I mean, sure, but this advice is why (for example) most surveys are useless, phone banking for elections is less effective, and just plain ridiculous to have to do.
Destroying a primary communication channel under a wave of fraud should cause more tumult that "just stop using your phone."
Right?
The first rule of avoiding scam calls is to never answer unknown numbers, and even some known ones.
Curious? Bored? Worried it’s an emergency? Wait the extra minute it takes for the call to go to voice mail, then decide if it’s legitimate.
Serious question though: is this actually feasible? I definitely think this (and fraud/scams in general) should be higher on law enforcement's priority list, but I'm a little worried that ubiquitous VOIP connectivity to the old PSTN made the economics of this as grimly inevitable as email spam.
I mean, telemarketing was a big business long before VOIP. It should have been nipped in the bud back then, but there’s no inherent reason we can’t make these companies criminal to operate. We just tend to favor companies over people, which leaves a huge space for exploitation.
The thing is, if I, as a criminal based in a country with minimal law enforcement permeability to the USA, can just order myself a 200-pack of valid US/Canadian phone numbers and begin making calls with them, there's not a hell of a lot that north american law enforcement can do about it. :(
Totally. And tbqh criminal enforcement is going to be whack-a-mole. The way to kill it dead is to charge civil penalties on the exchanges for scams that reach users, and let the exchanges charge those back, and very rapidly they'll have good ideas to cut-off and block spam calls entering the network
Why isn't there some code we can put in our phones after a scam call to report it, and let a robot handle it from there?
The robot would need to go through the spoofing back at the telcom provider's exchange, but that seems entirely possible.
The robot gets triggered enough, FTC looks into it.
FWIW. My Telco has had a program to block scam calls and SMSs for like four years and I still get them. it's not that they aren't blocking the calls it's just that the scammers will adapt.
This is exactly what I'm worried about: I am far from a telco expert but my hazy understanding is that the way the whole shebang works makes it _really_ difficult to block bad actors without an unlikely, expensive and possibly-illegal level of coordination between ostensibly neutral common carriers.
Weird coincidence: I just had a scammer try to run some kind of Medicare grift (important detail: I'm 20 years too young for Medicare) so I kept him waiting on the line while I told him I'd go get my card.
Living in Germany I've had two in the last five years. It's extremely feasible.
My favourite was the heavily South Asia-accented fellow claiming to be "Michael Becker". He was silly, but I kind of miss him.
I also don't miss the greatest hits from the US
"Your Microsoft computer" (please)
"Your recent car accident" (lol, nope)
"The Police Benevolent Association of..." (ayfkmskljnssds!?!)
Possible, yes. Difficult and time consuming and expensive and requiring massive international police and telecoms company cooperation. It can be done, but on the other hand it's fast and easy and cheap for offshore scammers to move on to new scams before they are caught.
You could probably do some to automate the finding of scammers, but a lot of it is getting companies' cooperation, companies with a financial interest in those same scammers continuing to scam, and companies outside the jurisdiction of the police where people are being scammed.
Hardly anyone I know I know uses their phones as, well, phones these days. You’ve got to wonder at what point will telcos be receiving more revenue from scam calls than from legitimate calls. Are we already there?
A politician could totally run on outlawing scam calls, fixing potholes, and library access for all. That’d be it. That’s the platform. The other big brain stuff we can figure out as we go. And win.
