Thousands of Brits bombarded in caller spoofing riddle Thousands of Brits were tormented by nuisance calls after West Midlands businesses were caught up in a caller ID spoofing blitz. Firms including We Solve IT and solicitors Bridgehouse Partners appeared to bombard residents at all hours of the day and night thanks to a foreign outfit that used the companies' numbers to mask the …
Surprising that telcos will accept arbitrary CLI from foreign parts and pass it on. I would have thought that at the least they could add the prefix of the originating country before forwarding it. That might be difficult if it's a tandem route via another country, but at least it should be tagged 'international'. I get cold calls which are tagged as 'international' on my phone, though no number is presented. Those all go to the answering machine.
CLI is a presentation service, where the final exchange can optionally present the caller's number to the person being called. It wouldn't have mattered even if there was no CLI active, anyone with a phone can still be woken up in the small hours by a malicious caller dialling at random.
The problem here seems to be that the info in the SS7 signalling packets was invalid, and that's the responsibility of the originating telco. An ordinary customer should not be able to change the values in those packets, since that would break the whole charging model. The customer may be able to add additional packets, but whoever the originating telco was here should be in deep shit for not validating the signalling info before passing it on. Since Ofcom was able to trace the calls it seems likely that the full signalling info was present, so they should be able to take action againt the perpetrator.
Then again, it's Ofcom we're talking about.
> An ordinary customer should not be able to change the values in those packets
It's actually quite easy to do if you originate calls on a VoIP system and then pass into a VoIP<->PSTN gateway. For a little while, anyway.
As soon as you're discovered, the gateway provider will disconnect you. But that's not going to stop the scammers - particularly if they are using hijacked credentials.
Vic.
The phone network is broken. Its so easy to conduct offensive call campaign's these days that phones have become like email was maybe 10 years ago - full of junk messaging and no easy way of filtering them. You can do anonymous caller reject, register with TPS and use caller ID, but as seen by this case, unscrupiballs companies find a way round or just ignore the regulations entirely. Plus Ofcom are so slow to react, or are blocked by international boundaries from doing anything that they're almost toothless.
Someone should make a spam-filter for phone numbers (I'm sure someone will correct me). I know most VoIP serverscan do this, but as far as I know, there arn't any decent phone-spam category lists that are properly usable. Anyone fancy asking the dragons for a pot of money?
You can do anything you want with asterisk.
I whitelist outside "business hours" taking information from my phonebook for "allowed calls" and send calls without callerid or with 08*/09* callerid straight to voicemail 24x7.
I wrote the rulesets (and scripts to read mozilla obscene phonebook format) around the time when I still had a BT line. They got really heavy use despite me registering for TPS and going through all the motions as prescribed by "the book".
I found a new solution after that - I moved to sipgate. Ever since I did that I get a couple of hits per year (tops) which are still filtered by the old scriipts.
I can comment on the reasons for the difference, but I rather not.
There are free apps for that. Since i applied for a loan about two years ago i have been getting about 10 spam texts a day and several cold calls from scammers and marketing companies.
The TPS does not work. Thing settle down for three months and then it flares up again. You see, registering on the TPS confirms that your number is a good one that works.
Also, replying STOP to the spam sms's just confirms that your number is real and is resold again and again.
I was forced to install a spam filter and blacklist app and it's been great.
I don't like doing companies adverts for them but http://www.truecall.co.uk/ does everything you could want for blocking phone spam.
It's one of those rare products that does what it says on the tin.
The subscription for the web interface after the first year is crap however you ought to be able to get everything complicated sorted out within a year. You can still set options via the phone handset but its pretty tedious.
We just registered with the Mail Preference Service and the Telephone Preference Service - virtually zero junk either down the phone or through the door.
Anyone calls with unsolicited crap then they get this treatment which provides a perverse sense of smug satisfaction... http://focusrite.livejournal.com/1627.html
Pint for everyone!
TPS only protects you from domestic calls. If I'm at home during the day, I get a non-ending stream of calls like this:
"Hallo Sir, this is Steve calling from Windows*. We've noticed you have a problem with your computer…"
I actually quite like that one, although I'm surprised they ever get any bites. I played along once, and said something like "Yes, what seems to be wrong with it?", which confused them a lot. After about 5 seconds I got a 'please hold sir", and then they hung up.
* No windows here.
Tom38 - Oh yes, I have been lucky enough to get two of those.
Managed to keep them on hold for 10mins on one call under the premise that my old computer was still booting (while I went about my chores) and the second time got 30 mins trying a variation of the legendary WP5.1 support call whereby I explained I couldn't see the switch on the back of my PC because it was dark in the room...
I know, I know, I did have too much time on my hands on both occasions, still it kept them from scamming some other poor sod for a short while anyway.
We get those over in Norway too, trying to get them find what they try to get to (which only seems to work in XP, as my wife got the first one when I was out and didn't know any better), on a PC set to Norsk in fun. . . . Asking why "Windows" would know about a problem on a Linux PC confuses them too. . . or simply refusing to admit I speak English.
I think around 25 minutes is my record, for getting them to talk me through finding my mac keyboard's windows key. I see it as a service to society, keeping them from preying on the more vulnerable.
They've smartened up these days, there is a "mac" download too for your hacked pleasure and they do seem to hang up more quickly than they used to.
WTB "SPIKE" function...
The cost to build (not the price they sell for) is revealed in the original Dragon's Den extract, which is on t'Internerd.
It's a *lot* less than they sell for.
There must be stacks of old voice-capable modems sitting cupboards somewhere that a suitable selection of AT commands and someone with some ingenuity could do something useful with.
Not me, sadly.
Yeah its pretty expensive for what it is and I'm sure you could use an old modem to filter stuff, however that's going to require you to run a PC 24/7.
To the guy further down the comments - its failry normal to have a manufacturing cost of 1/3 the retail price. I got no problem with everyone in the chain making money if I end up with a product that works reliably.
Had a quick look at the stats for the last 12 months :
Caller rejected : 33.8%
Unrecognised caller - Hung up at whisper : 22.4%
Starred caller : 16.6%
Anonymous caller rejected : 11.7%
There's a load more stats but the tl;dr is that 78% of all incoming calls are rejected or the caller hangs up. That's with TPS which is no use at all anyway - no surprise there, when has self-regulation ever worked in marketing?
Now maybe you guys are happy to let the phone ring/piss around with spammers but I'm not. Truecall means I don't even hear the phone ring for those 78% who are spammers. Much better.
The problem with trying to waste the time of the telesales person is that they are only earning a few dollars a day in India, any time you spend dealing with the call is costing you orders of magnitude more than its costing them.
And when you look at the scams as opposed to "legitimate" telesales (if there is such a thing) the money generated by one success is a week's pay for the caller.
As for TPS - yes register but don't waste any time reporting the calls you still get. There's the power in law to fine £5000 for each offending call. Beyond "contacting to persistent offenders and instructing them to stop" no enforcement action has ever been taken. But in any case it's powerless to act outside UK.
The problem I have with truecall is that unrecognised callers have to say their name and then you get disturbed anyway so it doesn't really stop you getting disturbed.
I'd like a feature where callers can type in their phone number which means if they are calling from a number that does not display caller id they can type in the home number and get through.
You can give people a 4 digit code which they enter after the phone number and it will bypass all the international/CLID/night mode stuff. Alternatively there's a "breakthrough" key that can be used.
In my experience virtually no sales droids ever say anything at the whisper, they just hang up so you never even hear the call.
a google with "phone with incoming call barring" will get some info, but my fav. is..
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=1833435
The Panasonic KX-TG8321 a decent DECT landline phone, for about £30, and the unit price goes down when you buy a multipack - one for the garage, use as intercom to kitchen, bedroom, etc... :)
It has a 'night mode' feature, that means it will not ring between set times (it will go to voicemail) ... you can also set phonebook numbers to 'ignore' that setting, so very important calls will get through..
you can then set certain numbers to be 'barred' (they get an 'busy' tone' ) that should stop the callers .. :)
if you are still curious about the number you can you use http://whocallsme.com/ :)
It seems that anyone can invent their own number to be calling from.. I have had numbers like 00000000 , 123456, and other silly stuff.. any number that seems kosher, I give 3 tries to leave a message, then they get into the barred list....
I even had a few from a computer that did not know it was talking to voicemail!! the message was " press # key to accept offer" ... LOL
Some UK Telcos (Not BT) allow you to have "Type 5 Presentation Number" on ISDN.
This allows you to send *any* phone number out as your calling number. You usually have to sign a document saying you'll be good. But once setup, you can send anything. The Telco doesn't inspect it at all.
What kind of sense does it make to "ping" people at 3 a.m.? Are you trying to screen out those who turn their phones off or down at night, or those who sleep soundly? Seems like a pretty bizarre requirement.
No, I would attribute the whole thing to stupidity. The scumbags were probably trying to configure a system to spam people at some point in the future, and some idiot clicked the wrong button before the system was properly set up. (The time would have been mid-evening on the US west coast, or after lunch in China. Just sayin'.)
The phone preference service list was great when it first came out and reduced my calls drastically, plus callers would instantly apologise and drop the call as soon as I said I was on it.
Nowadays though, assuming it's not scammy overseas calls who just don't care or automated messages with an American drawl telling me I've won a holiday, I'm plagued by callers who claim to be exempt.
I don't get sales calls any more, I just get a constant succession of either surveys (apparently they are not covered by TPS - at least according to one stroppy woman who interrupted me saying politely that I was on the TPS list by saying it wasn't a sales call, it was a survey to see if I'd heard of their product and that I was obliged to take her call) or firms trying to get me to invite them round to quote for loft insulation by pretending to be from a government agency (I know there are grants, but I'm pretty sure the government doesn't phone me up 5 times a week to tell me about them). Did have some fun with one of those though - she asked if I could see the top of the joists under my current insulation so asked her to hold while I went and found a ladder, and she did.
Unless the caller is rude, I try to be polite when dealing with them - they're only doing a pretty stressful minimum wage job at the end of the day, but I do wonder about some of them. If I was having to do this job to make ends meet and I called someone who clearly was not interested, I would end the call and move to the next one. I certainly wouldn't spend my time arguing with them and telling them they are wrong or stupid for not rushing to take up their fantastic opportunity. Do they honestly think I'm going to see the light and change my mind?
The examples you give, with all the ducking and diving around truth and good manners they entail, are why I am, without exception, as impolite as possible to any and every unsolicited caller whose purpose ,when all's said and done, is selling something or getting something for nothing. They are making a choice to call me, and as I am on the TPS list they know for sure I don't want the call, so one act of bloody rudeness deserves the same in return. The fewer people who find working in the industry acceptable and they less they manage to sell, the quicker the industry will become untenable.
The tactics used are invariably deceitful, manipulative, and uncaring of whether they take from the vulnerable or those who have a problem with saying no. The sooner the whole business becomes as widely unacceptable as sending 8 year olds up chimneys or indentured servitude the better.
"... try to be polite..." don't bother.
I asked one Indian gentleman caller asking to speak to me by name "who's calling", to which he replied "I want to speak to Mr Xxx Yyyy" after the third of these fruitless exchanges he changed his response to "F*** off you c***". I assume he'd rapidly found that phrase to be in widespread us in the course of his working day.
If I hear an Indian accent when I pick the phone up I now respond "I don't speak to Indians" and put it straight down. No point wasting my time trying to waste theirs. My time is worth a dollar a minute, they're probably earning a dollar an hour.
BTW the reason I say "I don't speak to Indians" is because unfortunately my UK Bank seems to have relocated to Mumbai I guess if they really do need to speak to me they'll take appropriate action.
I've been dealing with 'surveys' for a while, I just tell them that yes, I'll answer their questions, if they'll answer mine.
My first question? What colour underwear do you have on?
Their answer? Usually *click* *buzzzz* as they hang up. Although I did have one 'lady' who seemed quite happy to tell me that she was wearing red lace, that her thong and bra matched, and she was shaven..
I'd rather that they removed me from their lists for being offensive, it stops them calling me again, and seems far more effective than the TPS
Well, obviously you're not obliged to take her call. You are paying for that telephone line, not her.
According to the Telecom's Code 1984 (don't think it's been revised, and I am working from memory here), it is an offense to call someone who has not invited you to call. So, telesales, marketing and all that stuff is actually illegal.
Why? Well, the telephone is there for you (the person paying for the line) to be able to contact or be contacted by people of your choice. It is there, also, to allow you to call the emergency services in the event of an accident/incident. It is certainly not there for some company to use to harass you with vexatious calls.
Unfortunately there are a lot of businesses out there that don't care about the law. They flaunt it quite happily and then deny it was them. Last example I had of this was yesterday with that great favorite: Auto-dial call with recorded message. It tied up my line for 5 minutes even though I'd hung up due to what I consider a major design flaw: There's no way for the exchange to know I've hung up so it can break the connection for me (had to call BT via another phone to get my line freed).
> it is an offense to call someone who has not invited you to call.
I believe you are mistaken.
The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003[1] covers unsolicited calls in Section 21. Essentially, it gives the TPS some legal basis[2].
It's quite a useful Act in many ways - one of the few that's actually been used successfully in dealing with spammers in the UK.[3][4]
Vic.
[1] "PECR" - who thought up that acronym?
[2] If only we had some sort of regulator to make sure such legislation was actually enforced.
[3] See [2]
[4] I once used it myself - I threatened a spammer with prosecution under the Act if he didn't pay my invoice for cleanup after he spammed me. And my invoice was paid. :-)
The call must enter theTelco's network with some sort of identifier - a human might call it a 'caller phone number' - presented, for telco billing purposes.
If it doesn't have a calling identifier, or has an invalid one, the telco should just drop the call, or give an 'invalid number' reponse.
Now it gets a little trickier: the telco needs to filter on the presented network ID. For a trivial example, if the call purports to come from my network, but is coming in from outside, drop it, or if the call says it's from the UK, but the call originates in India - where a lot of my junk calls come from judging by the accent - drop that one too.
Yes, you'll probably throw a few false positives, but the volume is getting to the same state as my email filters: false positives is a price I'm prepared to pay for not nearly so much junk mail
It's a little more complicated than that. People are allowed to buy presentation numbers - this is where the number that appears is the inbound number for the caller, rather than the number they're calling from. If a UK bank has a call centre in India, there's no point showing an Indian CLI, it's more useful to everyone to show the UK number that the person receiving the call can ring back if need be.
That's well policed by the larger telcos - normally it's all part of a package - voice VPN and call centre traffic management out to India, outbound calling plan, presentation DNs. The caller might be in India, the call might not enter the PSTN until it reaches the UK.
The issue comes when calls are passed between telcos, two or three or four times - how could you police that? How could you maintain a white or black list when there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of calls a day, and numbers change on a daily basis? Telcos have to trust each other or the whole system falls apart - and that's where careless or rogue behaviour can allow things like CLI spoofing to propagate.
"If a UK bank has a call centre in India, there's no point showing an Indian CLI"
Why isn't presenting a UK CLI for an overseas call tantamount to fraud, misrepresentation, or similar? Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. Presumably it's considered legitimate because big business wants it to be?
Anyway, are you really suggesting the technology doesn't exist for the bank to route the "calls" from India to the UK via a non-telco mechanism and then have a magick gateway in the UK that presents a legitimate UK-originated CLI? Something like that would surely make spoofing a bit harder, no?
How could it be fraud? The number that gets presented is valid for the organisation making the call. One Indian call centre could be making outbound calls on behalf of the bank to customers in the UK, France, the US, Netherlands, Australia. There's no point in presenting a +91 number, no-one will ring it back and the individual making the call almost certainly can't receive incoming calls anyway. It's much better to present the 0800 or equivalent number to the person being called so that they can choose to return the call to the bank if need be.
Your suggestion wouldn't always work - as there are UK telcos that don't police presentation numbers actively. A call that originates in the UK can have a duff presentation number just as well as one that originates in India. It can on;y be policed by the telco or service provider who are first in the chain.
France Telecom offers that service. Any call that doesn't have a valid number, and authorizes CLI to present it, is diverted to a machine that asks them to speak their name. If they do you are called with a message along the lines of "will you accept a call from ..". It filters out the people who want to remain anonymous, or who know that you won't take their call, or the ones from machines that can't respond to the equipment.
Unfortunately they charge for it, so I take the simpler option of letting all calls whose number I don't recognise fall to voicemail. Just occasionally, after a repeated series of multiple calls per day, I'll answer and refuse to respond until they tell me who they are. If it is a company that I do business with (supermarket was the last one) I formally complain on their website. It's worked so far. If they won't tell me who they are they get sworn at (all calls are recorded!) and then ignored.
I seem to recall, from the depths of my memory, that there was a proposal to offer a service whereby a call would be automatically rejected if the presentation number didn't match the network number.
Not sure what happened to it, but I bet the marketing industry put a stop to that. Far too useful a service....
It would help if there was one place to go when this sort of thing happens.
It would help even more if they were not totally supine.
If a 'human' calls you it's the TPS but if it's a machine then it's the ICO.
I called the latter and they apparently need to know the name and address of the caller before they can take actiom. I had a CLI but they have no power to trace it - all they do is ring the number and hope someone will volunteer to incriminate themselves...
"BT and Ofcom were able to track the source of the nuisance calls, which now appear to have stopped."
But anytime you report a nuisance call like that to BT, it's a waste of time. They say they can't do anything.
Was this different - did BT act because the "real owner" of the CLI number complained ?
There is ONE place these calls could be stopped fairly easily - that's BT. They have the infrastructure, they have the industry knowledge, they have the data. They could very easily set up a system to identify these calls - as others have said above. But they will not, because they make money from them.
How could BT do it? Many of these calls won't go anywhere near BT's network. If a call originates via a SIP client on the public Internet in the Bahamas, enters the UK through Arbinet's switches in London and gets handed to C&W before they pass it onto Virgin, how could BT even begin to police that?
International calls are very much no longer in the hands of the former PTTs - deregulation has worked very well and I'd be surprised if BT handles even a third of international traffic by volume into the UK. Once it's in a national PSTN, telcos trust each other (they have to or the system breaks) - and so the onus must be on all telcos with international gateways to police their own inbound traffic through them.
Even then - policing will be somewhat limited. A non-UK originated call with a UK presentation number could well be legitimate and valid. In a technical monopoly such policing might just be possible, but I'm not certain. In a deregulated world with dozens of competing parallel networks, no chance. The number of telephones in the world is 'quite large' - would you propose a whitelist? How would that be maintained, who would pay for it? Surely you wouldn't expect someone like BT or France Telecom to provide such a thing for free to other telcos who are making money from having taking that international call business away from the very same PTTs? Regardless of who did it, the cost would be enormous - there would be tens of millions of changes a day to be checked, updated, propagated - and every single switch in the UK, regardless of operator, would need to be modified to check the whitelist before handling a call. I'd go so far as to say it's impossible.
One problem is that BT have a legal obligation to connect calls, they can't ignore them jiust because they think they might be spam. In most cases no telco can or will act until a formal police complaint has been made, and few people do that unless the calls really cross the line into harassment or obscenity.
As to money, if they are international calls then they may not make money from them. There's an old agreement that assumes international traffic balances out in terms of calls made/call received, so each telco just bills for calls made and keeps the total rather than trying to share out portions of calls according to which network handles which bit. That all changed with mobiles, and may well be different now for fixed lines. but I wouldn't assume that a receiving telco gets much money, if anything, out of receiving this junk.
"Because BT can't legally do what he wants,"
Which laws would be in this picture, please? Would any such laws not also block BT's revenue-generating "Choose To Refuse" service ?
BT's Choose To Refuse service already "does what he wants", albeit in a rather inconveniently implemented and significantly overpriced way.
I want a whitelist, where regular legitimate callers will be listed, and get put straight through. It's already technically and legally possible otherwise Choose To Refuse wouldn't be available.
I want a blacklist, which is where known offenders will go. Banks, scammers, etc. A personal message, perhaps depending on incoming CLI, would be a nice to have, but far from essential. It's already technically and legally possible, otherwise Choose To Refuse wouldn't be available.
For callers whose numbers are not on the list, I want automated telco-based Truecall-style interception. It's already technically and legally possible. Even BT already do it, in certain selected cases involving serious nuisance calls, albeit not as a routine part of Choose To Refuse.
I want it at a reasonable price, together with Anonymous Caller Rejection, another service which has no significant cost to provide but which BT choose to charge for.
Any telco that can offer me this service at a sensible price will get my business next month, and BT will be the loser. Same for the business of quite a few other irritated-at-BT people. Otherwise my phone becomes outgoing calls only. BT already get ZERO revenue from me on that front, which sadly means they have nothing to lose except line rental.
Market forces, where are you (because "light touch regulation" clearly isn't working here).
> Which laws would be in this picture, please?
The terms of the BT Licence.
> Would any such laws not also block BT's revenue-generating "Choose To Refuse" service ?
Of course not. You can choose to accept or reject any calls you want. BT just doesn't have the right to choose for you, without your agreement.
Which terms of the BT (or competitor) licence?
Choose to Refuse already mostly does this.
What customers want, now that teleharassment is routine and the major telcos seem unwilling to do anything about it, is a telco who offers an affordable sensibly configurable telco-based service to filter out the teleharassers.
"You can choose to accept or reject any calls you want. BT just doesn't have the right to choose for you, without your agreement."
Quite. But who is asking for the telco to make the choice without their agreement? I'm not. Where's the problem?
Quote "I want a blacklist, which is where known offenders will go. Banks, scammers, etc. A personal message, perhaps depending on incoming CLI, would be a nice to have, but far from essential. It's already technically and legally possible, otherwise Choose To Refuse wouldn't be available."
That's not true though.
Firstly there's the technical problem of how you check every single call, at every switch, against some remotely maintained list. There's a world of difference between checking the origination number against a short list held in the line's local config file to checking it against a list of potentially millions, held remotely, in real-time.
Secondly there's the commercial problem of how you decide which number goes in which list. You might not want a call from your bank, the last one I had from mine was to check that my debit card wasn't being used fraudulently and so I'm fine with getting calls from them.
Thirdly - you're rather missing the point. The ne'er do wells are spoofing CLI. They'll just change the number they present to one that's in the whitelist. And you can't put it in the blacklist because it's a real number of a real genuine person or business.
Finally - who would do this? There's no monopoly operator in the UK. Most international calls don't touch BT's network these days. A call originating in say, Nigeria, could arrive here at Arbinet's London exchange on a Cable and Wireless route and go straight into Virgin or Vodafone's network. BT's switching network might not be involved at any point in the chain. I don't know how many operators would be delighted to have to ask BT for permission, each time, to pass calls on.
The solution is for originating operators to police properly how presentation number is used in their network and for regulators to act swiftly when abuse is discovered. Rather like what has happened in this case.
I didn't downvote it, but can see why someone would. The problem is that his proposal is simply wrong. There is no single organisation that can police this on behalf of the industry and no amount of knowledge or infrastructure will fix that.
The underlying mechanism that routes and controls calls, SS7, wasn't designed to work the way he describes. It's not an extensible protocol and telephone exchanges do not expect to have to question the validity of the signalling messages they receive. That's why the originating telco has to police presentation numbers and the subsequent telcos in the chain have to trust them to do it properly.
A basic premise of the PSTN is any to any - once that starts being broken by telcos refusing to pass on calls it thinks are suspect, the whole thing breaks. It's possible to imagine an abusive scenario whereby operator 'A' thinks operator 'B' is sending dodgy calls and refuses to handle them. Any business on operator 'B' has to move their lines to operator 'A' or they can no longer reach any of the customers connected to 'A'. That's why telcos are obliged by regulation to handle calls in a non-discriminatory way.
The solution to this problem is for national regulators to kick the bottoms of telcos that don't police presentation numbers properly.
The only people I ever heard justify spam phone and email are, you'll be amazed to hear, marketers. One said "what's the problem, if you get a call you don't want, just put thhe phone down". In my view if the phone rings while I'm in the bath and have elderly parents, prone to call at all hours needing help I can't ignore the call, I get out of the bath and whether it's India calling to scam me or "a legitimate survey, permitted under the TPS (legitimate ones are but fakes are not)" it's a serious intrusion.
The email marketer said he accidentally sent a mailshot to the list of people who'd explicitly asked to not get his mailshots. The result was a high positive response rate, the most new business he'd ever got from a mailshot, his belief was that people have opted out so much they no longer remember what they've opted out from and so sending another mailshot, perhaps after a decent time period has elapsed, won't garner any complaints .
Anyway "...Money to be made..." as Truecall has shown there's a demand. My telco is happy to charge me for options like CLI - surely there's a telco somewhere I can route my calls through and it will do its best to filter - perhaps an equivalent of TrueCall but running on a large centralised computer. That could offer the advantage of crowdsourcing - so if large numbers of people blocked a specific number it would go on the universal blacklist. And of course blacklist ALL calls from India (and maybe any from outside UK) unless whitelisted.
The telcos do need to get on top of this problem instead of just telling us how difficult it is - the 'phone is increasingly looking like just a pipeline for delivering sewage into our homes. I've got a Skype phone connected to my router and frankly, I'm not sure I have a continuing need for a conventional line.
One idea: can I get a premium rate number for home so at least the scammers are paying to speak to me? Normal phone could be on permanent answerphone so friends and family could call and leave a message but if they needed urgent contact they could pay 50p a minute and use my premium rate number.
very true.. for the same reason the gov will not do anything 'dramatic' about smoking or alcohol... they make too much money from it, and **mainly** they may have all what you say, BUT do not have the brains to actually do it.. this is why BT internet is so hopeless, millions and millions of hopelessly ancient cable, and a hopelessly ancient way of organizing business... their current ads say they are doing the great NEW technology to give 20Mbps.. It was actually introduced about 10 years ago!!
(09 December 2002 report)
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/918-adsl2-the-next-generation.html
Because it's a valid thing to do. Indian call centre rings UK customer of UK bank, it shows the 0800 number of the bank instead of an Indian number that can't receive incoming calls. The next call is to a US customer of the same bank and the presentation number shows the local 1-800 number for the US customer to call.
... phone with a 'VIP' mode - and distinctive ring. So i have my non-VIP ring set to silent, and my VIP ring set to normal.
Answering machine message goes like this: "You'll need a PIN to proceed. Don't worry if you don't know it, I'm going to tell you. But before I do, I should also point out that unless you are a colleague, friend or relative of someone who lives here, using the code will be considered an offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. If you accept these conditions, please feel free to use the PIN: it is 1990. Otherwise you can leave a message ..."
The phone lights up at least 20 times a day. But no-one has ever dared risk the CMA which handily makes it a crime to access a system for which you are unauthorised, even if you know the password.
Most calls fail at the point that the 'grunt-detector' on the autodialler detects that it has reached an answering machine. Some people hold to leave a message, but where I have put the ellipsis above I have recorded a very long diatribe, lamenting the use of telephone spam. At the end of that message it tells them that the answering machine is currently off. I love seeing some calls lasting the full 3 mins.
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