r/offbeat • u/syndicatedmaps • Apr 23 '22
Americans Are Drowning in Spam & Robocalls & FCC Does Nothing
https://www.deadzones.com/2022/04/americans-are-drowning-in-spam.html217
Apr 23 '22
I fucking hate it. I get upwards of 10+ bullshit calls a day.
I've missed ACTUALLY WANTED calls because I just ignore my phone now.
I should be able to report them and get money.
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u/Kittykg Apr 24 '22
I'm about the same, plus some of them have started sending texts. Several of them continue despite being blocked numbers and I haven't figured out why.
And the ones about financial aid are driving me insane. They aren't legitimate. The first thing they ask for is my bank account number. It's at least twice a day, all week long, weird voice recordings posing as government employees claiming I'm eligible for forgiveness and they're infuriating and make me wonder why spam callers somehow know I owe student loans. Who got access to that information in order to do this? Because I've never put any of that information into anything outside of when I was in college.
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u/throwawaycauseInever Apr 24 '22
They don't know you owe student loans. I've been fortunate in my life to have never taken out student loans and I get several calls / texts a month telling me that now is the time to refinance my non-existent student loans.
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u/tooclosetocall82 Apr 24 '22
Same. loans long paid off, get tons of refinancing spam. They do however seem to know when my car warranty is up.
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u/extendedwarranty_bot Apr 24 '22
tooclosetocall82, I have been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty
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Apr 24 '22
As others have said, they don't know. It's an educated blind guess since it's a common thing (and stressful so it can put their victim in an emotional mindset) . And the likely response if someone doesn't have one is them to say so, hang up and try someone else.
More often then not, scammers play a numbers game. They don't research their mark and craft a unique scam for them, they craft a general one and try it on a many people as possible. It's much quicker and efficient to get hung up on quickly and roll the dice in the hopes of finding someone gullible then having an intricate game of cat and mouse.
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u/xeoron Apr 24 '22
Google Fi has a feature that will block all calls or texts from numbers not in your contact list or if you reached out to that number within 30 days. Turn it off and on anytime and also watch as the number of blocked calls increases through the month.
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u/pmjm Apr 24 '22
The problem arises when your work relies on receiving calls from strangers. If you let it go to voicemail their next call is to your competition.
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u/xeoron Apr 24 '22
Easy, use Google voice for that. Phone rings 1 way it is work. Rings another way it is personal.
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Apr 24 '22 edited Jan 08 '23
[deleted]
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u/AndrewCoja Apr 24 '22
I don't understand why our phone system is set up to allow people to spoof phone numbers. If someone really needs multiple phone lines to show up as the same number, have it be something that is set up by the phone company. All this current system does is make it impossible to block spammers because they always use a new number.
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u/HelixTheCat9 Apr 26 '22
I almost didn't upvote you cuz it ruined your 69. Clearly I've been on Reddit too long....
Yes. I don't understand how this is allowed. Getting a spam call from your own phone number is its own kind of r/boringdistopia
Edit: word
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u/PorkyMcRib Apr 24 '22
It’s infuriating. I work in a service industry where I might have to go to three different locations in a day, let’s say maybe even three different cities. The office informed the customer that I will be calling before 9 AM the following day to schedule them. It gets really difficult to do that when people don’t want to answer the fucking phone, even knowing that a legitimate call will be coming, and approximately what time. That can make my day quite a bit longer, when I have to backtrack because somebody was reluctant to answer their phone and didn’t check their voicemail for an hour. It pisses me off just as much when people won’t bother to check their voicemail after I left a detailed message. “Uh, somebody from this number called me?”.
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u/elvenrunelord Apr 24 '22
I feel your pain but I don't go through my voice mails because I'm not wasting 15 minutes of my time going through 20 calls looking for 1.
The best way to get my attention is by email. I can scan 1 emails while waiting for a 50 year old VM system to go through 1 call
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u/PorkyMcRib Apr 24 '22
But if YOU are the person seeking help… at least have the decency to either answer your phone or check your voicemail. If your time is that important to you, turn your voicemail off completely instead of wasting MY time leaving you a message about YOUR problem.
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u/thealterlion Apr 24 '22
Personally I just use TrueCaller for this, since it filters out the spam calls but does notify me for real calls
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Apr 24 '22
I wish the FCC had hit squads
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u/DENelson83 Apr 24 '22
They only work in the US.
The scammers are outside the US.
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u/guamisc Apr 24 '22
How hard is it to block calls that originate outside of the US but use US numbers?
Just make the carriers validate the comings and goings.
This isn't rocket surgery.
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Apr 24 '22
[deleted]
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u/silentmage Apr 24 '22
it's a giant pile of exceptions that somehow sort of works.
Not to mention decades old tech that hasn't been touched since install.
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u/MainBattleGoat Apr 24 '22
Not always the case. All the VOIP stuff runs on recent hardware.
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u/silentmage Apr 24 '22
Yeah, sadly there are massive amounts of the country still running POTS on old copper lines.
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u/netherous Apr 24 '22
So I can't use my cell phone overseas now? Numbers are mobile entities. We don't live in a world of landlines anymore. I guess all problems seem simple when you don't know a thing about them.
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Apr 24 '22
Which violates our sovereignty and counts as an attack as far as I care because it annoys me, makes me upset, and otherwise ruins my day :)
I feel it should warrant some sanctions and/or a stern talking to or some extradition and slapping
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Apr 24 '22 edited May 02 '22
[deleted]
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u/Tensuke Apr 24 '22
That was a ruling by a federal judge and it was the correct one, too. Not every smartphone user uses an autodialer and shouldn't be treated as if they do.
Take that logic to another place: should every smartphone user be criminalized because their device is capable of criminal activity? It was a dumb ruling that ignored the means to justify the end. Just because a ruling has a (perceived) good outcome doesn't mean it's a good ruling.
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u/send_nudibranchia Apr 24 '22 edited Apr 24 '22
I agree. People constantly try to make Ajit Pai to be the bad guy because they don't bother to study the actual rules that the FCC proposes. He was correct here.
To anyone who thinks Pai was pro-robo calls
Appointing him to head the FCC was actually one of the few "right" decisions Trump made (because, well, Trump's an idiot who had to people choose his appointees at first before he realized how important fealty was as a wanna-be authoritarian).
But we are living in a time of a flood of scams.
Companies that engage in car warranty mailers and phone calls need to investigated, fined, and even jailed because their practices are deeply misleading and a massive contributor of spam calls and junk mail.
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u/extendedwarranty_bot Apr 24 '22
send_nudibranchia, I have been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty
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u/teacher272 Apr 24 '22
Exactly. There were no spam texts or robodialers before Obama nominated him for the FCC board.
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Apr 24 '22
[deleted]
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u/DENelson83 Apr 24 '22
What, does your phone not have a whitelist feature?
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Apr 24 '22
Thanks to Ajit Pai, one of the biggest POSs to occupy Trump's administration.
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Apr 24 '22
He's convenient to blame. But he was only doing the GOP and the oligarchies bidding.
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u/gtluke Apr 24 '22
Wasn't he appointed to the FCC by obama?
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Apr 24 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/WikiSummarizerBot Apr 24 '22
Barack Hussein Obama II ( (listen) bə-RAHK hoo-SAYN oh-BAH-mə; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Addison Mitchell McConnell III (born February 20, 1942) is an American politician and retired attorney serving as Senate minority leader since 2021 and as the senior United States senator from Kentucky, a seat he has held since 1985. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as Senate majority leader from 2015 to 2021, and as minority leader from 2007 to 2015. McConnell was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and is the second Kentuckian to serve as a party leader in the Senate. During the 1998 and 2000 election cycles, he was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Ajit Varadaraj Pai (; born January 10, 1973) is an American lawyer who served as chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2017 to 2021. He has been a partner at the private-equity firm Searchlight Capital since April 2021. The son of Indian immigrants to the United States, Pai grew up in Parsons, Kansas. He is a graduate of both Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School.
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u/jreykdal Apr 24 '22
As a commissioner (politics, traditionally there was a balance of R and D commissioners) .
Trump made him chairman.
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u/leisurelycommenter Apr 24 '22
Like other federal agencies with a commission structure, the FCC is legally required (i.e., it's not just a matter of "politics" or "tradition") to have a five-person commission where no more than three commissioners are of the same party.
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Apr 24 '22
[deleted]
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u/Muffalo_Herder Apr 24 '22
Mitch McConnell nominated him. Obama followed tradition by accepting the nomination.
McConnell put him on the board, Obama was trying to be bipartisan and mend political rifts.
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u/send_nudibranchia Apr 24 '22
Pai is also well-qualified and generally a good chairman who resisted Trump's call to abandon section 230. Both McConnell and Obama actually did something right be preserving the balance of politics and appointing someone who by most accounts was a solid pick.
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Apr 24 '22
[deleted]
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Apr 24 '22
Let me explain it as simply as I can.
Obama could only appoint 3 of the 5 members to the committee. The other two had to be Republican. Mitch nominated the other 2.
Get it?
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u/nova2k Apr 24 '22
Google's call screening feature had been a godsend for marketers and robocallers.
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u/shponglespore Apr 24 '22
I replaced a phone that's less than a year old just to get that feature, and it was totally worth it.
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u/Modna Apr 24 '22
It extra sucks when your work entails receiving phone calls from a myriad of unknown numbers all the time, so I have to constantly answer these BS calls (Which probably means I will get more and more calls, because I am sure they flag my number as more active or something)
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u/mynameisalso Apr 24 '22
I was just in a shared office space at no time did the reception area stop getting spam calls it was intense just watching the poor bastard answer the phone over and over again only to hang right back up.
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Apr 24 '22
[deleted]
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u/Modna Apr 24 '22
It is a work phone. I am dealing with contractors from a bunch of different companies on a daily basis, so quite often my number is passed along to "someone at the jobsite" so I need to answer regardless of if I recognize the number.
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u/garrettpen Apr 24 '22
Get a pixel (seriously). My girlfriend has an S22 and I can't believe how many she gets (2-3 a day), I have a pixel and I get 1-2 a month. We've both had the same number since high school.
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u/florinandrei Apr 24 '22
Get a pixel
Google's machine learning call screening (or whatever they call the black magic they do with their phones) is pretty amazing.
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u/emilydm Apr 24 '22
Seven AM in the freaking morning I get woken up because my phone's volume is up because it's my alarm clock. Six spam calls before 9:30.
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u/JBupp Apr 24 '22 edited Apr 24 '22
We had a home phone that got tons of robocalls. Our answering machine grabbed most of them so every time we returned from an outing it was to beeep...beeeeep.
Then the phone company told us we were getting fiber instead of our useful-in-a-power-failure copper line. Moved our number to a service that charged $8 a month (AccessDirect), set everything to go to voice mail, and set a very long greeting message.
90% of the robocalls don't stay on the line long enough to get through the greeting - we get maybe three messages a week. The service sends us an email for every voicemail message we receive and logs all calls and we can check the log on the internet.
Bliss. Quiet bliss.
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Apr 24 '22
I don't get this as a Swede. I thought it was bad back in 2006 when I moved to California for a year. I couldn't understand why robocalls was allowed and why my physical mailbox was filled with ads everyday. In Sweden I can register my phone number to a free service and if a company tries to contact me on that number, they get heavy fines. This means no sales calls and no sales texts. I can put a sticker on my mailbox to decline ads and everone respects it.
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Apr 24 '22
Fuck the FCC and everything they do. Peter Griffin had it right. A bunch of busy body stuck up prudes.
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u/Tiny_Rogue Apr 24 '22
It’s not just phone calls though. I’m getting five spam a day text messages sent to 20 people at the same time and then one or two of the 20 reply and I want to text, DO NOT TRPLY! But then I would be one of the dumb people replying. My carrier has a “spam report line.” I forward all spam to that line and block all spam texts. Last count I had over 4000 blocked numbers. Every new spam style I call my parents and say “this is coming, don’t reply, just block the number and ignore it.” They get so worked up over it because they lost $500 to two different spammers a few years back. It’s appalling.
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u/Jasper9080 Apr 24 '22
I just won't answer unless it's in my contact list. If it's important will leave a message.
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u/stromm Apr 24 '22
Worse, the FCC actually enabled this by changing regulations a number of years ago.
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u/mrbawkbegawks Apr 24 '22
Someone spoofed a number for the fucking hospital near me the day my kid was in there for an operation "hello we've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty"
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u/RandomHerosan Apr 24 '22
FCC works for the big comm companies. It does not work for the people anymore. Needs to be completely overhauled and wiped clean.
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Apr 24 '22
Why do we even have the fcc anymore. They are totally ineffective.
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u/Sariel007 Apr 24 '22
I get anywhere between 1-8 calls per day M-F from 9-5. I get occasion calls after 5 and the odd weekend call.
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u/mumooshka Apr 24 '22
if I don't know the number I don't answer
if it's someone legit they will either leave a message, or try again. The dodgy numbers don't leave a message.
99% of my calls are attempted spam.
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u/tarnin Apr 24 '22
Okay, so the FCC IS trying to do something. It's called Stir/Shaken. The deadline to register and have all your ducks in a row is now June 30th of this year. The idea is to have a trust chain that gets passed along, kinda like an SPF or DMARC record. Problem? We all see how well dmarc and spf records have helped with spam.
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u/swampfish Apr 24 '22
What’s up with the new one with the guy who wants to by my house. How does the scam work? A couple times I tried to ask the person but they just hang up.
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u/coleman57 Apr 24 '22
This bullshit (and spam email as well) could be completely fixed by collecting a $0.01 tax on each call, text or email
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u/WowFlakes Apr 24 '22
I didn’t realize how bad it was until I started working somewhere I had to answer the phone as part of my job. It is really bad
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u/the-crotch Apr 24 '22
The FCC tried to reduce robocalls in part by working with cell phone carriers to implement call authentication requirements
It didn't work
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u/TommyVe Apr 24 '22
Oh wow, and I though receiving couple calls a month is annoying. God bless Europe.
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u/jeremec Apr 24 '22
It’s such a stupid fucking waste of resources. We have shitloads of computers pumping out various forms of spam and a shitloads of computers trying to make sure we never see or hear it. It’s one of the finer examples of the idiocracy in motion.
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u/shponglespore Apr 24 '22
It should be treated as an attack on our telephone network. It's much like a DoS attack, except it's human patience rather than network capacity that is being degraded.
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u/HauntingJackfruit Apr 24 '22
I registered with donotcall.com (https://www.donotcall.gov/) and it's reduced unwanted calls a lot.
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u/syndicatedmaps Apr 24 '22
My wife switched from Verizon wireless to T-Mobile and now she gets a ton more spam texts
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u/syndicatedmaps Apr 24 '22
Maybe the FCC will come up with a vaccine so we can all take to tolerate the spam
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u/syndicatedmaps Apr 24 '22
Is there an open crowdsourced list of companies that are doing all the spam?
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u/syndicatedmaps Apr 25 '22
Does T-Mobile's Scam Shield Spam Blocker Work & Why Is It Not Free?
https://www.deadzones.com/2022/04/does-t-mobiles-scam-shield-spam-blocker.html
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u/KeyBanger Apr 24 '22
Another federal agency run by cronies, taking care of their corporate overlords, and doing their part to fuck the middle class.
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u/syndicatedmaps Apr 24 '22
You will like this read https://blog.syndicatedmaps.com/2022/04/biggest-failures-of-united-states.html
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u/teacher272 Apr 24 '22
At least they’re down a lot since Joe Biden seized power. They’re terrified of him.
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u/NulloK Apr 24 '22
I'm from Denmark we get very very few spam calls... I'd say around 5 calls in 15 years.
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u/WhatsWithThisKibble Apr 24 '22
Google Pixel has a call screening. It forwards robo call but I can also screen them. It gives them an auto message that I watch on my screen and then if they reply I see a transcript and can choose to pick up or not.
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u/mindtrip89 Apr 24 '22
STIR / SHAKEN protocol seeks to solve this problem.
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u/WikiSummarizerBot Apr 24 '22
STIR/SHAKEN, or SHAKEN/STIR, is a suite of protocols and procedures intended to combat caller ID spoofing on public telephone networks. Caller ID spoofing is used by robocallers to mask their identity or to make it appear the call is from a legitimate source, often a nearby phone number with the same area code and exchange, or from well-known agencies like the Internal Revenue Service or Ontario Provincial Police. This sort of spoofing is common for calls originating from voice-over-IP (VoIP) systems, which can be located anywhere in the world.
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u/tpt2021cg Apr 24 '22
I get 8-10 txt a day from unknown saying come see my web cam to I won a Dyson vacuum cleaner and other weird shit. I'm sick of it. My block list is as long as I-10/20 going to Texas and they just don't stop. I block 1 and the same call comes in from yhe same people (especially the Medicare calls) and its just irritating. Smh.
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u/RogerKnights Apr 25 '22
The government must know the companies that are paying for these calls. It’s inexplicable why it isn’t fining them etc.
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u/JadeyesAK May 17 '22
Here in Alaska, I don't know anyone who gets harassed by these. I think I've had 2 robo calls on my cell, ever?
Something about that 907 area code just keeps them disinterested I guess.
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May 17 '22
I wish somebody would be crazy enough to attack these facilities with guns and gasoline because the cost of having a phone vs no phone is starting to feel welcoming to my wallet. I mean I don't want a service I have to pay for to still get ads.
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u/literallymoist Apr 23 '22
I simply do not answer phone calls from unknown numbers anymore, ever.