Australian senator Pauline Hanson wants devilish scam calls to flash '666' An Australian senator has come up with a cunning plan to stop phone scammers: any call from an unregistered VoIP line should show the caller's number as “666”. Senator Pauline Hanson detailed the idea in a letter to communications minister Mitch Fifield, as part of a government review into dealing with scams. On Facebook, she …
If you get a nuisance call then hang up & immediately dial Star 666 Pound. That would inform the telephone company that the last number that called you should be flagged as a Nuisance Caller. Ten such flags & the telco temporarily blocks that caller from making anything but Emergency Services calls - everything else generates a recording "There is a problem with your account. Please visit your local branch office to clear this issue."
Once they go in then the telco explains that they've had excessive NC flags. "This is your first warning. We'll clear the flag & unblock your line, but if you keep getting flagged as a nuisance then we'll cut you off completely. Why? Because pissing you off will cost far less than the government fines we'd get slapped with if we let you continue to piss off everyone else. Now stop being a bother & go away."
Most private folks won't hit the first warning very quickly at all, & legit business' will try *very* hard not to hit it either, but the scummy telemarketers will probably generate a few hundred such flags in the first 30 seconds. At which point the telco cuts them off until they come in to discuss the matter, then get told to stop.
It wouldn't be based on the Caller ID since that can be spoofed, but the Billing ID which can't - the telco has to know to whom to bill the call & *that* is whom gets the flag. If it's a VOIP provider then the provider gets flagged, slapped down, & quickly goes out of business. If it's a gateway then they get cut off, slapped down, & quickly go out of business. The legit ones will be vigilant about explaining the rules to potential customers, & if a customer generates that flag then the provider can hand that customer over to the authorities.
I don't know what the authorities might do, but making harassing phone calls is already illegal so maybe something along those lines?
*Sigh*
It's all a pipe dream anyway. This would cause the telco's to Lose Money & that means it has no chance in 666...
Telecom companies get revenue for connecting spam callers that (so far) exceeds any fine that might land on them, hence the excuses and tantrums any time there is pressure on them to do something useful.
Someone also needs to explain to Pauline Hanson that scam calls are not be convincing by design. Scammers require gullible idiots (preferably with Dunning-Kruger syndrome). The calls include blatant warning of the impending scam so scammers do not waste time on people who will catch on before giving their user name and password for on-line banking. The solution is to teach critical thinking in schools. Lie to children and reward the ones who catch the teachers out when they lie. The down side is that politicians with Dunning-Kruger syndrome would have a hard time getting elected.
>I suspect Pauline Hanson has D-K, she is a nasty racist character who has no place in reasonable politics
I was with you all the way up to the assertion she has no place in reasonable politics.
Its your job to make sure your position looks more reasonable than hers. If you can't do that, its time to question your own politics. The point of politics is to have a marketplace of ideas where they can be measured and assessed by the populace, not to allow us to tilt the playing field against those we disagree with by excluding them a priori. Excluding people allows them to be silent martyrs rather allowing their ideas to subjected to analysis.
Apologies if I've misread your intent.
But back to the article... with the NBN, I see no reason not to legislate to provide a billing id trail with SIP data as an addition to caller-id. Users can then make up their own mind. Telco's tend to double-dip anyway, when connecting spam to voicemail and then connecting users to their voicemail, so they should be happy with that.
"I suspect Pauline Hanson has D-K"
Hmm ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DK ...
Dorling-Kindersley
Donkey Kong
Denmark
...but nothing seems to fit. (Googles instead for for "psychology D-K" ...) Aha!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
"In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is."
So she's too stupid to realise she's an idiot. OK. That fits.
<<"I suspect Pauline Hanson has D-K"
Hmm ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DK ...
Dorling-Kindersley>>
<<So she's too stupid to realise she's an idiot. OK. That fits.>>
It is likely anyone using D-K in an ad hominem attack in an argument is themselves suffering from D-K.
"I suspect Pauline Hanson has D-K, she is a nasty racist character"
Even nasty racist people can have good ideas. Which is why ad hominem (i.e. personal) attacks are invalid.
If you want to disagree with an idea, it is best to argue the idea, rather than stoop to the level of those you criticize.
Telcos don't get revenue for connecting spam callers in the USA or Canada. We pay for local service, not for local calls.
And we still get telephone spam, even when signed up for the "do not call registry" -- although not as much here in Canada as they do in the USA.
I like the idea of extending some of the smartphone apps to telephone companies and landlines.
We don't all live in tiny overpopulated countries with really excellent cell service.
(BTW, did you know that if you consider the population density of England (not the entire UK) England has the highest population density of any non-city state in the EU?
With Scotland, Wales and NI, you're #30 of all EU countries. With just England you're first except for the City States. You even beat the Netherlands. Check it for yourself on WolframAlpha.)
"If you get a nuisance call then hang up & immediately dial Star 666 Pound"
Good idea but you're not taking it far enough. When the NC flag is reached the telco doesn't cut the caller off, they simply credit the account of those posting the flag with a call handling fee and debit the caller with the fee plus an additional handling charge for the telco. The credit could initially be in escrow so the caller has a chance to demonstrate that they're innocent if, indeed they are. As an additional refinement all those who received calls from the caller without raising an NC flag also get paid a handling fee.
So, the bank rings you to tell you you're getting close to your overdraft limit, so you put the phone down and dial *666#. Fourteen other people also do the same, and now your bank can't ring anyone to tell them they've hit their overdraft limit. Now you can say "but I didn't realise I was over my limit, they never told me!".
I'm sure with a few minutes thought I can think of a more plausible way to abuse your system.
<<So, the bank rings you to tell you you're getting close to your overdraft limit, so you put the phone down and dial *666#. Fourteen other people also do the same, and now your bank can't ring anyone to tell them they've hit their overdraft limit. >>
Yes, 15 is too low a number. We don't expect politicians to work out the details, and when we do (and elect mostly lawyers) it is a huge mistake.
It should be a percentage of the calls the calls completed are reported as *666.
Since not everyone is community minded enough to take time to dial *666, some study and tweaking will be required.
The percentage might initially be set at (say) 30%, with a minimum of 15 completed calls reported as *666. As public interest declines, reduce the 30%.
As others have said, there are services that do this for cell calls in the USA. Experts can check there to see what problems and issues need to be avoided.
Also to see what patent fees they'll have to pay.
>If you get a nuisance call then hang up & immediately dial Star 666 Pound. ...
I should probably point out that any company calling about overdue bills will immediately be caught up in this as well. Heck, I could see kids doing it to their friends as a prank.
At which point the telco cuts them off until they come in to discuss the matter, then get told to stop.
Good in theory, but with folks already doing this with IP addresses, it will probably not work. As near as I can tell, the scammers are signing up with mutliple customer IDs. When they get caught, they just move on to the next.
One issue I would see with this is that they could just taint the connections between telcos. I am sure you wouldn't be happy if your local telco was flagged because they offered a bad VOIP connection and it stopped you (a good individual caught in the crosshairs) from making valid calls. If the VOIP was reputable, then it could be that they get a free pass so as not to have their good customers cut off. A method would need to be worked out for "trunk" lines that tie telcos together.
Now if they scammer came in and got arrested, then that would work. Whatever the method, it need to be tied to the person, not necessarily the billing ID.
Whoa, the US has competition from Australia for notable idiot politicians? Well, in addition to Philippines, Venezuela, Byelorussia, Turkey, and a growing number of nation 'institutions'? I will *not* be surprised to see someone from my local asylum pick up on this.
Is it possible global warming is being balanced by a certain mental cooling?
So it works. Probably the only reason US and Canadian telcos don't all do it now is the royalty fees on the patents.
I'm not in the USA, so may I ask, is T-mobile is in a competitive market place? Is it offering this as a feature to boost market share?
If introducing this service is only going to be prompted by companies seeking competitive advantage we'll never get for landlines unless there is legislation.
I rarely answer the phone these days if it's not a call from anyone that I know. In fact, I rarely use the phone. Spam calls have destroyed all trust in the phone services and the phone companies appear to have zero interest in fixing the problem. That's the problem with the world these days... everywhere it's "I made some money, now it's your problem"...
"Cat's foot, iron claw, neurosurgeons scream for more, at paranoia's poison door, 21st century schizoid man… "
"I rarely answer the phone these days if it's not a call from anyone that I know. In fact"
I don't know where you are but here in the UK calls from doctors etc normally arrive as number withheld. It was explained here that this is so that communication with one's doctor is kept confidential even from the rest of the family should one want to do that.
So, you could keep up with that policy and miss the call that tells you there's finally a match for your kidney transplant. It's up to you.
So, you could keep up with that policy and miss the call that tells you there's finally a match for your kidney transplant. It's up to you.
That's what voicemail is for. I ignored a "private call" this morning, the resultant voicemail was from a police officer telling me they'd recovered some of my stolen property. I called back, all sorted.
They may not have a choice. They may be in a call centre and:
1. The phone on their desk has no externally visible phone number.
2. They're grunts, their managers are monitoring them electronically to see that they're constantly busy, and if they're idle or on break more than 5% of the time they get sacked.
So it is a deadlock. If you're in a similar grunt level job where you're constantly busy and can't be interrupted you'll never connect, unless one of you calls the other at home. (Or communicate by email.)
I made some money, now it's your problem
It's what economists call a "negative externality." It basically means that if you farm pigs intensively you can reduce your costs by dumping their shit (which is nasty stuff) in the nearby river (just take care that you dump it downstream of where you draw your water). You're happy. Your customers are happy. Your pigs are happy. People living downstream of you aren't so happy, but so fucking what?
This is just one reason why the "free market economy" doesn't scale well. If you try something like that in a rural community, the people whose water you contaminate will stop buying your product, ostracise you, and maybe even give you a good kicking if you show up at the local pub. But when you scale up to large corporations, local feedbacks have very little effect. Which is why legislation is required to stop unscrupulous companies (most large ones are) from inflicting negative externalities on people.
Over in Trumpistan, they're busy removing legislation that prevented (at least to some extent) negative externalities being exploited. Because, as the fucktards at the Chicago School of Economics insist, the reason deregulation failed disastrously every time it's been tried before is because we didn't deregulate enough.
It's enough to make you bang your head against a brick wall. The reason doing so doesn't fix your headache is because you're not banging it hard enough.
Slow day today (at the Parliament), Senator? Is the press & media ignoring you? Poor girl.
If I remembered correctly, caller ID is configured manually and it will accept any value, including a null value.
So I have no idea what she's quacking about.
PS: My home phone has Lenny set up and I don't have issues from spam callers. I only get joy when they talk to Lenny.
He's/she's using an ad hominem attack.
- Doesn't have a valid argument against the idea.
- Can't debate the points others have made that T-Mobile and Android store have working apps that already do exactly this -- proving that it works.
I wonder if he/she realizes she's negging a "big government" "government regulation" proposal?
I'd expect Trump supporters to be against this on the grounds of big government and more government regulation.
Is Trump supporting what those personally attacking this Pauline person are?
Poor OZ. Call me when you elect a trump for pm.
Been there, done that. The little pommie idiot is now sitting on the backbench and is still sucking at the taxpayer's teat. The only good thing was he was deposed TWO days before he was entitled to collect ex-PM benefits after retirement / not re-elected.
Even Paris thinks abbott is a twat!
All calls enter the telco's network from somewhere. Whitelist providers who guarantee valid credentials, and strip the caller ID from the rest. If the other telco passes calls from third parties who do not guarantee valid credentials then it needs to do the same - strip the ID before passing it to you.
"Market forces" will ensure that a telco wanting to deliver calls to a destination will fall in to compliance, as they will lose all ability to terminate "legitimate calls" properly if they don't.
Source network reputation works pretty well for email. You can still set up a server with a "reputable provider" and spam from it, but see how long it stays up for... The ones who will let you spam from their network are probably already on every spam list.
I don't have any issues with scam/spam callers on my landline.
All of my calls are screened with the answering machine, family and friends know that they need to announce themselves after hearing the recorded greeting then we pick up the phone.
All other calls are ignored and most of the time all I hear is "beep beep beep" when the call immediately disconnects after the answering machine greeting finishes playing.
Then, when I check the number it usually says "Out of area" or "Withheld" which is a sure sign that it is a scammer or telemarketer (despite us being on the Australian Do Not Call register).
I'm thinking about getting one of those Panasonic cordless phone/answering machines that can be set to block any call without a valid number - the phone rings once then immediately disconnects the call.
Good ole Pauline would drop the international thing and just require all domestic calls to have proper caller ID think North American CID2 name and number... including any federal callers as all of them come thru as unknown or private callers (equally sketchy as the international ones). My point being the oldies or those on benefits can't chose what call to answer. Is it a scam or Centrelink trying to cut off your pension... again?
"It's a trap!"
...that I've observed is to spoof CID with a number that matches the first six digits (NPA-NXX in th US) of the number dialed. This is apparently intended to make the called party assume someone in their own locality is trying to reach them. So I make it a point of only using service with numbers that are foreign to me, such as VoIP or a cell phone obtained in another state. Now such numbers are glaringly obvious scams.
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