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Spam Communications

Spam Calls Grew 18% This Year Despite the Global Pandemic (techcrunch.com) 89

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Despite several efforts from carriers, telecom regulators, mobile operating system developers, smartphone makers, and a global pandemic, spam calls continued to pester and scam people around the globe this year -- and they only got worse. From a report: Users worldwide received 31.3 billion spam calls between January and October this year, up from 26 billion during the same period last year, and 17.7 billion the year prior, according to Stockholm-headquartered firm Truecaller. The firm, best known for its caller ID app, estimated that an average American received 28.4 spam calls a month this year, up from 18.2 last year. As a result, And with 49.9 spam calls per user a month, up from an already alarming 45.6 figure last year, Brazil remained the worst impacted nation to spam calls, the firm said in its yearly report on the subject. The coronavirus pandemic, however, lowered the volume of spam calls users had to field in several markets, including India, which topped Truecaller's chart for the worst nation affected three years ago. The nation, the biggest market of Truecaller, dropped to the 9th position on the chart this year with 16.8 monthly spam calls per user, down from 25.6 last year.
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Spam Calls Grew 18% This Year Despite the Global Pandemic More

Spam Calls Grew 18% This Year Despite the Global Pandemic

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  • In spite of? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:40PM (#60808024) Journal
    How about BECAUSE of? There's a great chance that anyone you call during business hours right now will be at home, so it'll be easier to bother them and perhaps engage them in a conversation/call-back that they would not if they were at an office.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      This is kind of what I was wondering. Even at best, it would seem like a pandemic situation would be orthogonal to this.

    • Absolutely. In fact, yesterday a spammer reached me at home during my work-at-home business hours. I engaged him for 30 minutes while I went about my work. Never could've done that in the office. Now this spammer will spend the next couple days checking his PO Box for the check he thinks I've mailed him. Hopefully my fraud report to the Postal Inspection Service get handled before any actual sucker's checks really do show up.

      • You must be proud of scamming whoever you are working for out of money they'll be putting on your check, for the time where instead of working you were chatting on phone and filling out Postal Inspection Service reports.

        Speaking of which, I should get back to work myself :)

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          You must be proud of scamming whoever you are working for out of money they'll be putting on your check, for the time where instead of working you were chatting on phone and filling out Postal Inspection Service reports.

          Speaking of which, I should get back to work myself :)

          It only takes a few minutes of time. If you look, most phones have a "hold" button where you can put someone on and then do something else with the microphone and speaker muted. Many can even play a tune or something while on hold, so y

        • You must be proud of scamming whoever you are working for out of money they'll be putting on your check, for the time where instead of working you were chatting on phone and filling out Postal Inspection Service reports.

          And you must be proud of your inability to read:

          I engaged him for 30 minutes while I went about my work.

          Seriously, dealing with a spammer isn't very intellectually challenging. I'm able to write code perfectly fine while he continually rambles on about the benefit he's going to give me, and I say "ok" and "uh uh" to 50 question before he transfers me to his "supervisor", and then his supervisor. As for the filling out the fraud report, that was done in the evening.

          I hope you never take a shit on the clock, because if you do I guarantee you are depriving your emp

        • You must be proud of scamming whoever you are working for out of money they'll be putting on your check, for the time where instead of working you were chatting on phone and filling out Postal Inspection Service reports.

          Speaking of which, I should get back to work myself :)

          He/She did clearly say "while I went about my work".

      • > I engaged him for 30 minutes while

        Kitboga [youtube.com] ? :-)

    • Not to mention the number of people who are out of work, who need money.
      Being that it is really easy to mask caller ID (Much too easy, I firmly blame the Telecom companies for this), with the privacy of Cryptocurrency it makes a tempting revenue source for some people. Then they can double down, and basically target others who need cash with some fake make money fast scheme, where they themselves may be a victim of.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ebh ( 116526 )

        You're right to blame them. Spoofable Caller ID was originally a feature, not a bug. It was so that business customers behind PBXs could show the employee's name and direct-dial number rather than whatever undialable trunk line they were using form the PBX to the CO. What the telcos never implemented was a check that the caller-ID number really belonged to the entity it originated from.

        Of course, solving that telco-specific problem won't help much now that we're in the VOIP age, where the Internet acts like

    • Indeed. And name me a year when spam anything shrank?

      • I think spam emails might have shrunk at some point in the last 10 years, but undoubtedly it was just because the only ones still using it are old Koreans, and the spam just shifted to Twitbook.

    • The "despite" will refer to the idea that the scammers would be less active and also stay at home more often like everyone else.

      But I do believe you're right. I cannot see the scammers staying at home, but their bosses will have horrible work ethics and be threatening their workers should they decide not to work right now. And those who do leave in fear of their health will get replaced with anyone dumb, but greedy enough to fill in.

    • A great chance? No. At best 14% of workers even have the ability to work from home (that's double pre-covid levels of 7%).

      Well, unless you consider 14% to be great.. That's subjective I guess.. But still.. more than 8 out of 10 people called, who have a job, will not be working from home.

  • Endgame - whitelists (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Eventually, everyone will resort to only allowing calls to ring that originate from someone in your contact list. All other calls get routed to voicemail or some type of AI assistant screening ala Google.
    At that point, I expect hacking people's phones to steal their contacts list will become common and you will be able to purchase these on the dark web to be able to spoof a number that makes it through the whitelist.
    • I (and I suspect most people) already do this with my iPhone as of several iOS versions ago. Before that I was using Roboblocker which led to some entertaining recordings with people who couldn't understand the concept, but it never really worked right. The quantity of crap calls I get has plummeted to zero. Of course, I still get notifications for them, and I get loads of spam and crap texts, but it helps.

      • "I (and I suspect most people) already do this with my iPhone as of several iOS versions ago"

        Ditto here. I make sure to get all their Phone numbers when I visit a new doctor or other business I want to be able to contact me, because otherwise, it will never ring.

        And I got only 1 such call in the last 10 years.

      • Android 9 (and presumably 10) has a feature that marks calls as "Likely spam" that seemed to work pretty well. It turned on by default with an update, unrelated to Google Voice or any kind of screening, which I never used.

    • Eventually, everyone will resort to only allowing calls to ring that originate from someone in your contact list. All other calls get routed to voicemail or some type of AI assistant screening ala Google. At that point, I expect hacking people's phones to steal their contacts list will become common and you will be able to purchase these on the dark web to be able to spoof a number that makes it through the whitelist.

      Yup - at this point my phone is just the least used app on my phone. I think the things are already hacked. A couple weeks ago, my wife got a call - from herself.

      • No hacking there. That's just caller ID forging. Nothing unusual.

        • No hacking there. That's just caller ID forging. Nothing unusual.

          She talked to herself for about an hour too! Just kiddin'

          • Re:Endgame - whitelists (Score:4, Funny)

            by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:56PM (#60808466)

            No hacking there. That's just caller ID forging. Nothing unusual.

            She talked to herself for about an hour too! Just kiddin'

            My wife'll talk to herself for about an hour too, as long as I throw in an "uh huh" or "really?!" every few minutes.

            • That's crazy.

            • My wife'll talk to herself for about an hour too, as long as I throw in an "uh huh" or "really?!" every few minutes.

              Now on the other hand, years ago, someone called my parents house as a wrong number, and my mother ended up making friends with them.

      • A couple weeks ago, my wife got a call - from herself.

        That just means her boyfriend is a nerd who understands how to use the technology.

        • A couple weeks ago, my wife got a call - from herself.

          That just means her boyfriend is a nerd who understands how to use the technology.

          You could be right.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        "A couple weeks ago, my wife got a call - from herself."

        From the future, past, or a parallel universe?

        • "A couple weeks ago, my wife got a call - from herself."

          From the future, past, or a parallel universe?

          I think it was a car warranty outfit, so from a parallel universe.

          There is an effect in radio, under certain propagation conditions, where your signal can circumnavigate the earth, and you can hear yourself from some seconds in the past. How long the delay depends on what part of the ionosphere the signal bounces off of, and now many times it bounces.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
      Normally I immediately ignore any call from an unknown number. However while working from home, my office phone is forwarded to my cell. For that reason, I now answer all calls during normal business hours.. and at least 2/3rds of the calls are trying to urgently contact me about my vehicle's expiring warranty.

      I wish someone would lock those fuckers in jail.

  • And not one of them offered to deliver Spam (Score:4, Funny)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:47PM (#60808064)
    What am I supposed to eat with my Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      What am I supposed to eat with my Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes?

      You serve lobster with a Nest and a necktie?

  • "Despite" the global pandemic? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:58PM (#60808162)

    I'd assume the increase was *because* lots of people were stuck at home, plus there are lots of newly unemployed.

  • Why can't we have an option not to have calls routed, unless our phone service provider is sure of the origin?

    Say I am with $CARRIER_A - right now, they can't/won't tell me where spam calls are coming from. If they were obliged to do so, we'd be able to find out which networks are pumping out the spam calls.

    Combine that with a rule saying networks must not route spam calls, or they get blocked and the problem would go away in no time.

    Technically, it may require a little more metadata - but not tha
    • The reason for not implementing what you suggest may not be technical. For example, I wonder how much revenue of the telephone companies comes from telemarketers and spammers.

      • " I wonder how much revenue of the telephone companies comes from telemarketers and spammers."

        All of them, nobody I know calls people per voice and if they do, not a phone-call.

    • Carriers make a lot of money from all those spam calls.They have no reason to change anything. It's up to us to regulate them with our wallet and our votes. Gotta stop reelecting their puppets. Maybe next time

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by swm ( 171547 )

      The existing phone system was designed to connect phone calls.
      There is simply no infrastructure to verify the origin of a call.
      There are several efforts underway to create such an infrastructure.
      They all revolve around cryptographically secure signatures.
      It's a hard problem, there's a lot of programming, and it has to be deployed to carriers all around the world.
      There can't be any exceptions. If your go-live date is 2022-Jan-01, and Taiwan Telco isn't ready, then no one in Taiwan can call anyone in the U.S.

    • Caller ID is a broken system.

      It is so easy to hack, that the Telecom don't even bother to try.

      While there are some legit uses for this. It really doesn't need to be so easy that anyone can use it.

      But this is old technology from an era where much of the routing still happened with relay switches, and by tones played.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BuckB ( 1340061 )

      The TRACED Act, signed into law last January, compels phone companies to implement the STIR/SHAKEN protocol, with increased fines for abusers, generally does as you suggest.
      The timeline is about 18 months - but I'm sure implementation will be delayed and telemarketers will find a brand new way to annoy us all.

  • 28.4 calls per month? Bullsh*t. It's more like 28.4 calls per day. (Actually, I get about 4-6 per day but 28.4 per day sounds better)

    • I must have taken out about 100 different Amazon Prime subscriptions by now given the sheer number of calls I get from Amazon about them.
      Also, there seem to have at least 10 iPhone 12's that have delivered to me that apparently, I have not paid for or at least my credit card has blocked the payment.

      I wonder why Amazon does nothing to try to stop this. Oh wait, that will cost money and therefore, eat into Bezos's huge profits. Every one of those scammers is making it less likely that I'll ever buy anything f

      • "I wonder why Amazon does nothing to try to stop this."

        You gave them your phone-number, it's your fault.

        • Doh! This isn't the real Amazon calling. It is spammers. Indian voices using western names working in a sweatshop in somewhere like Bangalore or Chennai
          The only number of mine that Bezos has is one that went out of service almost 10 years ago. It has been that long since I bought anything from them.

      • I got a fake 'Your Amazon prime yearly payment has been processed' call a couple of weeks ago, it was the first time I'd had one of these. It was slightly plausible because I'd just cancelled a two month free trial, but basically failed because apart from anything else I know Amazon doesn't make voice calls for this sort of thing. But it's going to be pretty convincing for some people.

        At least I currently only get about one spam call per month, so it's no big deal.

  • “Despite Several Efforts”??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:19PM (#60808280)
    There are very roughly 31,500,000 seconds in a full calendar year. So if the figure quoted in this article is accurate - and bearing in mind we’re not at the end of the year yet - that means that there are 1,000 fraudulent/spam calls being made *every second*. And the telcos really want us to think that they are doing all they can to stop this?

    The worst part about this is the fact that in many if not all cases, the criminals are able to get away with this because they are exploiting holes designed in to the telephone network. The carriers know about these vulnerabilities (for example, the ability to spoof caller IDs) and despite this they do nothing about it.

    For example, if my phone provider gave a rat’s a$$ about protecting customers like me, they would make it possible for me to select “no caller ID spoofed calls” and “no international calls except for white-listed numbers” and then leave me to manage my own access.

    They refuse to do this, despite the fact that the technology to do this has been available to them for years. Which means that my telco - pretty much all telcos in fact - are not just aware of and ignoring these criminals acts... they are actively benefitting from them.

    It’s about time law enforcement took a dim view of what the telco’s do in this space and went after them for being criminal accessories and took their profits via “Proceeds of Crime” laws.

    It’s about time law enforcement actually stood up for the little guy, for people who are being continually abused by these multinational megacorps. If you or I kept on making spam calls, you can bet that the law enforcement would come down on us like 10,000 bricks down a well... so how come nothing ever gets done to stop these crooks? Oh, wait. Telco’s make money off of these calls. Right. Makes sense now.

    • What grinds my gears is that AT&T (at least) has the technology to identify a lot of spam calls. It literally shows up on my caller ID as "Spam Risk" or "Telemarketer." So why is my phone even ringing? Those calls shouldn't be getting through in the first place, or at least I should have the option to prevent them from getting through. It's not that big of a deal to ignore the call, but an incoming call will often interrupt other things I'm doing with my phone.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ytene ( 4376651 )
        Maybe not every AT&T customer has the Caller ID display that you have - which might explain why AT&T let the calls through by default. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: bastards.
        • They don't need to see that display to flag their account "Don't allow possible spam. Don't allow telemarketer."

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by irving47 ( 73147 )

            Yeah, but what if they're wrong about the use of the origin point? What if it's a call center that is used for legit. stuff most of the time and cold-call bullshit a small percentage of the time. Best not to block numbers they're not 100% sure of. "Spam Risk" is the same as a "Spam folder" so you can at least get a voicemail through if they were legit. The spammers won't bother with a VM most of the time.

    • Never fear, Ajit Pai is on the job. The swamp's been drained, and very soon, any day now, America will be great again. Stop the steal!

    • Hey... the telcos are taking the spammers money as fast as they can and turning it into executive bonuses. It's not the telco's fault that the spammers haven't run out of money yet.

  • Indian Scammers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:31PM (#60808344)
    From personal experience, the vast majority of the calls are from Indian scammers. I have no idea why the U.S. government seems to be doing almost nothing as these calls are ballooning to ridiculous proportions. To get an idea of just how disgusting these people are, check out the following YouTube channels: Jim Browning [youtube.com], Scammer Payback [youtube.com], and ScammerRevolts [youtube.com].

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by BuckB ( 1340061 )

      The US Government passed TRACED Act into law last January.
      The timeline is about 18 months - but I'm sure implementation will be delayed and telemarketers will find a brand new way to annoy us all.

      While a large majority of the folks who I chat with are from India, lately I've been getting more people from Thailand / Indonesia. The accent is about the same. The biggest difference is that they don't get mad if you call them Pakistani.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        While a large majority of the folks who I chat with are from India, lately I've been getting more people from Thailand / Indonesia. The accent is about the same. The biggest difference is that they don't get mad if you call them Pakistani.

        You could try talking smack about the king [wikipedia.org]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by irving47 ( 73147 )

          Oooh.. Call them pakistani.. that's brilliant. I'd been resorting to telling them to go outside an fuck the nearest cow they can find.

      • The TRACED Act is particularly about robocalls. I'm not sure how this applies to Indian scammers since many of them call you directly or have you call them after a popup ad hijacks your screen. And besides, there's no need for a new law to prosecute fraud - it's already a crime. The main problem is that we don't seem to have many, if any, resources directed towards taking down these call centers.

        While a large majority of the folks who I chat with are from India, lately I've been getting more people from

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by BuckB ( 1340061 )

          STIR / SHAKEN are protocols to lessen caller ID spoofing. Scammers need the anonymity of bogus caller IDs.
          Agreed that there are other methods of scamming, and am also frustrated that the US doesn't take a more aggressive stance.
          Jim Browning's videos from the scammers security system are fantastically informative.

  • Apparently most of this increase came from calls to my phone.

  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by DivineKnight ( 3763507 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:40PM (#60808398)

    Does it bother anyone else that we can find Bid Laden, yet we cannot find the extended auto warranty people?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Travco ( 1872216 )
      If our new president wants to "win friends and influence people" he'll make this high priority.

  • It's A Business (Score:4, Informative)

    by ComputerGeek01 ( 1182793 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:41PM (#60808404)

    The only way to fight these businesses is to make them unprofitable. I take a combination approach depending on where I am and how I'm feeling. The trick is to increase their business costs. The most obvious way to do this is to waste the call center employees time. Every moment their on the phone with you, is time wasted where they are scamming your neighbor and money lost. Another way is to increase their employee turn around. You can do this by either shaming the phone agent or being outright abusive to them. This approach isn't for everyone, but when you look at the cost centers for any call center model, you'll see new employee training is undeniably one of the highest pain points. Increasing their stress this way may also degrade their performance and cause them to lose a sale they would have otherwise closed so keep in mind the compounding effect of this approach

    • Good points! And, with Boomers getting to "that" age, we're wasting a national resource. We need to set up a National Alzheimer Spam Answering Service.

    • You can combine these two things. I play some weird characters on the phone, but when it gets close to the end and "I'm going to win $5000" or something like that there's often a moment, just before you transfer the money (say $200) they are asking when they ask what you are going to do with your winnings. Explain that your grandmother's chimney is broken so she can't heat her house and you are going to use the money to repair that. Explain that you have been saving up for five years to repair the villag

  • The very nice guy called and told me my iCloud had been hacked. I made sure I paid him to fix it.

    But I have not noticed any spam.

  • For example I never need to voice call outside CONUS and should be able to range ban the rest of the world.
    Every additional barrier helps.
    Whitelisting should be an option and business and medical communcations should be allowed (change privacy laws as necessary) to go via SMS and email. Kill the need for fax and everyone wins.
    Everyone who supports measure that favor spammers is a public enemy worthy of naming and shaming, but because the system is hopelessly broken the quicker fix is kill the need for voice

  • Being an election year, unsolicitated robo-calls from politicians, poliical parties and PAC's were way up. One small dimly positive note: with so many people working at home, there were fewer during dinner hour.

    Politicians can slap lipstick and mascara on that pig, and label it excepted political communcation, but, if it sounds like spam. warps the truth like spam and tries to con something of value from you like spam, it's 100 percent pure spam,.no matter what silly self-serving label it's given..

  • my already high volume of spam calls has increased by about 1800% just in the past few days

  • Spam calls still exist? (Score:3)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @06:23PM (#60809560) Journal

    Actually, I know they do because I occasionally find a voicemail from a spammer. My phone never rings with spam calls, though. Google's phone spam filter is amazing. All of my real calls come through just fine, none of the spam calls do, ever. I see in the UI on my phone that there's a way to mark a call as spam, but I've never had to do it because all of the spam is pre-identified.

    Apologies if this seems like an ad. I'm honestly just really impressed and happy with that particular feature of my phone (Google Pixel).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dargaud ( 518470 )
      It works because other people have marked that same call as spam before... Thank us !

      • It works because other people have marked that same call as spam before... Thank us !

        Yep, and crowsd-sourcing spam identification seems to work much better on phone calls than it does on email. At least so far.

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