Someone or company is selling their product/service, why can’t the government go after these people? Seems easy-peasy.
In: Technology
A lot of these people are in different countries. Not much the US government can do about that.
The phone system in the US sucks. Most of it is antiquated copper wires. Because of the static and poor quality of these wires, it’s not possible to determine which calls are spam/robocalls.
But yes, the technology to eliminate them is here, but because of the poor quality, it can’t tell which is a real call as opposed to the spamming.
Because phone companies don’t want to do it. I have a line with a Canadian provider that effectively blocks all spam calls.
If you get a good carrier it isn’t an issue much anymore. I have Verizon and a Pixel 7 and never get spam calls.
My coworker has T-Mobile and their spam filter was so bad it was dropping normal calls so he has to turn it off. Gets spam all the time now.
Most of these call centers operate outside of the US in countries that don’t police scam call centers as much. Thats why they are more common there.
They are pretty hard to stop. They have tons of phone numbers and those get shut down all the time but they just use a new one. They are usually making the calls through a computer program so they use a vpn which makes it harder to trace them. It doesn’t take crazy computer skills to edit the vpn a little or make your own which makes it exponentially harder to track. The us government already can get thru any popular vpn. Now they can’t just run it through a computer program, they have to spend time getting through it. Obviously they can but it makes it a good bit more effort.
Even if they do find their location, they will just move. They will just change their ip. There isn’t really any good or easy way to stop them. The us government can’t arrest them or disincentivize it nearly as easily. The only real way to stop it would be to monitor phone calls and use ai
It’s complex.
Technically one big issue is that anyone calling you can “spoof” their outgoing number. This is an important feature: when your bank calls you, they want the outgoing number to look like their main customer service number. If you call back, they want you to go to their main number, not to the representative who happened to call you.
Of course, the problem is that scammers use that feature too. They spoof their outgoing number making it harder to track them down.
Technology was developed to address this (called STIR/SHAKEN). However, lots of smaller businesses and smaller phone companies haven’t bothered to upgrade. So if carriers started blocking their calls, those smaller businesses suddenly wouldn’t be able to get through. Carriers have been afraid of blocking all unauthenticated phone calls and not letting legitimate business calls through. The FCC has mandated that phone companies block traffic that isn’t compliant or in a known list of exceptions, by May 28, 2024.
We will see how much that helps. There have been many steps along the way over many years trying to fight spam and robocalls without breaking things.
HOWEVER, yet another challenge is election-related calls and texts are still allowed. That’s not going to change ever because politicians WANT them to be allowed, they’re never going to vote to ban themselves.
I have a real phone number and and an app phone number that only give to businesses. I don’t get spam on my real phone number
I guess that is the drawback of having English as your main language. Have never been bothered by that in The Netherlands.
Capitalism.
To elaborate, the fact that there’s money being made here automatically puts stopgaps into “easy-peasy” solutions. I’m sure these companies are donating to their local congressperson to make sure sweeping government restrictions don’t happen.
There’s ALSO the thought of “scope creep”: if people don’t like spam calls, and the government agrees to stop them, what happens when people don’t like political campaign calls either?
Whenever the answer to a problem isn’t immediately obvious, the default answer is: money. Doesn’t matter what the question is.
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