The FCC wants to criminalize AI robocall spam The FCC wants to make AI-powered robocalls illegal and has warned of a rising wave of scams from voice-cloning technology. On Thursday, Jessica Rosenworcel, boss of America's communications watchdog, said machine-learning software could potentially convince people to do things like donating money to fraudulent causes. It's …
The FCC does enforce the do not call registry, but they have only so many resources so they go after a few big players a year (they make announcements you can google) but there are always more, and smaller ones they ignore.
IMHO the biggest problem is the exception to do not call politicians have given themselves. The overwhelming majority of calls I get (I live in a hotly contested state) are either politicians or surveys. On my landline (only costs $6/month so I keep it as a way to give out a phone number that doesn't ring and I don't answer, only review voicemails) I get upwards of a half dozen a day during the peak.
Politicians also figured out my cell number, but fortunately I'm able to block by keyword on SMS messages and spam is not a problem on iMessage (unless the idiots who want to force Apple to open it up to the outside world have their way) so I really don't see it other than every once in a while having to add a new keyword to the SMS filter list. I have my phone set to not ring if I get a call from a number not in my contacts, I get a few of those a day to during election season. They get sent to voicemail but political robocalls never seem to leave a message lol
Honestly if all political calls and surveys disappeared I'd be fine answering my phone for any call, as the odds it is a call that matters from a number I don't recognize (like my dentist confirming an appointment) would be about equal to it being from a telemarketer, and I would be so few in number I could go back to the old way of dealing with them by simply hanging up.
The present Federal Do Not Call Act is ineffective. I think that the Federal "Do Not Call Act" needs to be amended substantially to deal with this situation:
1) Penalties need to be adjusted for the inflation that has occurred since the 1991 passage of the Act. I suggest they should be adjusted annually by the greater of the annual Consumer Price Index and the annual Producer Consumer Price Index inflation rates.
2) Presently, the Act lists several "aggravating factors", which increase the statutory penalties from $500 to $1500. Even if multiple aggravating factors are present, the penalty does not increase beyond the penalty for a single aggravating factor,
Instead, the penalties should have a 1991_$ 1000.00 increment for each aggravating factor, so that, for example, if three aggravating factors are present, the statutory damages should be 1991_$ 3500.00 In particular, each request by the callee never to be called again should also be regarded as a separate aggravation, so in the case of a caller having been told by the callee 100 times never to call again, the damages should be 1991_$ 100,500.00.
3) Robo-calls are especially disruptive. The statutory damage-increment for robo-calls should be 1991_$ 3000.00 instead of 1991_$ 1000.00. Moreover, the callee should be reimbursed for attorney and court costs.
4) Spoofed-number calls are inherently deceptive, and should be considered deliberately fraudulent. The statutory damage-increment for spoofed-number calls should be 1991_$ 5000.00. Moreover, the callee should be reimbursed for attorney and court costs.
Calls that spoof either medical-provider numbers or government numbers should have penalties as severe as those for impersonating a police officer; moreover, statutory civil damages should be at least 1991_$ 15000.00 per offense.
5) As noted above, currently telecommunications vendors have no incentive to cooperate with callees, making spoofed-number calls almost impossible to track and penalize. Instead, they need an incentive. Telecommunications vendors should be reimbursed by the court at a rate of 3x their costs, for helping to establish the identities of guilty parties.
6) When foreign call centers are found responsible for violating the Act, they should be cut off from telecommunications-contact with the US, by whatever means (diplomatic or otherwise) are necessary.
If you make telcos feel financial pain hurt for failing to prevent ban-dodging, then they will rapidly find ways to actually fix the problem
They only started going after the IP-based call centres because fraudsters were forging routing data (Which is several layers down from CLID) and the terminating telco wasn't being paid
Yes, they get paid - usually about 1/3 of the call fee (which is WHY they had a strong disincentive to cooperate in efforts to block inbound spam/scam calls)
Can I suggest jail time rather than / in addition to fines?
It probably doesn't need to be a particularly long time in jail, maybe 6 months for a first offence. They consider fines to be a cost of business that can be avoided with bankruptcy, so it doesn't serve as much of a deterrent. Jail time, even for a few months, would be a lot more effective as a deterrent.
Also, penalties, including jail time, for any company that hires the services of a robocaller etc, as a strict liability offence.
"6) When foreign call centers are found responsible for violating the Act, they should be cut off from telecommunications-contact with the US, by whatever means (diplomatic or otherwise) are necessary."
The phone companies know when they're relaying spam calls and since they make good money on it, they don't care. If they could also be fined and execs subject to jail time, the latter being the most important, they might take steps to shut down the calls. That adds another line of defense if it's not possible to go after somebody in another country.
for pointing out that we have now reached the point that it is impossible to know whether someone said something, or did something, unless you are face-to-face with that person, and can identify them. You cannot trust recordings, film, live video or audio. And of course, the reverse applies. No-one can trust that you are you...
Can anyone tell me what possible benefit accrues from the development of this sort of technology, other than the obvious 'ooh, shiny, that's a nice trick, I wonder if...?'
Benefit in the sense of real broad societal enhancement: nothing. Benefit in the sense that some person manages to make some money: definitely. It doesn't only include people doing illegal or unethical things, either. You could use some of this technology to make certain things more cheaply, for example using modern voice software to perform voice-over work instead of hiring a voice actor or using it to create images instead of hiring a designer. The voice actor and designer probably aren't happy with that option, but it does mean that the costs for whatever involves these will be lower, which may get passed on to you. The harms of unethical and annoying use probably outweigh this, but we don't get to choose not to have it. The technology exists and will be used for all these purposes whether we approve or not. Copyright claims may weaken the one that makes visual art for a bit, but probably not for long, and that's assuming that the side I think is right wins which isn't guaranteed with so much money involved.
"I got robocalled yesterday, and I'm in Spain. They just call from outside the EU."
That's ok. If the execs at your local telco could be subject to jail time if they don't put systems in place to shut those calls down, there would be systems in place to shut foreign robocalls from making it to your phone.
"Also illegal in the UK, but the problem is that the fines issued by the ICO never even get paid, and definitely don't act as a deterrence."
Ignoring the regulator's efforts, I notice come telcos are good at stopping spam calls, other are not. My landline is now VOIP'd from A&A, and spam calls are rare as hens teeth. When I had the same number with Virgin Media I was getting about two-four spam calls a day.
I can't help suspecting that the bigger telcos make serious money from the termination charges for spam calls, and are in no hurry to lose out on that revenue; perhaps somebody who's familiar with the wholesale settlement side of things can tell me if that's correct.
In America I get spam AI calls several times a day ... I assume they are using AI to process my speech so I play Jenny Talia singing F.O.C.U.S. ... I love her song so I am laughing to get an AI spam call.
Why on Earth are Robo calls even legal? I cannot see a single legitimate use case, outside of perhaps a disaster warning, for Robo calls.
Ban them, and make the Telco's liable if they dont prevent them. Should be relatively easy to pick up that a single or small number of entry points into the telco network are pumping out hundreds of calls per minute. Those are probably not real people... So just block them. It's not like that wouldnt be hard to automate either.
Thank $diety, we dont have much of this bollocks in the EU. And that the EU is even cracking down harder on it.
So just block them. It's not like that wouldnt be hard to automate either.
What? And lose the revenue from each call made - now you are just being silly.
As an "innocent" party the telcos probably make more profit from the robo-calls than the people actually making the calls as they will have a tiny success rate but the telcos profit from every call.
If you want to stop robo-calls you need it to affect the telcos bottom line otherwise there is no incentive for them to throw away revenue.
"the telcos probably make more profit from the robo-calls than the people actually making the calls"
Just as the UK postal service makes an undisclosed but probably substantial amount of dosh from distributing junk mail such as pizza parlor flyers, that most people just bin immediately, among the legitimate postal deliveries.
"New Hampshire residents received a fake call mimicking President Joe Biden's voice telling them to not vote in the state's Presidential primary election"
<sarc>I'm sure the President spends much of his time phoning individual members of the public, regardless of the actual message</sarc>.
To anyone using half their brain, this is hardly likely to be an effective campaign strategy. And considering the ineptitude of most of the human-generated phone scam calls I get, there's a strong possibility that the bots will be even less convincing.
I don't think anyone bar a few people whose brains are even more shrivelled than the two sundowning geriatrics competing to be President actually thinks that Biden called them personally. But it's not unreasonable to believe that it was a message recorded by the President, because that sort of thing happens all the time.
The biggest hole in the current system is the nonfunctional Caller ID. If it's a real caller, it'll tell you who it is; if it's not legitimate, it'll tell you whatever the caller wants it to.
Tie it to ANI instead; if the ANI doesn't work or doesn't match the supplied caller ID, put a star in front of it. 99+% of spam calls spoof caller ID, so rapidly people would learn not to pick up if there's a star in front of the caller ID.
This, a thousand times this. DNC lists are unenforceable. Spammers just pop up and vanish too quickly for enforcement agencies to be effective, or they just operate from abroad.
What would really kill the problem is requiring phone service providers to authenticate Caller ID. Legislation on service providers can actually be enforced comparatively easily. Force them to make it so that users' displays get either an authenticated ID, or a marker that tells them it's unauthenticated (e.g. because it's from a foreign country that doesn't enforce this).
Having done that, building and maintaining a spammer blacklist becomes vastly easier, and you can just auto-block all unauthenticated calls.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
