Have any of you started to get AI robocalls? I've had a couple of
calls recently where I get the connect silence of a predictive dialer
followed by a woman speaking with call center background noise. She
gives her name and asks how I'm doing. The first time it happened it
seemed off for reasons I can't quite articulate, so I asked: "Are you
a robot or a person?" She responded "yes" and then launched in to a
sales pitch. The next time I asked, "where can I direct your call?"
She responded "that's good" and launched in to her pitch.
Just throw a dial tree plan in front of getting ahold of you. "Press 1 to
speak to a human." this foils most dialers which wait for a human to answer
before they throw anyone (anything?) on the line. They may also have the AI
get through the unpleasantries before they stick a human on it.
Many voip providers offer a dial tree. I have a provider with a snazzy web drag n
drop tree construction system, so you dont need to learn m4/asterisk/linenoise
and even directs SMS's to email for me. I've set it up for my wife and myself
(hit 1 for me, 2 for her) and I use it on all my online ordering stuff because
I know they'll be hacked sooner or later and my info leaked into the wild for
abuse.
I dont know how cell companies expect to be able to continue to offer any
voice services with the lack of enforcement against robodialing - I get calls in
the middle of the night (and have to leave my phone on for on-call from random
customers I dont know the ph# for). Even though I give my direct cel # out to
almost no one, I get 3-5 random calls a week. (I dont doubt that phone hacks are
uploading people's contact lists to the cloud for further infection/robodials,
as well as plain war-dial trawls).
I have a spam contact with > 150 ph#s in it. (I need an app to share these and
subscribe to autoblock but havent gotten a round tuit it yet.) Worse, they're
spoofing real ph#s - I call back calls I didnt answer and they all claim they
didnt call me - because a robodialer spoofed a legit ph# to avoid mass filter
lists. (Beware ph#s that use your NXX - human gut reaction is to answer ph#s
that look like your own supposedly, but its likely a robodial).
All this boils my blood. I am not sure why/how spoofing ph#s is legal. I get
sms mass spam too.
Too much control is left in the sending side, need way better filtering tools
on the receiver. Soon enough however I hope to just be able to dispense with
voice communication and point customers at something else (even SMS would be
better). Im not sure we're at the point you can enforce that without pissing
off customers but we're close.
(I dont support capital punishment for much, but this might be one thing...
Have any of you started to get AI robocalls? I've had a couple of
calls recently where I get the connect silence of a predictive dialer
followed by a woman speaking with call center background noise. She
gives her name and asks how I'm doing. The first time it happened it
seemed off for reasons I can't quite articulate, so I asked: "Are you
a robot or a person?" She responded "yes" and then launched in to a
sales pitch. The next time I asked, "where can I direct your call?"
She responded "that's good" and launched in to her pitch.
They're more in the domain of artificially stupid but yes.
The anti spoofing/spam app I have that screens calls to several DIDs I
have pointed at one phone reports a dozen or so calls per day.
I would generally assume that the current rate will hasten the demise of
the remaining pots services.
Whether or not its legal is irrelevant. It's trivial to do if your link to the PSTN is digital and you have a provider not filtering based on sent caller-id. It's kind of the PSTN version of the Internet's BCP-38 issue. All providers should be filtering based on "valid" caller-id...but so many don't do it, and the spoofing is nearly impossible to trace back to the origin, so those who do it can safely ignore other laws because they know they won't be caught.
And revenues wont be impacted because few have a cell for voice
anymore. With increasing data reliability we can move to voip
on phones and provider of choice who offer proper filtering and our
our own skill testing AI attendants
(Im thinking something along the lines of 'unladen swallow'.)
do it, and the spoofing is nearly impossible to trace back to the origin, so those who do it can safely ignore other laws because they know they won't be caught.
Forward to an 800, grab it from the ANI versus CID?
Yep. Add it to the list of IRS scams, fake arrest warrants, credit repair, free vacations, etc. The rate of calls has increased dramatically in the past year, especially with the "neighborhood scam" where they spoof their CLID to a local area code and prefix + 0000 through 9999 and blast you with calls, trying to trick you into thinking it's someone local and thus important or legitimate.
I have a second phone I use for work and on-call, so that goes on DND from 6PM to 6AM with a VIP list of people/numbers that can ring through. No problems there, and somehow that number isn't (yet) on anyone's list, so I don't get many calls.
On my personal cell, I started to use an app called Hiya that has been pretty successful. It's available for both iPhone and Android. It powers a lot of the carrier-specific apps like AT&T Call Protect, but unlike them, it doesn't suck. It's a giant database of reports that rate calling numbers and classify them as fraud, scam, neighborhood spoofing, etc. and you can flag them or route them right to voicemail. The only time it doesn’t work is when it hasn't updated its list in a little while and a few sneak through. They just realized a premium version that added some features. I haven't explored it yet.
Went from about 20 calls a week to almost nothing.
Carriers seem to be either uncapable or unwilling to address the issue other than the occasional lip-service reply about "taking customer's $variable seriously."
In article <Pine.LNX.4.64.1804040100050.26294@users.757.org> you write:
do it, and the spoofing is nearly impossible to trace back to the origin, so
those who do it can safely ignore other laws because they know they won't be
caught.
Forward to an 800, grab it from the ANI versus CID?
Won't help. If you do the forward, the ANI is yours.
Honestly, most carriers I've talked to are fed up as well, and just want to find a way to make it stop. As some one said, it's exactly like BCP38 --- the carriers that care keep their clients from spoofing caller id, etc. The ones that don't make everyone else look bad.
As carriers who get these calls for our clients we hate them. Short
duration calls have the same cost as far as channels, keeping cdr's etc yet
since they are so short there isn't much to be made. This is worse then
BCP38 since with the internet there is no reason for anyone at home or a
small office to be sending out a packet that is not with their IP. When it
comes to telephony say I have a PBX, I get a call and then want to send it
out to my on call tech. I want him to see the real callers number. I need
to now "spoof" that number so my tech see's the real caller. There is a lot
more room for abuse. Now the carriers terminating the calls (the ones
getting them from the spammers) they love them. Since it's dialer/short
termination they can charge and arm and a leg.
Honestly, most carriers I've talked to are fed up as well, and just want
to find a way to make it stop. As some one said, it's exactly like BCP38
--- the carriers that care keep their clients from spoofing caller id,
etc. The ones that don't make everyone else look bad.
If the scam caller is spoofing the numbers then I am not quite sure how T-Mobile can implement the block without blocking the legit owner of the number. The way to correct this as an industry is for them to inspect the caller-id coming in from their customer and if that customer does not own the number or toll free DN they are presenting, the call gets blocked. I know they can do this because our SIP carrier AT&T will not accept outbound calls from us unless we present a number assigned to our account so they can bill back for the call. Truthfully, the carriers do not have a real incentive to stop this because someone is paying to make all of those calls. I don't believe for a minute that they could not stop this immediately. A simple rule that you cannot make a commercial call without presenting a valid callback number would fix this. There is also the FTC problem. They do almost nothing to stop the violations of the Do Not Call list and you get nothing out of reporting the violations. If the enforcement was anywhere near the requirements of the DCMA regulations, this would be reduced drastically. First step would be to make the carriers liable for providing service to these scammers, then they might actually care.
For example, Vonage implementing Simultaneous Ring, you want to see
the original caller id on your cell phone, not your vonage number even
though Vonage is bridging the call to your cell phone.
More, the PBX may have trunks from multiple vendors and may use a
different outbound vendor than the call arrives on, so you can't even
reliably implement a rule that the outbound caller ID is rejected
unless there's an active inbound call with the same caller id.
So the logical conclusion is that caller ID is useless as an
anti-vspam measure and the situation is hopeless, so the only
solution is to not personally answer the phone at all -- let voice
mail take a message.
This is what I have adopted on my personal landline. With the
ringers disconnected. Although I get probably a half-dozen incoming
calls a day, perhaps one a week will leave a message. Most of those
messages are recorded announcements that started playing even before
the voicemail greeting finished.
- Brian
So the logical conclusion is that caller ID is useless as an
anti-vspam measure and the situation is hopeless, so the only
solution is to not personally answer the phone at all -- let voice
mail take a message.
Pretty much. We've received calls here with the CID displaying as our
own info, and others coming up as a neighbor's number. Some even appear
as law enforcement when they're scammers looking for donations to
charities that don't exist. I suppose if you're going to commit one
crime, go for broke.
This is what I have adopted on my personal landline. With the
ringers disconnected. Although I get probably a half-dozen incoming
calls a day, perhaps one a week will leave a message. Most of those
messages are recorded announcements that started playing even before
the voicemail greeting finished.
I've been enjoying quiet on a VoIP line with asterisk. Those who I
know/expect/desire calls from I can route them directly to my extension,
those others get the IVR. It works parallel to IP routing. I can go a
few days without hearing my phone ring yet my logs are filled with
spammers/telemarketing calls. Robo-dialers have no clue which extension
a human may be at, and I've been doing this for over 15 years with great
success. With a digium wildcard, this can work for POTS lines as well.
There are P-asserted identities that can be passed with the call in addition to the CLID. In SIP, there is also call history data that can give you all of the PBX hops identified.
If a customer with a PBX wants to forward calls back into the PSTN then the carrier can have an option to allow them to do that but they better also have a way of tracking those calls since they are open to abuse and they are obscuring the routing of the call. I am OK with that as long as the carrier is responsible for tracking back any abuse complaints.
I do think every PBX in the call path should be identified. We have had instances where some stupid PBX is forwarding calls to the wrong number generating abuse complaints that track back to the wrong place because the PBX forwarded the original caller-id. So you call that person back and they correctly claim that they never called you.
