Comment by pembrook

> I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call

Doctors and dentists.

Most of the calls I get are spam, but then the MOST important calls I get are from doctors, labs, and dentists. I do as much as possible online of course, but not all of these professionals have good online systems and phone calls are often required.

Sometimes you know what number they're going to be calling from ahead of time, but often you don't... especially if you're in a large medical network that has different offices for different specialists, etc. It's a really sad situation if you get sick and you're trying not to miss these important calls, especially when it's a long wait for a specialist and then you miss their call when they get to your name on the waiting list.

This will literally cost some people their lives and legislators need to act on making spoof calls impossible -- there's no reason why anyone should be allowed to spoof a number that they can't receive calls at.

Easy trick: Every time you get a spam call, answer it. Talk to them until _they_ hang up. String them along. Put them on speakerphone and keep working. Feed them fake credit card numbers (there are generators out there that create numbers that checksum correctly, so they type them into whatever they're using to bill numbers. Hopefully this helps flag them as a bad actor to the processors, idk).

It sounds like a lot of work, but when I started doing this about two years ago it took about two weeks for the calls to just... stop. Now I get a spam call maybe once a month. It's glorious.

My theory is this is the only route to get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones that spam companies in India have labelled "unprofitable numbers.txt". Seems like once you're on those, you're good.

Every minute they're listening to you use them for rubber-duck debugging is a minute they're not scamming Granny out of her 401k. Be prepared to get called bad names in foreign languages. Bonus points if you learn some phrases in their language to really get under their skin.

How convenient for the data collecting companies that so generously sponsor the new & free services, that our democratically controlled communication infrastructure looses in value.

> If I’m on a call, even with family, it’s now almost exclusively on FaceTime/zoom/meet/etc.

I really don't get that. I don't get these, on neither of my phones (I've got two numbers). When it rings, it's virtually always friends or family. Sometimes the bank/insurance/doctor. Very exceptionally do I get a commercial or scam call.

I think it's not an argument good enough to excuse to excuse Authy here: "my phone already leaked, so what's one more leak!?".

> Which isn’t great because those aforementioned platforms are all proprietary walled gardens with terrible incentives

Oh I fully agree. I'm using Telegram for chat but zero FaceTime/meet/WhatsApp here. People want to call me, they usually phone me. Once in a rare while Telegram.

Is this like an American thing? I'm in the Netherlands and i get like 1 spam call per two months (business internet/electricity salesperson usually)

> While this sucks, my phone is in so many data breaches at this point it doesn’t matter.

Yes, and this is the slope that we keep sliding down with these data breaches not being taken seriously. First it was your name and email. Now phone numbers. What's the next bit of our private info that we'll normalize leaking?

> Gmail did to monetize the lock-in on your inbox

This is why I have my own mail server and domain. Full control over mail, and access to features that you pay for (ie, unlimited e-mail aliases, control over mailbox size). No more worrying about “google decided to shut your free account down for whatever reason. Bye bye decades of emails and loss to services that use email based OTP or magic link login.

My phone number is from a different area code than I currently live in and I know no one from that area anymore. I can filter out 80% of spam just by ignoring calls from that area.

I wind-up using the phone because so many organizations malevolently misfeature they websites - doing what you want to (pay basic bill or whatever) is hard but upselling and new features, those you can do instantly.

Anyone who has kids has to answer the phone from strangers routinely. School staff and camp counselors are routinely using their own cell phones these days to communicate with parents.

Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once.

The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam.

In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.

> I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call

Doctors, dentists, moving companies, home improvement contractors, recruiters, etc. These are some of the most important phone calls I've received in recent memory.

I don't know what world you live in, but I religiously block phone numbers after just one spam call. And I usually don't give out my phone number. (I'm much happier giving out email addresses since I have an infinite supply of addresses.) I never get enough spam calls that I feel like the phone system is going the way of the fax machine.

I'm an European and I get zero spam calls.

I used to get a couple of cold calls per year for surveys, but I got unlisted via GDPR requests and now its down to zero.

Companies do try collecting your phone number, but then I answer NO to the obligatory "do you want the latest offers" question (in the EU, this is opt-in not opt-out). And it doesn't matter if my phone number leaks.

This is similar to my email address use. I used to get emails from recruiters, but after a couple of replies informing them that whatever profile they have is illegal, with my email address not being public, asking them to delete it, the emails stopped. I still get spam, but it's mostly fraud and US companies. Fastmail's spam filters are good enough, BTW.

My phone number works just fine, and the phone network is valuable given the better signal 2G can have, or the fact that not everyone is on the app du jour. And I find it odd when people call me on WhatsApp.

I frequently see US folks criticising GDPR, so I'm guessing this is one of those "the US mind can't comprehend" moments.

Very similar here... same for my primary gmail address... the most annoying thing is the "credit monitoring" that comes with a few of my credit cards is all but worthless... I get constant notices that my "email is compromised" but absolutely no detail on how/where/what exactly is compromised, with is like saying, your email is public.

While I do get a few regular phone calls a week, they're all in my contacts and I don't answer if the number isn't... at least 2/3 the time if I decide to answer as I'm expecting an out of band call, it's spam. On the flip side, I am wanting to setup for "your code is XXXXXX" as a verification on a personal website I'm working on to allow for public users. I know it doesn't add too much, but it's enough to reduce the noise. I'm not even sure what more hoops I need to jump through with Twilio to get to send said messages. I'm not a company, and not sending any kind of marketing campaign.

The telephone companies make money based on minutes of usage. There is a very large financial incentive for the really big telcos to allow spam calls.

Spam callers are likely the most lucrative customer of the telephone network for the telephone companies.

IMO The problem with data breaches is not the phone number being exposed, it's the other data around it that one can combine with other breaches to make full profiles of a person's comings and goings, their location/purchase history, their associations and preferences, etc.

This is very valuable data to have, not only for advertisers, but also criminals and other bad actors.

Also, the fact that nobody ever questions the authenticity of leaked data should be VERY alarming. Imagine what power someone can hold over someone with manipulated leak data.

Interesting. Here in the UK I get about 1 spam phone call a year.

I make and receive regular phone calls all the time. However I only answer those that are from numbers I have in my address book. I do the same with text messages, I have my default view set to "Known Senders" so I'm not even really aware of others. If I'm expecting an unknown sender message, such as a TFA code, it's easy enough to just look in "Unknown Senders" for it.

I feel the same way. I get far too many “hey!” Or “Hello?” “What’s up?” messages on my phone that never say another thing. Any family/friend of mine knows me well enough to try more than once to get my attention via messages, and 99% of them should probably be in my contact list already and I’ll hear the beep.

I have never shared my phone number with any online service aside from my bank and I don't get any spam on my phone.

I still don't recommend to do that and just toss those that demand your phone number away. Get a business phone if your work demands it.

I’ve found some success is curbing spam calls with the “Silence Unknown Callers” feature in iPhone. However this presents a few challenges. Mainly missing calls from delivery agents, who's number is obviously not in my iPhone contacts

I’ve been impressed with my iPhone and/or carrier (AT&T in the US) for tagging incoming calls as spam or telemarketing. The phone does still ring but I know not to answer it.

The solution to phone spam is voicemail transcription. Every call goes to voicemail, I get the transcription in a minute or two, and can call back if I want to.

I think that is intentional, AFAIK phone communication is more protected than other types so allowing spam to continue unabated is in the governments interest. Outsourcing the harassment to 3rd parties, similar to how prison torture is outsourced to the inmates. The government could fix these things but would rather not.

The phone network we once knew is useless in terms of answering or bothering with any calls or text from those not in your contacts. If you do .. you do so at your own risk!

Really? I get nearly zero spam text maybe 1-2 per year, even voice calls now. I get maybe 1 per month now. I'm with US carrier TMobile and on iOS.

Yet another reason the digital world is marching towards a closed-by-default model.