is making a call to your number, right now via a handshake protocol not entirely unlike starting a tcp connection.
Re:Better yet is this. Not kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not that hard.
The phone company know who they're billing when they complete a circuit. They know who every caller on their network is and what numbers they are assigned. The TELCO should be responsible for assigning the id to the circuit. Not the subscriber.
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Sure, but what do you do if they falsely report it?
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The reason they report incorrect caller ID is because the exchange that the call is coming from is falsely reporting it.
The only way I can imagine to correct this would be to perform an end-to-end reverse lookup on the phone number that is claiming to be the one calling you and ask the exchange that is directly connected to that particular number if that number is making a call to your number, right now via a handshake protocol not entirely unlike starting a tcp connection.
Actually there is a much easier way to do this. Our VOIP provider for our customers has implemented it. You can't spoof their calls. They require the sent from number to match the actual number if not the call will not complete. We had trouble when they did this with a hospital and a bank who were sending out the incorrect number string with their forwarded calls. Its possible but the companies have to care and for the most part all they care about is selling phone service and not what the people that
Re:Ajit Pai opposes robocalls. (Score:5, Insightful)
If only he had some sort of position of power involving communications. He could do something about robocalls.
Re:Ajit Pai opposes robocalls. (Score:4, Insightful)
If they want to annoy the controllers of the FCC shouldn't they be robocalling Verizon CEO's?
Re:Ajit Pai opposes robocalls. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait until the calls from Greece come in (Score:2)
I live in CO now
Ahh, then any moment you too can start getting the spam calls from Greece ( +303-XXX-XXXX )
If you see a + at the start, do not answer the call.
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Why is this modded down?
I haven't had mod points in months.
I would have modded it +1 Informative.
Wait ...
I guess I just answered my question.
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What are "voicemails"?
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I stopped getting robocalls partway through the Obama administration, and started getting them after Trump took office. It may be coincidence, but it's easy for me to think it's related.
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As the saying goes: sometimes you have to swallow the bad-tasting medicine in order for it to heal you.
The bad-tasting thing in this case is not medicine, it's corporate cock. Your willingness to accept it into your throat does not have any bearing on its healthfulness.
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Sure there is [wikipedia.org].
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You may not know this, but the guy on the screen talking in the first person is just an actor. He didn't actually do any of this himself, other than reading it to you. And maybe writing some of the jokes. Maybe.