FCC imposes record penalty against transnational illegal robocalling operation

> After that time though, random calls were never fun like that.

My aging father loves to play with the scammers any chance he gets. One day he got the classic "Grandpa! Oh thank god you answered, I've been arrested in Vegas and I need bail money or terrible things are going to happen!"

After a few beats of shocked silence he launches into "BILLY?!?!?! The family has been trying to find you since your mom ran off with you 15 years ago! Where is she? Where have you been? Are you well? We just want you to come back home! We've had a PI looking for you for over a decade. Give me the address of the jail and I'll send our lawyer to pick you up."

Usually they're not equipped to deal with such a plot twist and just hang up.

I really enjoyed messing with the "Microsoft tech support" calls I would frequently get. In addition to keeping them on hold for half an hour "while my computer turned on" (aka I made and ate breakfast), I liked to try to follow their directions on wholly inappropriate hardware and seeing how they responded. After telling one guy that "chrome" wasn't a recognized command, he asked me what was on my screen and got very excited when I replied, "READY."

Alas, my old Commodore 64 proved scam-proof.

(As an aside, I remain amazed by the scammers' patience.)

In addition to the other comments here, there seems to be a significant difference in the ease of making calls from different numbers in the US vs EU, both in caller id and in the call source. I get constant spam calls to my US phone lines, never from the same numbers and now usually from geographically nearby area codes (same-area-code spam seems passé these days). I get a handful of spam calls a year to my EU phone lines, but they are usually from international, outside-EU numbers, seemingly in hard-to-pursue jurisdictions. (This ignores some of the impressive texts in the EU a few years ago that managed to come from short names of real banks; those seem to have been an unusual exception and I assume the exploit involved was fixed.)

Looking at VoIP sites, I can easily get a phone number in seconds, for cents, with almost no documentation, and any area code, in the US. Lines in the EU cost significantly more, take longer, and often require documentation, especially for geographic area codes.

I expect that the type of access used in the US for these calls simply isn't feasible in the EU, and so the calls there need to be from 'real' numbers in countries where the scammers are safe, which then makes them easy to filter out and far less effective. The access in the US just seems weirdly open.

You do get the occasional one in the UK. I get one every 2-4 weeks I'd estimate.

I imagine part of the reason it's not a bigger problem in Europe is not a lot of people speak Dutch/German/etc. in the countries where these scammers are often calling from. They all speak English though.

My experience with Robocalls (I get 25-30 per day) has been that the overwhelming majority are trying to run a scam against Medicair (the US government's health program for older people) by fetching some personal information from the victim, which they then use to send fraudulent bills to Medicair.

So I assume that the ease of scamming the US government in this regard contributes to us being the victims here.

Edit: I hadn't RTFA and now I see this fine was about auto warranty scams. Second theory: lots of Americans are living below the poverty line, public transit sucks here so most people need cars to get to work, and it can get risky/expensive relying on an older vehicle to be able to get to work, so it makes an easy target to offer somebody what looks like coverage for a likely expensive auto failure for a few hundred dollars.

English language. A large pool of marks to robocall, and English speaking call center workers make spamming and scamming economical. Compared if you needed to find French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, etc speakers.

It's expensive to call EU cellphones. In the US people are billed to receive calls (of course these days people usually have unmetered calling but the legacy of cellphone numbers not costing any more to call than a landline continues).

They are rampant in RU and UA. One of the craziest stories is how Ukrainian phoine spammers weaponized their skills to coax Russians into setting fire to government offices

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/01/phone-scammers-coa...

> What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?

Setting up a business in Europe (for example in the Netherlands) requires significant paperwork. In the US, it's done in a few seconds. In the US, it requires years of court proceedings or (in this case) government agency investigation to shut down a business. (No idea how long that takes in Europe, but I hope your governments are more powerful than this.)

Regulation can be a good thing.

who makes phone switches and software in the Netherlands?

I ask because I wonder if the US has unmaintained 20 year old hardware and software builds on it, since Lucent seems to have vanished around then. I mean that I wonder if spammers are taking advantage of unmaintained software, or naive antiquated laws, or both.

According to yesterday's article on the same case, the FCC is claiming to also have done just that:

> “Armed with the facts [the FCC] gave phone companies permission to cut off this traffic before going one step further and directing them to block it outright. We got results. Following our action, the number of auto warranty calls fell by 99 percent,” she [FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel] wrote.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/03/fcc-fines-robocaller-a-rec...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989845

It was interesting what Singapore did. Basically all numbers need to be registered, otherwise the default caller ID is "Likely SCAM".

The government gave companies a heads up, but even Singapore Airlines and a few major banks had to send out emails apologizing for their texts being labelled as "Likely Scam" right after the change.

Suffice to say legitimate companies got registered really quickly.

The main measure pushed by the FCC under Ajit Pai (so he was not a total waste of oxygen) was SHAKEN/STIR, which is basically cryptographically signed Caller ID. Deploying this went amazingly rapidly by the standards of the telco industry, and specially considering how much legacy there is in the landline phone business where the switch makers Lucent and Nortel went bust 2 decades ago and obviously their software has not seen any updates in that long.

I thought shaken/stir was going to do just this. Does anyone have inside knowledge as to why this hasn't fixed things yet?

It isn't a hard problem. Once we can trace where the call originates, blacklists should be able to snuff this out pretty quickly. Once phone operators start getting penalized for this sort of thing, the problem will get much better.

That would result in less money flowing though

>Emergencies don’t come from random numbers.

This is an absolute that just plain isn't true. For instance, out-of-state PD calling my sister-in-law from an unrecognized number to inform her that her sibling had died suddenly. There are numerous instances where an unrecognized number may need to contact someone for an emergency. I don't say this to disagree with the general sentiment of your post, but I do disagree with that particular statement.

>This is just a form of “you may have already won!"

If someone contacts you claiming you have won a prize, and it appears to be from a real but shady business (e.g. a car dealership), consider falling for it. The scam is most likely illegal and you may be able to collect. Your local government should have a consumer protection agency that can help you do so. Just keep your cool and document everything.

I've taken two car dealerships to court for this. It was fun and profitable.

Also, it appears the scam is illegal at the federal level.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/...

I am not a lawyer. You should read your local laws.

I own a business. What you propose isn’t really a option. People leave a voicemail, telling me to call them back. Even if I do so right away I almost always get voicemail. Even calling back 10 minutes later and then 30 results in…voicemail. If I leave them a message or text to call me back again the universe often chances it to be when I’m in the bathroom or driving.

It’s infuriating.

Very fixable but something about reading strategies for proper use of the phone makes me really angry. It’s on me to be on guard and suspicious at all times instead of using the phone to make calls and not thinking about it besides that. Every way I can communicate is out to get me!

When my doctor calls, I cannot get a call back through their system, I've tried, and I don't have a list of their outgoing numbers.

> To those complaining about getting constant calls. This is fixable if you want to fix it.

For people who are even remotely customer-facing their job involves answering calls from unknown numbers, so that's not a solution.

Biggest problem I see is if you’re checking your voicemail, you have to at least start to listen to every one of the scammer call voicemails if you’re going to catch the real ones. It’s tedious.

I have been doing this for years and it creates a steady stream of problems when people change numbers without telling me. The spam situation is so apocalyptic that I deal with these problems as the lesser evil, but it seems very weird to present this as a "fix" rather than a steep tradeoff that might work for some people.

I tried that approach for a little bit. They ended up filling up my voicemail box within like 4 or 5 days.

I don't know if it's still the case but Verizon used to charge you to block spam calls - so if you didn't pay and they knew you were being called by a spam number, they would still let it go through. Absolutely insane. It was something like $4 a month.

See my other comment. The FCC is claiming to have finally done that, instructing providers to completely cut off this operator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000227

I'm not sure what your point is. Even if they made just $10mil, fining them out of existence (and giving precedent for such a big fine later) is still a good thing.

The fine isn't to remove the profit, it's to punish them for the 5 billion scam phone calls. They are being fined 5 cents per call.

It was 5 billion calls to 500 million numbers over a 3 month period.

It's a fine, not a compensation order. The robocalls were criminal offences, not just attempts at unfair enrichment. The purpose of the fine is to punish the offender and to deter others.

"Two of the central players of the operation, Roy M. Cox and Aaron Michael Jones, were under lifetime bans against making telemarketing calls following lawsuits by the Federal Trade Commission and State of Texas."

We can hope that the size of the fine will set the stage for some significant jail time, as it seems unlikely that anything else will work.

Me, too. I’ve noticed a weird trend. Voicemail that is 20 seconds of silence. I can hear the sound of breathing. No hello or anything. Once I picked up and got the same thing. I even said “I can hear you breathing” and got the hang up after 20 seconds. They’re all from different numbers so I don’t think I have a stalker.