Comment by DeepSeaTortoise
6 hours ago
The solution is accessible law, not better anti-fraud tooling. Introduce a spam / fraud button, using it requires your pin and costs $10, but obliges your telecom provider to record the call (preferably including a few minutes before you hit the button), email you a signed recording and if found to be spam deposit $100 onto your account. Your provider may then hand the fee +10% for himself to whatever network the call in question entered his own network from. The last cooperative network in the chain gets stuck with the fee, forcing them to either reclaim the money from the malicious customer, the next network in the chain (in court) or pony up the money themselves.
Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.
That's pretty much the proposal I've made for some years.[1]
California has introduced bonding to telemarketing firms specifically. I feel that should apply at the carrier level, where networks carry a guaranteed bond, pay regular premiums on it, and are dinged for unwanted calls, with the proceeds being split among the called party and any third-party network(s) traversed by the calls. Downstream networks could seek compensation from ANY upstream network carrying the traffic regardless of whether or not they originated it.
This would both create a penalty for providing, or transiting, unsolicited calls, AND create an incentive for carriers / network providers themselves to pursue unsolicited traffic from their peers.
<https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/telreg>
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Notes:
1. See for example <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/111099306069523624>
I think we have to do something this extreme. We have to give the system a total makeover. Somehow we also have to keep it from being fully centralized and have the big brother problem on the other side. Unfortunately these two goals are difficult to get through at the same time, with the system that we have.
If major states like California and New York pass it, and spam basically dies in those states, it wouldn't surprise me if it spreads across the country.
Assuming the nature of the spam and how it makes money.
Cue the crypto bros touting their decentralized spam-detection blockchain
Infeasible. Fraud or spam is usually pretty hard to confirm from one recording without additional context. Many scammers have plausible deniability or are just checking whether the number is active. Moreover, this solution would involve secret non-consensual recording; what if it's not a scam?
> Many scammers have plausible deniability
The scammers who call me are perfectly obvious.
First, they tell me the company they are from (almost certainly a fake one -- could be easy to verify). Then they try to convince me that two years ago I have created an account on their website, they gave me some free money that was managed by an AI, and now I have a ton of money, and they need to send it to me (a completely bullshit story). Then they tell me that in order to get that money, I need to install a software, that I know happens to be a remote control software (no legitimate financial institution would ever do that).
There is no way to make this plausibly deniable. Especially the part about the need to install the remote control software... which is the entire point of the operation.
Plus, who is ‘confirming’ the spam? The same entity (or group: carriers) that is keeping the $10 and paying the $100 out? That just means the result will always be ‘not spam.’
Unscrupulous operators will just run up huge liabilities and close up shop by the time they can be identified and dragged into court, meanwhile having started another similar operation under a different name. That's basically already what's happening, and the speed differential between the technology and the law will be forever in their favor.
The idea is that telecoms would be on the hook for these folks' behavior; they'd be incentivized to scrutinize them more thoroughly.
A lot of scams unfortunately operate right on the line of legality like the car warranty morons
Sure, but that's okay because you don't need 100% of spam calls to be recognized as spam for the incentive to do its job. The system still sounds like it could still work even if a large percent of calls weren't flagged.
This works both ways, if the detection rate is low then nobody would press a "lose $10" button.
How are they listening to a few minutes before the button? A "temporary" recording of the first 2 minutes of every call? I feel like there would be some privacy concerns.
It'd suffice for them to sign the transmitted information (audio and required timing metadata for the packet stream) and make you do the temporary recording on your side, transmitting it back to the provider once you hit the button, to let them handle the backup/safekeeping aspects for you.
Simpler yet: require every call to come with a physical source address, huge (and enforced) jail times for faking it. Let the internet and the pissed callees crowdsource the rest
This would be an enormous invasion of privacy. Other countries have a lot less issues with spam calls without these measures
I spent a little time unsuccessfully looking for a reference, but in some ancient Greek and early Roman governments, newly elected officials who were in charge of money were required to personally indemnify (become responsible for the professional liabilities of) their predecessor.
If your predecessor committed fraud, you were 100% personally responsible for it. You would then gather the evidence and sue your predecessor for your losses.
That sounds like a great way to attract scammers and dissuade honest people, so if it's ever been tried it must have failed spectacularly (I also searched for variations of this idea but didn't turn up anything).
It probably worked for Romans because the taxes you were allowed to collect was so much more than you had to send back to Rome that you could get rich 'honestly'. That and you had options to prove the fraud that meant the other was unlikely to try.
How does your predecessor today have those funds? The problem is politicians get to "play" with wealth beyond their own reaches (typically).
I don’t understand how this works. Suppose someone calls you about some political poll and you hit the button, would it count or not? What about a cold email (there was another such thread about cold emails being praised, i said fundamentally is spam but was downvoted lol).