[mrsuprawsm]

It's mind-boggling that the United States allows this kind of thing to happen.

In the EU I get maybe one spam call every couple of months. From the stories you hear from Americans on HN, Americans get multiple spam/scam calls a day, and the vast majority of their inbound calls are spam/scams.

What is going wrong in the US that isn't going wrong in the EU? Language barrier? Regulatory capture?

[kube-system]

The US just has large number of people in one country code who mostly speak English, have high incomes, a uniform retail landscape ("go to CVS and get a Google Play card" works everywhere), and an abundance of options for telephony.

It's not like Indian scammers are beholden to EU law but not US law.

[Diesel555]

We also have policy problems. As previous commenters with experience in the industry point out, this problem is easy to solve. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a policy problem.

It’s not an ideals problem. Even very conservative economists would agree that there exists a negative externality in the transaction between the call center and the telecom company on the person being called where there should be some cost on the transaction to account for that externality.

So, it’s not even a conservative liberal thing (intentionally not using party names as those names may not reflect conservative or liberal ideals). It’s a policy problem. Write your member of congress.

[iudqnolq]

Nope, the incentives don't work like that.

I regularly get spam calls in Chinese. My best guess is this is because if they randomly dial Bay Area area codes they sometimes get Chinese people.

[chucksta]

That's the same statement, they wouldn't use a Chinese robo-caller in an area with little to no Chinese population

[iudqnolq]

I'm replying to someone who says the EU is too diverse for it to be worth spammers' effort. If it's worth their time to spam people with northern California area codes in Chinese that makes no sense. Calling people in Germany in German, for example, would be much more reliable.

[FooBarBizBazz]

So basically, monocrops are vulnerable to pests.

[username_my1]

I think it's because of the language.

No one in the EU (outside UK) will receive a call in English and think this is legitimate

In the US if you call any company you would expect someone with an accent

[mrsuprawsm]

Ireland is also in the EU :)

Here in NL, however, it does seem like scammers are occasionally taking advantage of the comparatively high English proficiency and are trying to scam people in English - this one was doing the rounds for a while: https://www.fraudehelpdesk.nl/alert/engels-telefoontje-namen...

[BeetleB]

I'm guessing the scammers can't understand the Irish accent :-)

[sosull]

Ah sure look.

[pcthrowaway]

I'm confused by this. Huge parts of Germany (and maybe Greece) are English speaking. In Berlin you hear more English than German being spoken on the street. Denmark and Holland seem to have high numbers of English speakers as well.

I think several other countries conduct a lot of business in English, but I haven't spent enough time in Europe to know this for sure.

[hikingsimulator]

Lucky you. I usually get one or two spam calls a day in Europe (France/Germany) but they are marked as spam.

Bless the people keeping that red list up to date.

This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls.

[hnuser847]

> This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls.

We do have that, but it probably depends on the carrier and the type of phone you have. On my iPhone with Verizon, there's a setting to "Silence Junk Callers", in which "calls identified by Verizon as potential spam or fraud will be silenced, automatically sent to voicemail, and displayed on the Recents list."

It's not perfect, though, and I still get a ton of spam calls. As a rule I almost never answer the phone if I don't recognize the number.

[supertrope]

Spam filtering for phone calls is in its infancy. Only 20% of calls are signed https://transnexus.com/blog/2022/shaken-statistics-november/. Some robocalls are signed. Many legitimate calls are blocked. I ignore all unknown callers.

[jjtheblunt]

we do have that info (perhaps presentation of such depends on phone software of course).

almost all my inbound calls are spam, in the united states. when i've listened to voicemails left, they even have native north american accented people reading the prerecorded scripts, so there's deep roots to the depravity that cross country borders.

[ghaff]

>if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up

Sometimes but not consistently.

Though honestly in the US I get maybe one SPAM call or text a week these days.

[rootusrootus]

> This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls.

Yes, of course we do. Verizon and T-Mobile, at the very least, mark calls as "likely spam" reliably. Can't speak for any carriers as I've not been a customer of theirs for some time.

[karmelapple]

I wouldn’t say “of course” for a few reasons:

1. It was introduced only within the last couple of years, even though spam calls have been happening for much longer than that 2. A bunch of calls escape the “spam likely” designation even though I’m on one of the major carriers

So I’d say although we have it, it’s not nearly as reliable as I’d expect it to be.

[bayesian_horse]

In Germany scam calls often come from callcenters in Turkey. There is a huge quantity of people who speak both Turkish and German quite well and a small portion of them who for some reason or other reside in Turkey now participate in scam operations.

Turkey doesn't have much interest in stopping this. One could argue they have quite a few bigger problems, crime related or not, to try and shut down a source of foreign currency. Same as India.

[Macha]

Certainly most of my inbound calls in Ireland are scam calls. Not sure this is solved EU-wide, maybe just in your specific EU country?

As far as I know the solution is to require more anti-spoofing techniques (e.g. SHAKEN/STIR) for caller ID and then cut off the carriers who don't provide that, plus the carrier providing the numbers enforcing stronger terms on their users.

[ianmcgowan]

The only anti spoofing technique that works for me is restricting calls to people in my contacts. It’s a bit of a pain with transactional things, but (at least in the US) it seems we’re long past the days where you could just call someone with no warning. I usually get a text or IM first now.

[mrsuprawsm]

I'm in NL, and it seems to be solved here. I'm not sure _how_ it was solved (or they avoided it becoming a problem in the first place), mind you.

[dahfizz]

Would you ever expect a legitimate call from your bank / government / business to be in English? Particularly English with a strong Indian accent?

I think the US gets targeted mostly because of language. Indians learn English in school and it's not uncommon for a legitimate call in the US to come from someone with a strong accent.

[jacquesm]

A couple of items to our advantage: there are quite a few carriers here but only very few of those have physical infrastructure and those tend to have strong political connections. They are tied in with LE and AIVD at the operations level and have excellent security departments and a reputation to uphold. Then there is the willingness of the local authorities to put time into this, and publicize when they nab some of these scammers. And finally, NL is a small market with a weird little language that isn't spoken much outside of our borders. (South African doesn't count ;) ).

[newhotelowner]

Well. The UK is not immune to spam calls. Here is a YouTube video of hacker going after a call centre that was targeting the UK. They were making millions of dollars per year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyEoOfSECp0

Indian knows english. It's hard to target non-english speakers.

[wozniacki]

Same reason the U.S. allows all other sorts of privacy invasion like the White-Pages-like search sites that will gladly share ( for free ) your past 11 something U.S. mailing addresses you've resided at, the names, ages & addresses of your family members & a whole host of other information ( you may have to pay for this bit ). All you need is someone's First & Last name. Even the U.S. state is not really needed.

The reason being someone is reaping massive benefits from whatever loophole allows for this kind of data collection & is shoring up initiatives so that loophole isn't plugged.

Now try the same search with a U.K. resident or E.U. resident you know of. I'd say you will have a markedly tougher time gaining access to similar information, with just a few clicks & without ever pulling out your credit card. I have no clue if U.K. is similarly compromised off late but a few years ago ( prior to Brexit ) it was not the case.

[bluedino]

It's mind boggling that such a high amount of people are willing to pay up whenever they get a call or email

[rootusrootus]

The fraction is quite low, but when you're pulling from a pool of people measured in billions, even a really low percentage is good enough.

[danmaz74]

I'm getting several per week in Italy, now mostly about Amazon stock - previously it used to be mostly about crypto something. So boring.

[numpad0]

EU has the same problem, ja_JP too sans the non-native callers part. Maybe just the US is most affected.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/12/europol-phone-...

[mnky9800n]

i get plenty of sms though. very annoying to get it to stop. you can reply STOP or whatever they suggest to reply to stop the messages but it doesn't seem to do anything.

[Cyberdog]

As with replying "unsubscribe" to spam messages, replying with "stop" to spam texts may just notify the senders that your email account is still active and being read by a human. If it's not from a legit organization which will actually respect your "stop/unsubscribe," just delete the message and don't reply at all.

[mnky9800n]

Yeah I'm thinking about legitimate businesses that I shop at that keep sending me coupons I don't want.

[jfk13]

Also, sending such a reply may turn out to be a chargeable message, not included in your standard plan.