The scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this day. And has been for 10 years.
A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable.
It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as number@t-mobile.de for example, while a spam call would say fakenumber@01012.com.
Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away.
It works great to this day, because I never published it.
Surprised to hear this as well. I have never received a Spam call growing up in Germany and living there again between 2015-2019. In 2019 I moved to Australia and spam calls have been a constant annoyance due to massive data leaks across all banks and public institutions.
I have both a German mobile number and landline number, and have never once received a scam and spam call on either in the 8 years I have been living in Germany. I guess it is a problem of having a public contact number on a website.
Depends on the prpvider as well. Vodafone seems to have (had?) zero qualms about passing my old landline number to multiple shady call centers after taking over Unitymedia. The number was not known to anyone but my parents and I opted out of erverything I could find, still for some time got weekly calls. I haven't had that woth Telekom so far.
Spam calls (and even more so: SMS) have gotten much more frequent on my mobile number in the last 2 years. But in this case, it's a number that has been in active use for the last decade and has by now probably been in multiple data leaks... :/
> It creamed my corn so much
Come again?
Edit: I guess it is in urban dictionary, but my first thought was the last definition listed:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=creams%20my%...
Twin Peaks reference, perhaps? https://twinpeaks.fandom.com/wiki/Garmonbozia
Cream my corn again?
Sure. Just don't eat it too fast.
Screen unknown callers to VM. Solved all my problems
I simply don’t answer calls that aren’t in my contacts.
VM? Virtual machine?
Wow the HN crowd is younger than I thought.
Voicemail
I’m old enough to remember voicemail and I’ve never seen it referred to as “VM”.
Not only is voicemail still a thing but just yesterday my iPhone took it upon itself to identify an incoming call as 'suspected spam' and route it to voicemail. I didn't tell it to do that so I guess it's part of some update Apple have pushed. I sometimes wish Apple would ask me first before that kind of thing! Although I probably would have ok'ed that one if they had asked.
Dunno about the US, but where I live (Czechia, in Europe), voicemail is simply not a thing. I've never used it in my life and I don't know anyone who's ever used it, young or old.
We have it here for mobile but by default providers set it to "call waiting" instead. One of the reasons people don't use voicemail (other than not knowing it exists) is they charge you money to leave a message. Your plan minutes don't count. They probably charge you to listen to messages too.
It’s what old folks use when they could just text or email.
Wow, I am surprised to hear that. Is blocking calls not a thing there? In Sweden you can say that no sellers may call your numbers, companies where you are a customer excluded though.
I never get spam calls or sellers calling me.
The only spam I have received with my mobile phone in Germany was the network operator asking me for permission to spam me with ads.
This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy".
When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy".
And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't do that because they prefer to collect a few cents a call from them rather than serve their customers better. It's everyone else who needs this.
They're not intercepting calls over their network from suspected bad actors; rather, they've created some phone numbers that always go to Daisy - see https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/11/virgin-media-o...
Ah! So step 2 is wait for the spammers to automate blacklisting of Daisy phone numbers, and only then start rolling out a (paid) Daisy option to customers.
Not connecting calls doesn't waste spammer money, but maybe Daisy does.
If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.
Then, once the spammers have blacklisted the Daisy numbers, cycle those spam-free numbers to their customers and start a new batch of Daisy numbers. This way, there is a constant flow of spammer free numbers being cycled into the pool. Of course, everyone and their dog wants your phone number, so you will have to be careful who you give it to if you want it to stay spam-free.
> Then, once the spammers have blacklisted the Daisy numbers, cycle those spam-free numbers to their customers and start a new batch of Daisy numbers.
This is actually genius. The spammers will have blacklisted all of their targets eventually.
Until they catch on and un-blacklist the numbers periodically.
we all know the end game: ai scammer talking to ai granny
As long as the scammer's paying to route the call, I'm ok with this. And the telcos' fitness function for their pool of robogrannies should be time-spent-on-call. Making it uneconomic is the way to kill it.
Half of the spam calls I get today are AI. And I get more or less one spam call a day.
AI Guilfoyle and AI Dinesh
dead internet theory, telco edition.
presumably someone is still getting charged for calls and AI -- and therefore someone is making money -- in this situation though, non?
My friend works for a big telco and is the guy fixing this problem for them. They have amazing powers of deception when they need it. New numbers can be conjured up at any time.
The new fad among wireless carriers here in the US is to route what they think are spam calls to a fake voicemail box.
Voicemail that is left in this generic voice mail box never makes it to their customer and the customer is completely unaware that some of their calls have been diverted.
Wow. There should be a way to opt out of this, at least. Isn't this a violation of common carrier laws?
Sounds like a shadow-ban.
Then suddenly, calls from consenting callers to consenting receivers are labeled as spam and blocked. What can you do about it? Nothing. Switch to email, I guess. Oh wait, same problem.
You sound like an advocate for telemarketers. Am I correct?
I doubt very seriously that the pool of people who have knowingly and intentionally and explicitly opted in/consented to telemarketing - that is, without any dark pattern involvement and with a clear and unmbiguous consent experience, is very large. In fact I think it is infinitesimal because I can’t recall seeing such a consent UX- they ALL involve dark patterns. And if you pair that with “marketer who diligently implements all state & FTC requirements and does timely and accurate processing of removal requests, I think that the 3 relationships left are web app UX testers.
I think the world would be a better place without telemarketing or email marketing. Maybe a “one email per year” limit per merchant who you have actually paid money to and not opted out of.
I’m not OP, but my worry is about the false positives. I have real inbound calls and emails getting detected as spam all the time. Luckily my VoIP provider has a spam box I can look in, but at this point I just have to go through them every so often to make sure I’m not missing anything important.
If the telecoms can perfectly predict the telemarketers, then I’d love it. But in practice how often is this going to block people I know from calling me? Probably not never, and then we just have to give up on phones as a reliable method of communication.
Exactly. Many people want to be able to receive phone calls from their doctors, airlines and schools. These types of B2C calls are presumably most likely to be marked as spam in the event of false positives.
I’ll take my chances. 99%of the people I want to talk to either email/text me first or are already in my contacts list (which I’m not really all that picky about). I’ll accept that failure rate.
Isn't "emailing you first" just kicking the can down the road? What stops spam emails getting through to you? (Besides the exact kind of heuristic filtering you seem to be objecting to, that is.)
Email spam filters have the advantage of being able to see the content of the message, so hopefully they're more accurate.
The disadvantage of email is that it doesn't work for urgent use cases, like Disneyland calling the parent of a lost child.
Disneyland will have a handful of IPs and phone numbers, and I'd bet my hat will have a team aggressively calling any ISP or provider that flags them as spam.
Even better : ignore unknown numbers, real unknown people can leave voicemail.
(Hopefully leaving voicemail keeps out of reach of spammers, I guess it's just too expensive for them ?)
reductio ad absurdum: we're back to Pony Express
Bulk scams by mail are at least less common because mail fraud is investigated pretty seriously and results in federal felony charges. Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher. Unfortunately individuals are still sometimes targeted.
> Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher
This is the thing we screwed up for email and phone (after per call fees dropped to zero).
It's not rocket science to create systems that net to zero for common usage (balanced in-bound vs out-bound), but charge an arm and a leg for bulk senders.
Until you're running a file server or the equivalent. There has to be some way for a willing recipient to zero-rate or reverse-charge the responses to their requests. The Internet gets this wrong.
The physical mail spammers know to only use deceptive tricks, like "FINAL NOTICE" or pretending to be affiliated with you using some publicly available information. I have not yet seen one dare to full-on lie, because there would be real consequences.
If a scammer puts "FINAL NOTICE" on a solicitation they mailed with no prior relationship, I do still report it as fraud. But that's probably wishful thinking.
I called out email because email actually has this problem. It's not reductio ad absurdum if it's true.
Simple: shoot the messenger.
The pony express put significant cost burden on the sender per message, which is inherently self regulating.
Not sure about all carriers, but on mine I still get a push notification when a call gets blocked blocked by the spam filter.
Better yet, route all calls for all disconnected/unassigned numbers in their part of the numbering plan to it. It would probably kill robocalling overnight.
Who tells them the number is disconnected? That would have to come from the shady carrier enabling this stuff.
I hate to say this.. but I find this very difficult to believe..
I don't think any telco puts effort into stopping spammers.. I'd like them to but I don't think it's something they either can care or legally capable of fixing.
I work for a telco, though not in that department. We put a lot of effort into trying to block spam calls, and adapting systems to the newest tricks. The reason why the results aren't better is (I'm being told) a combination between IP telephony making reliable source tracing all but impossible, and common carrier laws which mean that you can't block a call unless you're 100% certain it's a scam, otherwise you open yourself up to being sued.
I imagine that many of us would gladly accept blocking call with a much lower certainty. Maybe we need an audio catcha.
Thank you for the insight.
> If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.
Why?
Ah, so it's a honeypot.
I think you mean Lenny[1] not Lemmy. Although I think it would be incredibly funny to have scammers talking to the voice of Lemmy[2].
My mistake, but I completely stand over my words: it's cool if someone sends scammers to talk to the disembodied voice of Lemmy Kilmister, not cool if Vodafone or O2 license his likeness to do the same thing.
If you mean Lenny, I've got bad news for you. The gentleman who created Lenny was a fairly high up person at a telco, and continues to be.
If every third call you make goes to Daisy you are using shit data and are likely part of the problem. Are you absolutely sure they are fucking up the spam detection, or are you just doing all of your cold calling with blinders on?
Let's ignore the real problem and distract the plebs by building some cute AI tool instead.
Would it help to know that
> Influencer and reality TV star, Amy Hart, has worked with Daisy to produce a shocking video to show how she’s taking on phoney fraudsters
Wait, is a phoney fraudster an honest person?
Like a scam caller who then genuinely helps you somehow
If that video really existed and was as shocking as they imply, they would have linked to it.
I love that they are weaponizing the perceived kindness of senior citizens in this way. Many of the victims of scams are some of the nicest people ever that were taken advantage of in some capacity - usually while trying to help someone. It's the digital age equivalent of staging a broken down cart and then robbing some old folks. I think most of us hate the idea of the "solution" being to not go near anyone with a broken down cart out of fear.
I'm not saying this fixes everything, but I would rather a world where scammers odds at making a living at this are so poor they won't bother versus a world where everyone has to block every number by default and live in metaphorical bunkers to never interact because you might be a scammer.
> I would rather a world where scammers odds at making a living at this are so poor they won't bother
Then what's stopping the scammers from finding another "evil" job that makes money? You have to remember that humans tend to not enjoy accomplishing thievery and the scammers most often do this out of necessity. Of course there are big call center operators who truly are terrible people, but this conclusion is true for the bulk of their workforce.
> You have to remember that humans tend to not enjoy accomplishing thievery and the scammers most often do this out of necessity.
There are endless ways to earn an honest living. Nobody stealing from vulnerable people and the mentally degraded is forced to. I fully believe that people can survive without scamming seniors for a paycheck.
What is your suggestion? It seems like you could discourage any form of preventative action against immoral behaviour this way. There is _always_ something worse than the problem at hand.
It's a very common way of justifying poor behavior or criminal activity. It's basically "if they didn't sell the drugs someone else would" or "if they didnt steal someone else would" etc.
The big call center operators usually have political backing too.
Seems like the logical endpoint of a lot of this is people getting paid directly for their attention. Want to call me? I've set a price of $5/call that I answer, and an additional $10/minute of listen time after the first 10 seconds. Want to send me an email? $1/email and $5/100 words. Anyone I have emailed is automatically on my allow-list, which I can also adjust manually.
That's EVE Online's approach to fighting ingame "email" spam [0].
Every player can configure an amount of ingame money that is levied from a sender's account to deliver a message to them. It's a currency sink, so it's themed as a "tax" levied by the NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the recipient of the message.
I thought it used to default to 5 ISK (a pittance, something you can make back by shooting a single NPC pirate ship). I see some references to the default being ~2000 ISK at the time that it was changed to 0, where it is now.
Worked pretty well, imo. Players that need to be publicly contactable (people who organize public events, for instance) can turn it off easily. People who are "space famous" can crank it up to reduce targeted spam. Even at the default setting, it's effective at keeping ingame scammers from blasting the whole player list with messages (at least, the poor ones :). Doesn't apply to people you've already exchanged messages with. I think there's also some allowlisting you can do, etc.
0. https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_Mail#CONCORD_Spam_Prevent...
> it's themed as a "tax" levied by the NPCs and its value is destroyed rather than paid to the recipient of the message.
It’s a cool idea and would work good for real world fines, too: fines that destroy the money paid instead of transfer it (to the city, the court, the police and so on). The fines would disincentivize bad behavior, while also not incentivizing the police to “go generate some crime” because it pays them.
Some argue that's how taxes work already. Taxation destroys money, government spending creates money.
MMT (modern monetary theory) argues that taxation isn't about "funding", it's actually about controlling inflation.
MMT is somewhat controversial.
Totally agree, but only if those taxes go to the entity that creates the money. From the federal government's point of view, who prints money, there is zero difference between collecting money and throwing it in a furnace. Both do the same thing. Money is just a piece of paper that says "the government owes you a debt of one buck". So if it is returned to them, they no longer owe it to you, and if it gets destroyed, the same thing is true.
But if those taxes go to the State of California, it's different. They don't print money, so it becomes a real debt to them. Destroying it in that case would cancel that debt and free the debtor (the Treasury) from that obligation.
Great real world functioning example.
The idea in general seems to have been around since 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
And maybe like a temporary hold of the money, so you get it back if I’m convinced it’s not spam. Probably would resolve 99% of spam issues in the real world and create a chain of trust. Add some temporary disabling feature as well if you’re expecting a call from a random number too, so you’re set.
Sounds like a great solution to the minority of people like you and me who wouldn't mind the added steps of approving every real phone call as not spam after, having to remember how to set that you're expecting a call from a random number, etc. I can't see it being acceptable to enough people for any network to go down this road unless spam levels get way worse.
Not approving all the time, just setting every call by default to $1. Everyone who knows you will call knowing they’ll get their money back. And you can do an easy “add everyone in your contacts to a whitelist”, boom done.
It'd work well for both ends of the spectrum (spam callers & friends) but think would kinda fall down in the middle though — kids' school, doctor's office, plumber coming to service your boiler.
Where you are expecting a call and it's definitely not spam, but they're not going to be ringing from a pre-approved whitelist. Don't think they'd want to be putting $1 per call on the line and hoping for people to remember to click the right button afterwards
The plumber at least is presumably paid a lot more than $1 for doing that job, and they would most likely just pass the cost onto you ?
Spam is already at the level of changing people's default behavior from answering calls that come in to (as I saw described abt younger mobile users) "would rather pick up a live hand grenade than an unknown caller"
Personally, my default was to pick up and is now if recognized contact pickup, if not and I'm expecting an unknown call, scrutinize, then if pickup, only answer with a cough or two — never "hello" or "yes" due to threat of voice cloning escalate to banks.
Spam is universally detested
My assessment is that voice calls are on the verge of going obsolete if the telcos fail to get a handle on spam. Yet the telcos behave as if they have no clue whatsoever and DGAF.
Reporting spam should be the other way around, it defaults to assuming a normal interaction.
Consider: if you get harassed with a call or text you don't like, you send an SMS with that phone number to some known short code. You then receive $1 from the caller. If the caller cannot be found, the last verifiable link in the chain is responsible for paying the fine.
This would cause carriers to behave overnight, instead of allowing foreign call centers to spoof other people's real private numbers with your area code.
couldnt they just automate ways to handle the code?
plus a lot of spam comes out of compromised phones, or compromised systems. what good is this if i have your phone, or just your SIM?
That sounds a lot better to me
At least we can dream, ehh?
Satoshi Nakamoto's first visionfor Bitcoin was just this - pay-to-send email.
I think you're thinking of Hashcash? Not invented by Satoshi, and not pay-to-send exactly. It's proof-of-work for email.
I'm certain Satoshi was thinking of Hashcash! But I did mean what I said, though it wasn't until Martti Malmi released his emails with Satoshi that I knew this, and so might not be well known:
https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/
> "[this next bit turned out to be very controversial. there is extreme prejudice against spam solutions, especially proof-of-work.]
> It can already be used for pay-to-send e-mail. The send dialog is resizeable and you can enter as long of a message as you like. It's sent directly when it connects. The recipient doubleclicks on the transaction to see the full message. If someone famous is getting more e-mail than they can read, but would still like to have a way for fans to contact them, they could set up Bitcoin and give out the IP address on their website. "Send X bitcoins to my priority hotline at this IP and I'll read the message personally."
90% sure this was also an idea in Bill Gates’ “The Road Ahead”
That's similar to the idea I had for combating texting spam: - If your number is in my address book then texts are free for you - If this is the first time you are contacting me then you pay me $1
There are probably downsides and ways this will screw up real relationships but it will certainly increase the cost of spam.
One issue I can forsee:
- Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to please add them to your contact list first so that they can message you.
- After a while of half their clients not doing that and lots of fees on their end, contractors stop providing a phone number at all, asking you to please install ContractorApp to communicate with them.
I love every part of this. Not having things in writing is one of the most common tactics with bad contractors. And I miss their call backs because I have unknowns goto spam, so I have to remember to disable that feature...
Here they do already use watsapp, viber etc for communication, maybe because they are cheaper.
>Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to please add them to your contact list first so that they can message you.
This is reasonable. If they want to reach me, they should whitelist in advance instead of hoping they can randomly get through.
aye. i have a business relationship with these people, let me know how to communicate with you ahead of time so I can whitelist or clear that.
Maybe when you first receive a text you see:
This message is from an unknown number. (Accept / Block / Charge sender $1)
Well, that just invokes we-had-a-baby-its-a-boy
They had a baby.
It’s a boy!
That said - perhaps harder to change the name that shows up as quickly as you could leave a recorded name? :)
Still one of the best ads ever made.
Ha! Okay, I like this, I think it changes my mind on the whole thing being viable. There's probably some reason it wouldn't work in reality but the satisfaction from pressing the charge $1 option on spam would be huge.
I disagree about the we-adda-baby-itsa-boy issue. I don't see how that'd apply given that you can charge them $1 from the very first message.
They already charge $200 so I doubt $1 extra is going to matter.
one click to add from the first message = $1 total cost.
contractors can add this to their invoices if they care.
You just made the new scam ‘persuading you to text me’. I get $1 for everyone I fool!
Presumably the money would go to the telecom company, I think. Still very good for trolls though.
I think you have just described LinkedIn's business model, minus the fact that you don't get the money but the filter provider does.
Yes. There are all kind or brokers selling the attention of their audiences: Google, TV Networks, podcasts, LinkedIn, etc. I'd like to see another attempt at disintermediation in the space.
If you have already sorted the world between people you want to take calls from and people you don't, why wouldn't you just block the people you don't want instead of charging them money?
Because there's a middle ground of people who we have not yet categorized. I don't know every phone number my doctor might call me from.
My doctor, bank, eh well everyone, will text or email me if they cannot reach me. I haven't answered a number I don't recognize for the past 10 years; life is excellent.
And you think your doctor would be willing to pay for the privledge of talking to you?
My attention is valuable. I should be able to sell it on my terms.
Is it though? Like it might be valuable to you, but i doubt its valuable to anyone else in a phone call situation and both parties need to find value to make a sale.
Like if you are interested in the convo then you should be paying the other person as you are getting value from the convo.
What's the situation where you don't care about the convo but for the right price you could care, and the other party also thinks that price is reasonable? Like maybe if someone is trying to recruit you i guess, but the situations where that is true seem very few and far between (and we already have a system for that, where traditionally someone offers to buy you a meal in exchange for listening)
> What's the situation where you don't care about the convo but for the right price you could care, and the other party also thinks that price is reasonable?
Minimally targeted advertising.
Why would the other party think the price would be reasonable? Like the entire point of minimally targeted ads is to spray and prey.
Like if you assume a CPM of $2, that means $0.002 per phone call. Would you really find that acceptable?
If the answer is no, then you aren't really accepting payment,you are just blocking people with extra steps. No different than if you said you will accept a phone call for a billion dollars. You aren't really accepting something for payment if you set a price that nobody will pay.
> Is it though?
Marketers seem to think so, or they wouldn't waste their time calling.
No way to vet the quality of your offering makes a both-ways attention economy fundamentally unworkable in a Western society. If you were really prepared to be an 'attention worker', then you could go work at a click farm or content moderation firm or the like, one of the fastest growing markets in the developing world.
Best I can offer you is an in-game bonus for watching an ad.
No one's buying your attention on your terms. They're only exchanging it for the online services you want to use. No attention, no services, better up your subscriptions budget or make do without.
(Sorry if I'm being blunt, attention economy participants can't be so they'd sugar coat it to such a degree that you might miss the point).
Even if it was 20c per call/e-mail, it would solve the spam problem overnight, while not interfering significantly with legitimate communication.
Pay to email has been tried multiple times, and failed.
I have considered creating this email service. I’m sure many others have as well, in some form or another. Does it already exist?
Well... I still get SMS spam. I assume spammers just use other people's hacked phones.
You can get a sim for a few bucks and spam under the rate limit.
You can buy jigs that hold hundreds of SIMs connected to a handful of cellular modems connected to a c&c and drip them out.
Right but it costs money to send SMSs. At least it used to. I dunno if they've given up charging for that now since nobody uses them. Tbf I haven't seen a phone contract without unlimited texts for at least a decade I guess.
How exactly do you propose to collect the money?
Or.. just have telcos do that to each other, instead of offloading any more of their service onto their customers/victims?
If you use a VoIP service like Twilio and voip.ms, you can set up a very simple IVR menu that just asks unknown callers to press 1 to be connected to you. No AI involved.
For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls. Obviously this isn’t going to work against scammers who call directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some pre-recorded message which isn’t going to pass the menu.
Edit: s/auto/pre
My Pixel 8 (not sure what other Android phones do this) can screen calls using their AI assistant. It asks what the call is about. If they answer, it displays the text to you as it rings through.
It sounds surprisingly human-like, even saying "Hello?" in a slightly annoyed tone when the other person doesn't respond in time.
Those Pixel features are underrated.
Another good one is for the phone to stay on hold for you. That one has been extremely valuable to me as Qantas would regularly keep me on hold for over 5 hours when I tried to get my money back for a cancelled flight. The operator would sometimes be a bit confused when I pick up, but it usually worked well and certainly beats listening to hold music for hours.
… until Qantas deploys AI bots that can keep your AI going indefinitely!
I have pixel 7, and I think this feature is or very unstable, or cell-provider dependent. It was on my phone, then was not, then re-appeared briefly again, now it is not even in settings.
Have your Bot call my Bot and they’ll have lunch.
that is a surprisingly awesome phone feature
I wish it was available on my pixel, but only in US I guess.
Its kind of funny to think we've already had many of these services that were apparently really ahead of their time.
I remember being an outside sales rep for a local mom and pop wireless company in the late 90's, early aughts. We sold an automated "assistant" called Wildfire that would screen calls and stood as an intermediary between you can callers. She would answer, you would record your name and then it would call you on any number of devices you had entered. At one point, I had it calling three of my numbers (office and two mobile numbers) and at any time, you could just send people to voicemail. It was very similar to how many of the AI assistants work today. If I remember it was like $30/month, but as reps we got to use it for free which was really fun tinkering with it.
AT&T also had something like this where you could have a program they offered which would screen your calls and either connect you or you could send people directly to voicemail. It didn't have nearly the features that Wildfire had, but it was effective.
Obviously in the late 90's and early aughts, something like this wasn't really needed and after a few quarters, AT&T quietly stopped offering their service. Wildfire lived on until the mid aughts after being bought and then killed due to lack of adoption and use.
Kind of crazy these kinds of programs were pretty common before the AI assistant craze now.
Details about Wildfire here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_Communications
I seem to vaguely recall this Wildfire brand name....Because when i first got google voice, it was really half of an acquired company...which if remember correctly was a competitor to wildfire, no? Like grandcentral or something? Anyway, yeah, when i first got google voicemail, this feature was really impressive! But, of course eventually learned that this tyoe of thing already existed in some corners :-)
If they ever get clever enough to automate the menu selection, it would be funny to have an infinitely deep IVR sort of like the tar pits people build on websites to trap web crawlers.
It's a great idea, and in Canada using the Koodo/Telus network you can turn on "call control" for free which does basically this, except it makes the caller enter a random number between 1-9. And you can also whitelist certain numbers like friends and family.
I think I've gotten exactly one spam call since I set up an IVR like that a few years ago, and it was probably not quite daily before that.
Very nice to see, my grandmother was recently scammed out of a large amount of money. Luckily the bank reimbursed her.
Scammers are a stain on the reputation of India. You could argue it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same brush, but quite clearly rule of law isn't properly functioning over there and there's complicity in letting them do this. Same goes for Nigeria.
Oh, believe me, Indians fucking hate the scammers, probably more than you do.
Jim Browning (the scambaiter who worked with O2 in this article) has successfully compromised several scam operations, gotten their physical address and other dox, and referred them to the police. The offices get raided, Jim gets some nice CCTV footage of the raid, the operators of the criminal enterprise get a nice perp walk... and then a month later the case is mysteriously dismissed with a bullshit reason about AI deepfakes and "IO" (influence operations, I presume).
The thing to keep in mind is that India's government is run by Modi, a Hindu ultranationalist who wants to deport all the country's Muslims to Pakistan[0]. There's a pretty straightforward pipeline from organized crime to fascism and I wouldn't be surprised if the scammers in question here are part of Modi's power base (or part of other organizations which are part of his power base).
The only thing I could think of to fix this would be to strategically suck people out of India through generous visas for migrants who want to live in a country with functioning[1] institutions. The thing about organized crime is that it relies on having a pool of suckers to continue joining the criminal enterprise - in other words, even the scammers are themselves being scammed. This is one of the less selfish reasons why I'm an open borders fanatic, but I also have to admit that such a policy in today's era has negative political capital.
[0] Which itself has money problems because it's budget gets siphoned off by their own military and they have to beg the IMF for scraps
[1] To be clear, India's institutions still exist, they're just mildly broken.
I'd imagine India will gradually crack down on it more over time. The tech industry there is growing massive and they surely aren't happy about being associated with scammers.
They won't. The companies that operate these scam centers are diversified criminal enterprises run by ultra-wealthy and politically connected individuals. These people own the police, they own the politicians, and until fairly recently, they owned the voters through massive vote-buying schemes.
You can get away with murder in India if you're wealthy enough (e.g. the case of Jessica Lal, murdered by a politician's son in front of at least a dozen witnesses). The egregious corruption of the INC or "Congress party" (which is ideologically progressive) over many decades has created a massive voter exodus to the conservative BJP party, the majority party in India since 2014. However, the corruption and inefficiency at all levels of civil society has remained endemic.
I just googled Jessica Lal and the Wikipedia article suggests that the rich murderer was convicted and sentenced to life in prison?
He was indeed sentenced to life, but was inexplicably allowed to go in and out of prison during his sentence - on one occasion he was paroled for thirty days under dubious circumstances. He was eventually released on parole 4 years ago for "good behavior", and is now trying to rehabilitate his public image (along with his extremely corrupt father).
I mean, in that very article it talks about how he was granted probation many times, and has already been released. Doesn't seem very lifey to me.
Of course, the scammers have created their own AI to call people and scam them so it's just playing catchup.
It's like corporate avatars for hiring or cold call bots for sales.
I'd say stick to white listed numbers, but pro phones can't do that, and they are the most prone to spam.
I always ask the robocalls to say something specific.
It finally worked the other day! A robot repeated "chrysanthemum" back to me when asked. Sadly it seemed to be limited to this one single trick; as I continued my attempts to exploit it, it abruptly apologized and ended the call.
Cute, but one day I am going to get lucky and a scammer is going to get absolutely wrecked.
Chrysanthemum is also my go to. That or “You’re in a desert. You’re walking along in the sand when all of a sudden.. you look down and see a tortoise..”
"Tortoise? What's that?"
Wait, what's your endgame here?
Great, the dead internet theory is being backported to landlines.
So some time in the future, the Telcos will report, that 30%-50% of calls are Scammer AIs talking to Granny AIs
It would seem to me that it's a lot easier to build an AI that acts as a non-tech-savvy granny to keep scammers busy, than one that actually successfully executes a complete scam from start to finish on a real life person.
I'm imagining this is just a publicity stunt, and I'll say it's a very good one. However I can't see it being very practical. There are lots of scam calls to keep up with and LLMs and text-to-speech models are expensive to run. If they do run this in production, the costs of running hundreds of 'Daisies' will inevitably be passed onto the consumer, and worse still, if the scammers are calling in through PSTN lines or cellular this will use up our already scarce bandwidth. I've frequently had difficulty connecting through trunk lines from Belgium and Germany to numbers in Britain, and that's without a legion of AI grannies sitting on the phone!
real-time full duplex like OpenAI GPT-4o is pretty expensive. cascaded approaches (usually about 800ms - 1 second delay) are slower and worse, but very very cheap. when I built this a year ago, I estimated the LLM + TTS + other serving costs to be less than the Twilio costs.
which is why we need to adopt nuclear power so we run thousands of these so the odds of them picking up a bot instead of a person is overwhelmingly likely
Every type of defensive tech is nothing more than driving up the cost of attack.
Doubling the dwell time for a scammer will halve their profits. That could have interesting second-order effects. Perhaps it makes it not worth it for some subset?
This reminds me of “shadow banning” - instead of letting the misbehaving user know they’ve been banned, and let them find a way around it, you make them believe they’re not banned and let them waste their time interacting with the system (without actually interacting with others), this makes them spend less time on actual misuse and it makes the penalty for it more expensive. Good strategy. Cruel too.
So I don’t think that this is just entertaining PR, I can see why it’s better than simply banning the scammers. Still a question of cost though.
No doubt it has been misused at some point or another, but shadow banning in the context of online communities is generally a last-resort defense against the very worst and most prolific trolls. Not someone who accidentally breaks forum etiquette one time.
A person who is shadow banned generally continues their antisocial behavior in the face of multiple warnings and reprimands. I don't see it as cruel. I see it as defending the community against those who get pleasure out of trying to wreck it. It's effective because the bannee is generally too dim to realize what has happened to them until they get bored and go away.
In regular communities, maybe, but that kind of abuse is rampant on platforms : I was shadowbanned on Reddit as a new user, and still regularly get shadowbanned in YouTube comments (seemingly if I dare to post more than one comment, or if I dare to add a link, including a timelink to the very video!)
Is it effective at all though?
It's very easy to check if your posts are available by browsing them anonymously or under a second account.
The next step up is "heaven banning":
You're completely right! Genius comment.
That makes no sense. Why would you spend more money and electricity to keep trolls around longer?
The longer they spend in heaven, the less they spend trolling. I’m not saying it’s worth the cost, but it’s something to consider.
It keeps the engagement metrics up without poisoning the discourse.
So it's just an AI re-implementation of the Telecrapper 2000 [1]? The original site is down but there are plenty of YouTube videos [2] of it still available.
That's pretty hilarious. Amazing what you can do with just a well-crafted pre-recorded script.
There are some other Youtube videos where a guy writes these ChatGPT personalities, but those aren't as entertaining because the AI is basically just blurting out random thoughts rather than engaging in an actual conversation.
Jolly Roger has been doing this for a while, the example phone calls are hilarious. https://youtube.com/@jollyrogertelephone?si=sB3Tiql0wsUlXldo
yes!
I applied for a mortgage today through my bank. Before the automated “next steps” email could hit my inbox my phone was already ringing and ringing and ringing. About 10 minutes straight of automated spam callers that are watching who knows what public ledger on now.
I guess it pretty much means retiring this number next year. I’ve inly had the number a little over a year and the spam has slowly crept up despite best efforts to give fake numbers where possible.
We accidentally registered a domain once without the privacy setting enabled and proceeded to get dozens of spam/scam calls about it over the next few months.
Do registrars verify the numbers?
Might put the number of someone I don’t like first; then flip the privacy setting and fix the number
Great PR move, but surely better to invest in more basic security measures supported by their app (chain of trust, verified callers/messaging etc). Instead their app is primarily a react native sales tool. Part of the reason that o2 was so affected by scammers calling from south Asian call centres with “the latest offers” was because they used to do exactly this with their customers.
To be clear while I don't enjoy the idea of receiving low-effort sales calls, I do think that real scammers are different. Real scammers don't have a business, aren't willing to go to court, etc.
This reminds me of Dead Internet Theory. We have a phone network of AI scammers endlessly calling AI counter scammers. What a time to be alive.
Boy howdy, wait until you hear how rural phone companies make money.
There is one simple and easy solution to this mess, but good luck getting traction on it.
I was a little surprise to read that they're using speech-to-text and text-to-speech rather than an end-to-end speech model. Won't that horrible latency? (I guess the old-person persona disguises it a little...)
Another solution - drop numeric phone numbers all together and switch to alphanumeric or verified contact only. With numeric, sequential phone numbers you can just robocall all the numbers until you find a victim. Making the search space significantly larger should solve that attack vector. Of course, this will effectively be the same as transitioning from IPv4 to v6 - with all the same associated pain
It'll help with so many things: - in contact syncing systems you can't rainbow table your way to decrypting numbers - numbers can be permanently burned once they're released or deemed as spam. This means every service could ban spammers safely without fear of burning a real user. - people could more easily have alt numbers, non-voip numbers for untrusted services.
I don't think the scammers are using sequential iteration over numbers. I suppose it's more efficient to just call numbers exposed in a data breach.
Your suggestion won't help circumvent that. I think.
Fair, but you could throw away numbers more easily in this situation due to data breaches. You could also "update trusted parties" with a new improved scheme overall.
Instating an AI model as "Head of Scammer Relations" is hilarious. I think the point here is to collect the phone numbers of scam call centers and have Daisy call them so that scammers waste time talking to it rather than a victim.
Having dealt with O2's support line, I wouldn't be surprised to discover they'd deployed a time-wasting AI there too.
Good on them!
> and one in five (22%) experiencing a fraud attempt every single week
That seems low. I guess they mean phone calls only.
I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day (and these are the ones that made it past the first line defense). I also get 10 or more scam texts.
Some of the phising emails that I get, are frighteningly realistic (but invariably seem to have at least one speling eror in them).
If folks live in a normal suburban development, they are highly unlikely to get several hundred crooks, knocking on their door, every day, but being on the Internet, means exactly that.
The crooks only need to land you once, you have to have a perfect record, avoiding them.
> I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day
I've seen no legit spam e-mail in years, on my very old, very used, "forums and other logins I don't care about", 2005 gmail address. What provider are you using?
mac.com.
I have an OG address that was registered about five minutes after Steve introduced the service.
Network Solutions sold it to spammers, and the rest is history.
Also, a couple other of my emails (and phone numbers) are associated with businesses, so are sort of public record (not really, but everyone finds out, anyway).
So we should all be relieved now because scammers can't train and deploy AI models but old people will surely adopt them.
I can already see AI scammers phoning AI anti-scam agents.
AIs talking to AIs... at the end of the day the real winner is always Nvidia
Nvidia should change their brand logo to a shovel.
Whenever I go home to visit my elderly parents, I'm amazed at how many scam calls they get. Like at least 4 or 5 an hour. And they pick up each one because they're from a time when you simply pick up your phone when it rings, and they won't change their habits.
It's long past time that phone calls should stop being synchronous and immediate. They are only this way because historic landlines were synchronous and immediate, and nobody changed it. This functionality should be culturally unacceptable in 2024.
Imagine if the concept of a land line never existed. Then, a startup came out with an app that: 1. allowed random people to cause your handheld device to stop what it was doing and immediately ring and vibrate and pop up a dialog over whatever app was active, 2. when you pushed a button, an instant two way audio channel was initiated, and 3. they could do all this without any authentication whatsoever--just needing to know a non-secret 10 digit number. This kind of app would fail every App Store guideline, and it would be laughed out of the ecosystem as unacceptable to end users. But in reality, it's "The Phone App" that comes pre-installed on your damn phone!! Insane that this kind of application is acceptable.
Lenny was the OG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM
It's the year 2035. 80% of all energy is consumed by AI scammers talking on the phone with AI Grammas.
I default to never answering now. Every time I feel like it might be an actual person on the other end and risk answering, it has turned out to be a scammer or spam call. Not sure why governments don't do more against them - scam and spam callers have destroyed phone communication.
I see a large number of spam emails with the "fake invoice" scam, and I've often thought an AI powered voice bot could really waste the time of the scammers call center and save some senior citizens money and grief. Has anyone developed an open source equivalent?
If this is just a PR stunt, imagine what they're cooking up behind the scenes: AI reps to answer actual customer calls. No more paying a horde of $10/hr meat slaves in some call center! You know some execs creamed themselves over this already.
Have you been to an AI drive through yet?
Reminded me of Lenny and he didn't even need any AI to waste a lot of scammers' time.
I remember setting up Lenny and forwarding calls I used to get to him while commuting on the bus early in my career. It was a lot of fun to listen to scammers start to freak out when they realized what was happening.
Our record at the office was 47 minutes. FORTY SEVEN MINUTES keeping a scammer on the phone till they hung up. We never laughed so much at work in all of twenty years. :D
Maybe Daisy has become sentient and has taken over all operations at 02. No one noticed.
KitBoga, scam baiter par excellence, did this in 2021[0].
Isn't text-to-speech very expensive? Last time I checked, Eleven Labs, the most natural-sounding TTS provider, were charging insane amounts per token. Wasting so much on scammers sounds unsustainable and just silly.
So, scammers start using these things too (obviously), and so AI will be trying to scam AI, then they'll be like "we need to detect when our bots are talking to a bot, so they can exit the call sooner." GANWAR
Remember: O2 gets paid for incoming international calls by the minute
Scammers can jam this by reporting legitimate phone numbers as scam numbers, no?
I wish they would have a number I can cal to speak to her. That would be fun
I could try to walk it through fixing its network settings in Windows 98. Really re-live my telecom tech support days.
I could relive my teenage years where my grand dad would call up 2 x per week so I could help him set the clock on his microwave.
I was thinking the same, but so that I can conf-call unknown or obviously suspect numbers to it, and listen to the hilarity unfold in real-time.
Follow-up idea, probably silly:
Robogranny Olympics. Allow people to submit their own bots, Micromouse/koth.org/Battlecode-style. Bots are run on random phone numbers for several weeks, and are ranked on average call length (total time/num calls). The robot that can keep spammers on the line the longest wins the prize.
A condition of submission is that the bot code and weights are published (not open sourced, just published). Competition is repeated yearly.
I wonder when will the scammer also create an AI scammer.
Joke aside, is this going to be cost effective? What would it cost to keep a scammer on the phone for an hour? Who will pay this bill?
Seems stupid to publicly announce this product so that scammers are now aware of it? Also what happens when scammers start using AIs of their own to do the scamming?
If scammers are wondering if a confused little old lady who's the first person to listen to them all day is actually an AI programmed to be nice that's... probably not a bad thing
This scratches an itch, sure, but the people manning the phones for a scammer are likely to be in a pretty desperate situation themselves. They may or may not be free to leave, etc. I'd like to find a way to help them roll over on their bosses and find their way to something more productive, rather than just making their bosses madder at them.
>I'd like to find a way to help them roll over on their bosses
They're unlikely to do this, because scam call centers are typically a branch of local organized crime syndicates. There is nowhere for them to roll, because their boss' boss also pays a bunch of crooked cops and whatnot.
The bottom rung guys doing the actual calling aren't gangsters, but further up the organization they are, so attempting to fuck with the organization from the bottom will not end well for you if you live in that area and lack protection.
I really enjoy the Google Pixel exclusive call screener.
https://youtu.be/V2IyttWHJfs?si=mreFXk6h-yDAJ3D7&t=50
I've had a few friends get new numbers, and seeing "Hey it's your Aunt, I got a new phone" live transcribed on the screen has come in handy.
What's the best API for real-time conversations?
Strangely, I looked at OpenAI's offering.
Despite it being crazy expensive, they also didn't offer a reference implementation anywhere close to the functionality that is demo'ed in the regular ChatGPT app.
Nobody seems to get the interruptions correct - people are doing all sorts of weak workarounds like push-to-talk, etc.
Or we could just make these calls illegal?
They are. Sometimes people continue to do things even though they're illegal
Well then make it easy to catch the perpetrators.
Right. These scam calls are not a god-given problem. Some countries do not have them in any significant amount. I suspect there is greed involved (political or corporate) that prevents this problem from getting solved.
My father setup his own solution for robocalls. If the phone rings more than three times it kicks the call to the fax machine. Apparently fax lines are supposed to be kept clear because of legal reasons? All I know is half the time I call I get a dialup sound as my call gets routed to the fax machine.
This may be the best use case for AI yet.
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This feels more like misery porn disguised as a crusade to 'protect' the vulnerable. I’m not suggesting we make it easier for people to get scammed, but intentionally engaging seems like a recipe for a harsher clap back. Education > Escalation.
Sadly, many scam callers are actually slaves in Myanmar. Those unable to detect this may face physical punishments, or worse. Not that I'm supporting the practice of scamming, but this kind of scam prevention is also morally dubious.
If spammers like this are in another country, their country should be cut off from the global phone and internet system or we should simply drop bombs on their call centers.
Weird how she doesn’t sound like an old lady. Just hearing the voice, she sounds about 45.
"I got all the time in the world" I never felt that so literal and scary
What I find amusing is that scammers have my phone number but my wife's name - so I get random calls where they say "Can I speak to Ms Arethuza" and I say "No" and end the call.
Weird. AFAIK nowadays the contacts are bought from lists out of online orders where your name is there. Do you shop in your wife's name?
No - she does book restaurants in my name as hers is quite complicated to spell!
The "Daisy" AI sounds exactly like a female version of Bill Nighy.
Actually the google phone as some spam blocking additional to the one in my carrier which is crap, I was using the samsung app and I was getting spam calls always, I set up google one , now I get none
This goes to show how tech can be a double edged sword. Sure, AI is going to be abused by scammers, but in the never ending arms race its also going to be used against them.
Or make every phone call cost a cent. .But then again therecis large growth potential in human hostile software abd services and defenses against that
Other controversies aside, this could end up being a bit of a organic Turing test, if the AI ever becomes convincing to enough scammers.
Wondering when an AI passes the HN Turin test. -- Or has it already happened?
As long this doesn't put Kitboga out of business.
That's great, but I can't tell who are fraudsters until after hearing what they say.
Fight AI scams with AI assistants and just let them have the conversation themselves
Who Timewastes the Timewaster?
If Jim Browning is involved, it might not be terrible. Let’s see.
cant even stand to watch (or listen to) more than 5 seconds of the obviously generated granny. i doubt even the audio will be convincing enough.
Wait until the scammers become AIs too. Thinking of a world where phone conversations between humans is the exception ...
They would be better sorting themselves out first rather than working on this nonsense
Or Virgin/O2 could, you know, just actually block the scammers.
honeAI pot
Imagine a day when a scam bot will talk to AI granny.
Wait till the AI scammers start calling
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Surprised there aren't any comments whining about this because the scammers are bigger victims. Usually there's at least one.
> surprised there aren't any comments whining about this
This is called a totem.
You’ve invented or learned a caricature to rail at which may have once been based in truth, and from time to time again approximates it, though never with the fidelity you ascribe to the original. It’s commonly done by sides in partisan polarisation, the most common being a two-mode system that pillories its picture of the other.
If you picture the person writing the totem comment, you probably have a clear idea of what they do for a living, how they dress, et cetera. Totems are why both deification and demonisation work; they’re a hack of the human ability to visualise and project.
Nah, check the archive. I have no idea how they dress, nice "totem" though.
This is doubling down on “may have once been based in truth, and from time to time again approximates it.”
Analogy: phantom pain is pain in a limb that was once there but now isn’t. The limb was real. It probably felt pain. But when a patient imagines pain after the limb is gone, that’s the diagnosis.
Those comments are real. The people, probably, too. Responding to them when they aren’t in the room is a separate matter.
You have this notion of a visualization gimmick and have visualized me using it (ironic). In fact my game is far simpler; blithly preempt and thereby insult anybody who subscribes to a belief I consider to be misguided. For all I know they look just like me, it makes no difference.
> preempt and thereby insult anybody who subscribes to a belief I consider to be misguided
This is the totem. You react to a misguided belief even when it’s a phantom.
If you look at two-mode polarised discussions, you’ll find both sides talking about a totem of the other, reacting to imagined preëmptions and rarely interacting with each other. The graphs separate. As a result, the preëmptions are more imagined than real. (Both in characterisation and frequency of emergence.
Note that this is perfectly normal. Kids do it. And it’s fun. It’s also easy, since instead of reacting to anything empirical or well argued you’re constructing straw men for the purpose of taking them down.
You have reiterated your position after I disputed it, a behavior which may be described as "doubling down". This term carries a negative connotation, and therefore proves the other person (myself) correct.
> have reiterated your position
I clarified my position. The visualisation isn't the totem per se. The representation is.
> term carries a negative connotation, and therefore proves the other person (myself) correct
Nobody said you were wrong. Correct, necessary and even germane are distinct.
Several other comments ITT raise the spectre of a future where AI scammers and AI recipients are at war.
The above comments seem to me much like a simulacrum of how that might go. The comment exchange should have stopped much sooner.