Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:
“I am in the middle of a cell phone nightmare,” France, who lives in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, told Ars in an e-mail after three days worth of the calls. “My phone started ringing three days ago and has continued to ring every few minutes since then. Each time it is from a different number… I can’t conduct a client call, can’t text because calls coming in interrupt the process, can’t even take photos for the same reason.”
On the first night, France went to bed, slept for 7.5 hours, and woke up to 225 missed calls, she said. The calls continued at roughly the same pace for the rest of the five-day stretch, putting the number of calls at somewhere around 700 a day.
The first half of this well written Ars Technica piece delves into spam calling and the futility of trying to block those calls. The second half is about solutions, solutions like RoboKiller:
Instead of merely relying on a blocklist, RoboKiller’s technology analyzes the audio fingerprints of calls and can thus block many robocalls from spoofed numbers. Robokiller took first place in a contest the Federal Trade Commission held in 2015 to find the most promising new anti-robocall technologies, and the company has been busy improving its technology ever since.
My understanding is that many of the robocalls we receive are simply attempts to verify that there is a human at the other end of the line. If there is, your number is added to a list, and that list is sold to another tier of more precisely targeted robocallers.
Like many people I know, I’ve stopped answering the phone if I do not recognize the phone number. Seems to me part of the solution would be technology that prevented spoofing in the first place. Yeesh.
There are legitimate reasons to spoof a number. For example, you use a VoIP service like Skype or you run a business and you want all outgoing calls to have the company’s main line as the outgoing number. What is needed is a cryptographic fingerprint that only the legitimate owner of the phone number can use to identify themselves as the owner of the phone number.
On an iPhone, turn on Do Not Disturb. Make it on all the time (i.e. turn off Scheduled) and have Silence set to Always. Then under Allow Calls From, choose the All Contacts group.
That will silence any unknown caller while letting anyone in Contacts through. IF you have someone who calls from, say, an office landline where their number is different each call this will be a hassle but assuming calls are from people in your contacts, this works quite well.
Great Planet Money podcast about this. The FCC has to develop a caller verification system that will prevent spoofing.
Sorry, this is a very poor solution. With “do not disturb” turned on you do not receive notifications for any messages or reminders.
It would be a huge step forward if Apple would allow you to just block calls that are not from numbers in your contact list. The current implementation only works if you you set “Do Not Disturb” which blocks all message alerts and reminders.
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I’m going to guess that the current head of the FCC has no incentive to do anything of the kind.
Well, that’s a few legit reason, though. I think with all of those telemarketing and scam calls, the authority should limit the use of number spoofing especially for businesses. There have been so many bad reports and complaints regarding number spoofing. I even read about a consumer who sued a company with help of a law firm called Lemberg Law, after getting multiple calls from spoofed numbers, and those calls were coming from that company.
We’ve been screening all our calls for years, but this problem only gets worse. I’d guess marketing-trade-association lobbyists are very happy about that.
Hmm… good point. I don’t notice that much since my notifications also pop up on my Mac and I usually have both with me, but yes, that’s a definite negative. I wonder if iOS 11 has more granular control over what’s silenced.