Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.
California has introduced bonding to telemarketing firms specifically. I feel that should apply at the carrier level, where networks carry a guaranteed bond, pay regular premiums on it, and are dinged for unwanted calls, with the proceeds being split among the called party and any third-party network(s) traversed by the calls. Downstream networks could seek compensation from ANY upstream network carrying the traffic regardless of whether or not they originated it.
This would both create a penalty for providing, or transiting, unsolicited calls, AND create an incentive for carriers / network providers themselves to pursue unsolicited traffic from their peers.
<https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/telreg>
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Notes:
1. See for example <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/111099306069523624>
If your predecessor committed fraud, you were 100% personally responsible for it. You would then gather the evidence and sue your predecessor for your losses.
And further to that, the elderly are also the ones who cannot block unknown numbers, because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from (they may have a pool of numbers but it’s not reasonable to add all of them to contacts). Blocking all unknowns would block these important health related calls as well.
This is a huge issue with scam/security awareness education. Too many legitimate orgs use the exact behaviors we tell people to avoid. Same thing with email, can't tell someone to never click links in emails when services keep relying on magic links, third-party notification domains, etc. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC do nothing because scammers will just typosquat.
In the phone number example, most of those numbers too are unlisted outbound numbers, you couldn't even google them to verify.
Half the battle is getting legitimate organizations to stop acting like scammers in the first place so that shady behavior becomes an obvious red flag again.
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Notes:
1. Incidentally, the first and second largest-circulation magazines in the US now: <https://www.magazineline.com/blog/most-popular-magazines-in-...>.
I know this because I had to spend 6 months taking care of my dad while he was dying. We had so many medical people calling us and making appointments, and doing tests, etc etc. And on top of it about 10-15 spam calls a day and it's impossible to differentiate via caller ID. This was all while I was also working full time from home. It's a real hellscape, and these phone scammers are really having a negative effect on people's lives. It made my life miserable at one of the hardest times of my life, and I have nothing but contempt for these fuckers, and no empathy left for the people making the phone calls either. They're all scumbags and deserve time in prison.
Now, my only worry is that I might get a call from someone who I need to talk to, but is blocked and I won't even know it. For example, what if I get an emergency call from police/fire/hospital and I won't even know it. I also tried using "Screen unknown caller" feature, but then, no one likes them and sometimes they think it is AI bot and they usually just hang up (which is great for spam caller but not for legitimate caller)
My only solution that I could think of is to have a dedicated phone line just for friends/family/work, and a second line for banking/shopping/utilities/everything else.
This fails the moment one of your "clean line" contacts downloads a sketchy app that sells all their contacts, and sells an updated list as your appear in their recent calls list - meaning it's not a one-time thing, it's for a few weeks after every time you call them.
Scammers or spammers will never send an SMS with clarification that they wanted to call you.
As a parent, the "block all numbers!" approach has always seemed incredibly naive to me.
No police/fire/hospital emergency outcome is going to hinge upon someone else answering a phone call or text messsage.
When its someone legit I find that they actually go through the effort. I've had USPS explain who they were to my phone and I was able to answer them as a result.
If 99.9% of us have internet phones, why aren't we using PKI, decentralized protocols, crowd sourced reputation to communicate instead of POTS phone numbers, SMS/iChat and relying on the carriers to police spam.
Full disclosure I'm the founder, and I've got a couple dogs in this fight
Broadband Breakfast does seem to be one of those entities. ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) is another, though as a telco alliance I consider it highly suss.
(Submitter.)
For spam mitigations to work, the cost of selling that business must exceed its revenue.
Some, and I won't mention AT&T by name, are very curiously opposed to any regulations touching this.
The other element is that carriers can act at the network level, noting how much abusive traffic arrives from given peers, and taking direct action against those peers. That could involve rejecting traffic outright, subjecting it to stronger challenges, and/or diverting it to investigative / law-enforcement bodies (I'd suggest both national and state entities) for both tracking and enforcement. Power-law relations mean that at any given time, a small number of networks will account for the overwhelming majority of spam, though which networks will likely change over time.
The key problem with this is getting the carriers to act, which ... will probably involve a few carrots and sticks. I'll address those in another comment, except to mention bonding: <https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/telreg>.[1]
Individual action will not solve this problem, but there are steps you can take.
Most major US carriers now offer some form of robocall blocking. "Scam Shield" from T-Mobile, "ActiveArmor" from AT&T, "Call Filter" from Verizon.
MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) may or may not offer scam / robocall blocking themselves (though IMO they should, and should be required to). Some will identify spam calls, but those are still passed through to your handset.
Beyond this, there are on-device apps which can be used, some are carrier-based (e.g., "Call Filter Plus", from Verizon, similar tools exist for Verizon and AT&T), some are third-party. These of necessity share your voice/text activity with third parties, which is its own concern and consideration.
Full Android, iOS, and several full-featured Android alternatives (GrapheneOS, /e/OS, LineageOS, etc.) offer unknown caller rejection. Numbers not in your contact list are directed to voicemail. At present, few spam calls will leave voicemail, though some do, and as AI expands in capabilities, applications, and adoption this will all but certainly increase. I'd strongly encourage use of this.
Feature phones / dumbphones ... have far less capability. Most cannot even reject unknown numbers, which ... seems a ripe target for legislation and/or regulation. Phone frameworks such as AOSP / KaiOS seem to afford little capability for even creating a call-blocking app. This and other dumb devices (e.g., traditional landlines) are a strong argument for carrier/network level mitigations.
The company everyone loves to hate, Comcast/Xfinity, actually has one of the most sophisticated voice/text spam blocking systems, and one I'd like to see mandated to all carriers: <https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/spam-blocker-overvi...>
It's risk based.
It classifies calls into three categories: high, medium, and low risk.
It adjudicates calls based on risk.
High-risk calls are terminated entirely.
Medium-risk calls are directed to voicemail.
Low-risk calls are subjected to an audio CAPTCHA (enter a two digit value to ring through), otherwise are directed to voicemail.
(It's not clear whether or not a whitelisted number will escape any treatment, perhaps subject to conditions such as originating from the appropriate/approved network for that call.)
I haven't used that system, but in advising people still moving off landlines, or looking at VOIP solutions, it's making Comcast an attractive option.
(I don't know what other VOIP providers, say, Twillo or Asterisk, offer, but suspect at least some have similar if not more-capable systems.)
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Notes:
1. California requires a $100,000 bond by all telemarketers in the state. The state has a small fraction of the incidence of robocalls of the worst US states. Several others have some bond. My view is that bonding should apply at the carrier level and be surrenderable to both contacted individuals and downstream peering networks, to provide both a strong financial penalty to abusers, and an incentive to downstream networks to pursue abusive calls.
'Kay. So you call people and just clearly have a tone the second you hear a voice which could well be someone's answering machine
(Of course most of it would be automated, I guess)
Special place in hell for these people
Cheap messaging is as annoying now as calling. Ruining the phone experience overall. Soon Apple will have to do something.
Instant messaging solved all this shit 700 years ago!
Let each number act as an "account" on the phone network/company, just like IM accounts, each with its list of contacts, and blocked numbers.
Shove incoming calls into "Strangers" with low-annoyance notifications (ringtones) by default unless they're from a "verified" company etc.
Oh and yeah as others said, a "Report Abuse" button.
Phone numbers are a scare resource and the telecommunications networks heavily regulated with numerous central points of control.
This bullshit is scaling because the companies which gate and sell that access have no obligations, legal or otherwise, to deny scammers access to their resources.
SHAKEN/STIR identifies whether or not a given number is originating from a specific network, but without knowing whether that's an approved network, rejecting unapproved-origin calls, or tracking how much unapproved traffic a given network is emitting and penalising it for this, the information isn't actionable.
"Measure it harder" doesn't solve problems. The information must direct meaningful action.
2-5% of scams succeed but penalty should be there accounting for 95-98% that did not succeed.
IANAL but I know failed attempt at robbery or murder is also prosecuted, failed attempts at scam are not, because people just hang up and move on. Then the reality is society doesn’t have enough resources to deal with "scam attempts" - well we have to focus on murder attempts an plain robbery
And I think this is also a problem at the habit/behavior level for people. Most people don't want to know how to set proper boundaries with people and technology and articulate what they want. Once you do that at least you can articulate what you want to come in at you or not.
Without that you get stuck with a weird one-size-fits-all policy which definitely doesn't fit for me at least.