[PaybackTony]

I built telecommunications systems / software for some time. The unfortunate truth here is that telecom carriers absolutely already have everything they need to largely put a stop to it but they knowingly ignore it. It's the biggest problem in the US because because of pricing. It's expensive to run outbound campaigns in almost any other country, and very cheap in the US (fractions of a penny per minute compared to 5-10c per minute in some EU locations). Scammers need volume to make money.

The reason carriers -- from the local exchange carriers and up -- ignore it is because just a single scam operation can mean 10s of thousands of dollars in volume a month, and sometimes more. Since they have to self-report for the most part they're not very incentivized to stop it. There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it, but carriers push back hard on those regulations and they never stick.

I know from experience dealing with this that it's absolutely not ignorance that's at play on the regulatory and commercial side. It's disgusting, and as fueled with greed and red tape as you'd fear.

[ligerzer0]

What blows my mind is scammers can spoof real people's phone numbers... Like shouldn't that be a top priority to shut down ?

[iancmceachern]

Yes, I've even had them spoof law enforcement phone numbers, we should have the technology to shut that down

[EchoReflection]

Someone very close to me recently got scammed by someone calling from a fake Wells Fargo fraud prevention phone number

[heavyset_go]

That sounds like it might cost money, though. It's free to just do nothing about it.

[nostromo]

You've missed the legal / regulatory side of things.

Apparently this has just recently changed, but telcos are highly regulated in the US and they are legally required to execute calls placed by their customers. This means that they have to be very very sure the call should be blocked before doing so, otherwise they face legal liability. This regulatory structure means that call spamming in the US is all but legally protected.

Compare this to less-regulated email, where Gmail and other providers are free to block spam based on any reason: source ip, domain, content of the email, etc.

[smachiz]

Are you referring to STIR/SHAKEN that is a requirement and has been/is being rolled out?

I'm not sure how much was commercial benefit vs lazyness/no incentive to solve the issue directly - the telcos aren't making a lot of money on inbound calling. It's just a problem that didn't impact them directly - only their customers.

[PaybackTony]

Have to touch on this as it's a common theme to my response. There absolutely are regulations. However, regulations being in place, and the enforcement of these regulations are different. STIR/SHAKEN is a requirement, however it's an easy requirement for scammers to meet. (Numbers are super cheap to buy in bulk, pennies per month typically). Sooner or later they'll run out.

The second side of the regulation miss is that carriers have to self-report much of the time. These centers pay into the 6 figures monthly to their carriers. The carriers know exactly what kind of traffic is being sent through and many times aide these scammers in shaping the traffic to look more legit. Auto-warranty scams in the past? Huge amounts of that traffic were routed through the likes of Y-Tel and a couple others. Regulators knew this but enforcement took years to happen. It's the same right now.

Lastly is the issue of what happens once enforcement occurs? The answer is not great: The scammers change numbers and keep going. They aren't local and it's not cut and dry when it comes to continuous enforcement against foreign entities. Their carriers still support them and the fines are typically less than a month's revenue from the larger outfits (think Uber).

Better meta-data helps aide robo / scam / spam blockers. IMO, we should just shut down these carriers who knowingly aide these scammers. We know who they are, they aren't hard to find.

[smachiz]

Isn't that basically what they did? I think the FCC authorized the disconnection of a handful of service providers, and has been aggressively sending notices to others.

https://www.engadget.com/robocall-company-may-receive-the-la...

[pards]

The telco's complacency have trained their customers to not answer the phone thereby destroying one of their primary businesses. Gen Z and Y consider it rude to call people.

[smachiz]

I think that was true long before robo calling was a big thing.

Since texting and even back from the AIM/IRC generation - when I was in college 20 years ago, with T9, people were already primarily were texting not calling.

[zackmorris]

This is a classic example of an unintended consequence of deregulation.

Normally we could petition our elected officials and get something done about it. But lobbyists have come to so completely dominate our legislative process that whole industries have effectively coopted the government through regulatory capture.

On top of that, they've hoodwinked half the population into thinking that regulation bad.

At this point, we can all remain hypervigilant and snoop on our grandparents and get sucked into various private industry scams like identity insurance. We can play games with switching carriers within the duopolies in our areas when they let scammers steal from us. We can project loudly on social media when someone across the world steals right from out of our bank accounts, and haggle with our credit card companies to charge it back and rip off some merchant so that we don't have to pay. This is how scams metastasize into protection rackets and authoritarianism.

Or we could like, make this all illegal and charge carriers directly when it happens. But that would cost rich people money. So rich people run propaganda campaigns to convince us that fines just get passed on to consumers. Which doesn't make any sense in a free market, where we could switch to a cheaper carrier that didn't get fined.

Once we see this from that meta level (that political controversy is rooted in misdirection and lies) it just gets so tiring to watch the same debates over and over. Maybe we need some rich people to step up and call out this nonsense (dragons give up their loot so easily). Maybe we need to organize and start some consumer unions that dictate to vendors how much we'll pay for their services until they shape up. Maybe we should get back to our geek roots and start a free peer to peer wireless network.

Huh, writing out this rant, I just had a thought. Where's the keystone in this? Political progress can't be hacked, so none of our instincts around quick fixes work. In other words, the half of the population that has the working solution has to somehow convince the other half to go along with it. That can be a long and painful process spanning decades.

So what does the other half want? What concession to them would result in getting legislation passed to solve this?

[nostromo]

Telcos are one of the most regulated industries in existence.

And as I point out in my sibling comment, bad regulation is the reason this problem exists: because telcos are not legally able to block most spam calls. If not for this regulation, telcos would have solved spam callers long ago by blocking suspected sources of spam. (Instead, they do work-arounds like labeling them "scam likely.")

[supertrope]

The FCC gave the green light to blocking spam in June 2019. https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2019/06/05/beating-back.... This resolved AT&T's concern/excuse that their legal obligation to connect all calls included spam.

[Nifty3929]

I gave you an upvote even though I'm going to disagree with you. In general, I'm very open-market and low-regulation - however in this particular case you're touching on the idea of a "common carrier," which is an important idea.

When you have one (or a small number of) providers, in a high-barrier-to-entry industry, that provides a critical service - this gives these providers enormous power over us if they were to refuse to do business with us or charge us higher rates. Think water, electric, shipping/postal, internet access, telco, etc.

What if the postal service decided to stop doing business with you, perhaps because of the offensive content of the letters you want to send? Or nobody will ship your merchandise because they don't approve of it? Or your internet provider cancels you? And what if there are a small number of them that collude on these bans, so now you can't even switch providers?

By designating certain industries as "common carriers" it prohibits them from denying service to anyone for any reason, except for particularly obvious, egregious and illegal reasons.

If you want to send out Nazi propaganda newsletters to people who have requested them - the US Postal Service will (and should, I believe) deliver them for you.

We should not allow telcos to decide who's calls to put through. This is a job for legislators and law enforcement, however imperfect those solutions are.

[chinabot]

Scam calls are already criminal what more regulation is required?

[zackmorris]

That sounds plausible, I can understand that carriers shouldn't filter traffic, because that goes against net neutrality. So it sounds like carriers can't block traffic at their level, but can attach metadata that the end user can block. I did a quick search on how that would work and found this info from Robokiller (no affiliation):

https://www.robokiller.com/robocall-blocking-technology

Under the Governmental backing turndown arrow:

We’re fighting behind the scenes to get government support for better fighting robocalls. The FCC’s TRACED Act is just one piece of legislation we’re behind that will increase penalties for robocallers–but there’s far more work that needs to be done.

I realized a TL;DR of my rant after writing it:

Organized crime is stealing from members of the community and the police rarely succeed in returning stolen property. The mayor claims to be trying to help, but mostly works at reelection. Half the community wants to pass a law to fine a middleman who sees crime occurring but does little to stop it. The other half claims that the law itself facilitates the crime and wants to cancel more laws. Some people hire a watchdog to prevent the crime, and that seems to work. Others feel that if the crime affects the whole community, then a solution should be part of the commons, because vulnerable and/or impoverished members of the community would be left defenseless otherwise.

I'm in that second camp. I feel that a conservative argument here is: if I have to be bothered by every little thing because the government can't do its job to defend the community and the security of its property, then that's not a republic, it's anarchy.

[Diesel555]

Anyone claiming “deregulation” for the names sake is speaking rhetoric without knowledge. Both conservative and liberal economists agree with regulation. The most conservative of economists understand the concept of externalities. Call centers bear a clear externality. The business transaction between the telecom Company and the caller bears a negative externality on the callee who is not a member of that transaction. Conservative economists would also agree with regulation to at least impose a cost on the transaction to reflect that externality. The problem is with policy and lobbying as you stated - write your member of congress.

To comment on a now deleted post to this comment: I’m not arguing that bad regulation doesn’t exist which can perpetuate and help continue market failures. I’m arguing that good regulation is the fix to known market failures and economists on both sides recognize that.

[mschuster91]

> The most conservative of economists understand the concept of externalities.

Even conservative economists (and for that matter, also other experts) usually aren't dumb, but I've never seen one of them act on their knowledge appropriately. They all prioritize their ideology and their donors, some of them even refuse to listen to science and facts when people die by the masses.

[WalterBright]

> I've never seen one of them act on their knowledge appropriately

Milton Friedman

[Diesel555]

You are confusing economists with politicians. I can point you to many conservative economists who recommend good policy - whether or not that is implemented is a different story. Economists are advisors, not decision makers, in this context.

[nurettin]

> There are a few easy to implement regulatory / technical mechanisms that could nearly axe all of it

What are these easy few regulatory/technical mechanisms?

[ericbarrett]

PaybackTony, I would also love to hear your suggestions (not sarcastically).

[nojs]

It may also be that they see this as a slippery slope of being responsible for moderating the content of phone calls, which is not a road I imagine carriers want to go down.

[jyu]

How many broken systems are the result of perverse incentives?

[ChuckNorris89]

Absolutely everything: car dependency, affordable housing and healthcare, hard drugs, the environment, corporate tax evasion, energy, money laundering, immigration, good pay for nursing and teaching staff, etc.

"We can't fix X because then sector Y would suffer trillions in losses and jobs so it's best to keep the status quo and kick the can down the road."

[baron816]

Can you please tell this to congress?

[supertrope]

Congress already passed the TRACED Act. The FCC is moving relatively quickly in issuing government orders (as fast as a federal agency can move). It will take years for phone companies to upgrade to signing calls with level A attestation. Right now 20% of calls are signed and that includes level B attestation (we know the number is not spoofed but not who is using it) and level C (we only know the upstream phone company). If signing is implemented it will take more time to finally cut off non-signed calls. Tracing abuse takes time. Then robocallers can not pay fines and open another LLC. Hopefully this will reach an equilibrium like email where 99% of raw email traffic is spam but spam filters make it reasonable for individuals.

[javajosh]

So, I realize this is a big ask - but can you please write this up as a story and sent it to a major news outlet? My cynicism is already high, but I would not have suspected this of all things, that telcos would allow the elderly to be victimized to the tune of $10B to make a few pennies.

Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal

[bbbbb5]

>Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal

Most of the losses (in $ terms) from these scams do not involve gift cards. They involve the scammers convincing you to install some remote desktop software and emptying your bank account.

It's already illegal to send people to open bank accounts with fake IDs, but the scammers have no problem cashing out the bulk of their profits like that.

[mixmastamyk]

How do they get the big bucks out of the last bank?

[bbbbb5]

Sometimes they transfer to a cryptocurrency exchange, sometimes they go to a branch to withdraw everything. Banks don't really like either of those, so issuing checks and cashing them somewhere else is a common scheme.

Some may bounce the money through a few accounts and eventually into a business account that'll send it overseas, it depends.

The people on the ground are random replaceable idiots.

[saxonww]

My grandmother got talked into mailing cash between the pages of a magazine. I don't really know what to say other than the format of the money doesn't matter too much, someone is going to try to scam people out of it, and the scams are going to work.

[alexb_]

"Make a way you can use money without being tracked by everybody illegal" is not a good thing

[_-david-_]

>Also, fuck gift cards. Make them illegal

And when scammers go back to using Western Union are you going to ban that as well? When they ask a person to send them cash are you going to ban cash as well? Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this.

[javajosh]

I want gift cards banned not because of scammers. Like pay-day loan services, gift cards are based on the fraud of profound information asymmetry. Gift cards make liquid cash worse in almost every dimension. It's tied to one supplier. It can be lost. I forgot the stats, but I'm positive billions spent on gift cards are never redeemed.

Gift cards are just slightly less evil than payday loan services. They take advantage of a (positive) human need to give, and a (negative) human need to not work hard, picking out a gift, and a (negative) need to appear to have purchased a gift when one, in fact, has not. What makes it even more evil is that because it's a gift the loss is not seen as important for the giver (they gave it away after all) or the receiver (they weren't expecting to have this thing). The burden on the receiver, to carry around this extra piece of plastic, having to remember to use it, possibly even altering your behavior to use it, makes it even more nefarious.

I don't think my position is particularly common. Certainly gift card industry fraud is low on the list of societies pressing problems. But it is a problem and one that I wish was better understood .

[cuteboy19]

Perhaps the solution is to (further) stigmatize gift cards. The Chinese seem to have figured it out with their red envelopes full of money.

[javajosh]

Yeah, how about this: when I get a gift card, I a) discount the gift about 50% based on EV and b) consider the giver kind of stupid for wasting money like this. It's like the opposite of being impressed with someone for getting a good deal. "You spent $5 and this is worth $100 to me, awesome!" versus, "You spent $25 on this and it's worth $10 to me. Yay." Everyone just fucking loses. (Like you, I am surprised at my vehemence - perhaps pg is right that writing and thinking are one and the same, and I'm just late to the epiphany that I absolutely loath gift cards. So much so I wouldn't even mind being known as "that guy who hates gift cards so much".)

[zinclozenge]

> Hell let's just ban all money to prevent this.

You might be on to something here.

[jesuscript]

That’s kind of sad that they won’t just fix it if they can. I over hear my elderly parents give each other tips like “don’t open that email, it’s fake” and things like that.