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Kon5ole 13 hours ago [-]
Great idea!
Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
In Spain we have something called "Lista Robinson" (in Sweden exists something similar, called "NIX-registret") which are basically opt-in lists where you can enter your phone number, then once the new lists been distributed, the telemarketing companies cannot call you, if they're doing things properly. If they call anyway, you just mention you're on the list, they hang up, and remove your number from the list they have, eventually you stop getting calls.
I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too. Obviously hospitals, doctors, utility companies and similar don't cross-reference against these lists, as they have actual relationship with you already.
Both in Sweden and in Spain I used to receive a lot of spam calls, like multiple per week, and once enrolled on these lists, the calls are non-existent, the only telemarketing calls I get now are from the companies I already have relationships with, which happens maybe once a month.
If you suffer greatly by the constant spam calls, like I did once before, do take a look and see if there are similar opt-out lists in your country :) They may take a month or two before actually eliminating all calls, but they do work, apparently.
joenot443 11 hours ago [-]
We have a similar list in America [1] and Canada [2]. Unfortunately, like any regulation, its efficacy is only as good as its enforcement, so my understanding is they're both routinely ignored. Particularly grim for the Canadian case -
> In January 2009, numerous media and consumer advocacy organizations reported that anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer and download a set of numbers from the list for a $50 fee. It took their reporter ten minutes to do so. It has been proposed that list may be being downloaded and used as a telemarketing list overseas, where there's little that can be done as the CRTC has no jurisdiction outside of Canada
From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams.
And the rest are political calls, which are exempt. This the most annoying, come election time, I get 5-6 texts or calls per day asking for money or votes.
TeMPOraL 10 hours ago [-]
> From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams.
Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.
Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.
cge 8 hours ago [-]
I think the point is that there is a distinction between calls that are intrusive spam or arguably scams but not already illegal, and calls where the content of the call is itself unambiguously illegal.
Bans on unsolicited calls, or do-not-call lists, can be effective for the former, as it moves the behavior from being legal to being illegal, while for the latter, they are already breaking laws, often in a more severe way, and technical measures or enforcement are more important.
A phone company trying to trick someone into paying more per month for something they don't need is likely to be worried about being fined if caught calling a number on a do-not-call list. A scammer pretending to be the tax office and demanding payment of supposedly unpaid taxes is going to be in trouble if caught regardless of rules about what numbers can be called.
alistairSH 10 hours ago [-]
100% agree. When I said scam above, I meant the obviously illegal fraudulent scams (like the "We're MS, and see you have a virus, please give us your CC info and let us remote into your desktop" stuff).
Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.
The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.
munk-a 5 hours ago [-]
In this context they're not the same thing. Calls from companies legitimately operating in the country need to obey laws or face enforcement (ideally, unless the government is asleep at the wheel) while calls from scammers outside of the country are breaking a bunch of laws anyways so who cares about violating a do not call list.
I consider marketing is a plague on attention and view it highly negatively - but in the case of tools to reduce unwanted phone calls there are some real differences in what's available to legitimate vs. scam callers and a do not call list can only ever be effective against people working within the system.
garciasn 2 hours ago [-]
Some politician reached out to ask me what he would need to do to get my vote:
I replied, "Stop providing politicians exemption to spam constituents." Strangely, they didn't respond.
saidnooneever 4 hours ago [-]
this experience will vary per region, telco and carrier network. some filter more advanced than others and some regions have more telemarketing than others based on the metrics they pull from it.
i get mostly robocalls from scam centres in india. most are filtered but some go through. 0 telemarketing.
natebc 11 hours ago [-]
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jameshart 10 hours ago [-]
The US and Canada also already have an outright ban on auto dialing and telemarketing calls to cellphones.
There are exceptions for nonprofits, political campaigns and surveys and to be honest those do seem to be the nature of all the non-scam unsolicited calls I receive (and of course they are somewhat difficult to distinguish from scams anyway), based on the voicemails they sometimes leave, so it may well actually be working.
robertlagrant 11 hours ago [-]
> anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer
I suppose many people would wonder what the difference is between a legitimate caller you don't want and a fake one.
jameshart 10 hours ago [-]
From context they mean pretending to be a legitimate law-abiding telemarketer who plans to use the do not call list for screening purposes when in fact they are an overseas telemarketer who plans to use the list as a cheap set of known working phone numbers.
bluefirebrand 10 hours ago [-]
If you have a policy of never giving these people the time of day, then it's no different
If you're the sort of person that is too polite to just hang up and you might get hooked by a scam caller because you let them talk to you, then it's a big difference
derfurth 10 hours ago [-]
It was the case in France too, it was called Bloctel; you just had to register your phone number and telemarketing companies had a legal obligation to look it up and not call you.
So it worked for a time, legit companies stoped calling; however most people didn't knew about Bloctel as it was little advertised.
Meanwhile, spam calls turned into scam calls, and a real issue especially with the elderly.
So I think that banning all unsolicited calling kills two birds with one stone, spam becomes illegal and scams as a consequence becomes easier to spot as there are no more unsolicited calls.
pmontra 10 hours ago [-]
We have that kind of list in Italy too. I registered my number and I keep getting calls, so I stopped answering to numbers not in my contacts list. If I know that somebody will be calling me, I ask for the number and I add it to the list.
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
Have you tried answering and then just saying the name of the list you've enrolled in? Tends to help propagate to the companies that they absolutely should not call the number again. At least here the companies tend to actively self-moderate and cross-reference against the lists, as the law does get enforced. When I worked in cold-calling call centers in the past, I remember they being strict with teaching the "marketers" what to do when people brought up the local list(s).
brabel 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the information, I live in Sweden and get calls at least once a week, but it's annoying enough.
I visited family in Brazil and was shocked about how people there seem to get unsolicited marketing calls every hour or so!! My mom was forced to change her number to stop them as she nearly got scammed of several thousand dollars - sometimes the scams are extremely convincing - in this case they knew she was at a certain bank agency and who she talked to, so clearly it had inside involvement. Also, now with AI-cloning voice services, it's almost impossible to tell if the person on the other side is really who you think it is. Answering calls from unknown numbers is an absolutely no-no. Even from known numbers, you've got to be careful.
metabagel 8 hours ago [-]
Once a week, LOL. I get 3-6 calls per day (USA).
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
You know, this comment + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208950 ("sitting on my bench with the neighbor's calico meowing at me, when fully automatic gunfire would ring out") gives me the impression that the US really is a completely upside down country compared to most others out there, but people are just so used to it, they don't understand what kind of dystopian world they already live in every day.
Years ago when I first found Lista Robinson was because I felt like I received calls once a day and had to do something about it because it was too much. If I got 3-6 calls per day I'd think I'd get rid of my phone in total, I wouldn't want to have a phone at all if that happened :P Then some of the residents in the US are used to gunshots going off in their neighborhood, I just don't know what to think anymore...
black_knight 10 hours ago [-]
Same in Norway. I have been on the list for decades, and I never receive any unwanted calls – except from my mother (j.k love you mum!)
I am not sure why it works so well here. I have vague recollections of news articles about it being ignored in the past. I guess they just struck down hard on those. Also, I imagine if you put yourself on that list you would be really grumpy if someone called to try to sell you something.
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
> I am not sure why it works so well here.
I'm guessing (since Norway and Sweden tends to be more similar than different) that Norway also have something similar to the Swedish "Marknadsföringslagen" ("The Marketing Act") that effectively outlaws companies from calling people who obviously don't want to be called. They quite literally get fines if they call people on these lists, hence the companies actively cross-reference against them.
I've worked in cold-calling telemarketing in both Sweden and Spain in my previous life, both companies I worked for were deadly afraid of accidentally calling people on these lists, and actively instructed employees to basically say "Sorry", hang up and flag the number if someone mentioned the name of the lists.
amarant 7 hours ago [-]
Nix-registret is awesome! I didn't realise just how good it is until I transferred ownership of my number to my company, which automatically took me off the list(companies can't be in nix) which almost immediately made me regret owning a phone.
There are tax benefits to having the company foot the phone bill, but it's not worth it, currently.
throwaway894345 7 hours ago [-]
How does it work, technically? In the US we have something that is supposed to be similar--put your number on a registry and telemarketers can't legally call you--but in practice we've just built a list of real phone numbers that telemarketers and scammers can use to target numbers that are owned by real people rather than brute-forcing the entire phone number space. If there is any enforcement at all, it's imperceptible.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> How does it work, technically?
Now it was decades ago I worked in cold calling telemarketing, but back then, the company basically purchased/subscribed to various lists of numbers they get from other companies, and also had lists of numbers to not call, either obtained from the do-not-call registries, or their own lists of "unsellable" customers, bad numbers and so on, simply crossed-references the ones that they for legal (or otherwise) shouldn't call, then the telemarketers who all sit in basically automated stations, end up just calling the "good" numbers. Different teams get different chunks of the numbers, but all the calls they're supposed to be doing, are supposed to not be on any of the do-not-call lists already.
The telemarketers themselves are told to basically hang up and mark the number as "do not call" if anyone picks up and says/mentions the name of lists. Most companies I knew from then took the lists seriously since their mechanism is based on actual laws in the countries, and evidently since I nor the people I enrolled in these lists receive marketing calls, the companies today takes them equally seriously.
amarant 6 hours ago [-]
I had to look it up, but it seems like you do a lookup per number before calling, and nixregistret will basically tell you if that number is in their register or not.
I'm not sure how enforcement works, from the copy on their website it seems like it's purely voluntary to even check there, but serious companies do because their customers will hate them forever if they call people who are registered.
I'm actually surprised it works so well given the apparent lack of enforcement. The only calls I ever get these days are from someone with an Indian accent who says "hello I'm calling from Blockchain", and even that has been a while!
ferngodfather 11 hours ago [-]
Most countries have these no call lists but they are fairly useless as there is no enforcement.
I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
> Most countries have these no call lists but they are fairly useless as there is no enforcement
What country are you in that it doesn't work in? I know for a fact it works in Spain and Sweden, but it'll really depend on the country. You'd help by others by being a bit more explicit :)
> I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
That does suck and seems counter-productive indeed! Even more curious what exact country you're talking about now.
HappySweeney 10 hours ago [-]
In Canada that list is used by foreign telemarketers to spam us. Our enforcement authorities just shrug and say the criminals are not in our jurisdiction. That being said, my phone is pretty good at stopping it.
rightbyte 10 hours ago [-]
It works versus serious companies cold calling you. Scammers and semi-scammers still call. There is some need to adress what it doesn't solve too.
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
Dude, what country? In Spain or Sweden, I literally don't receive any calls from unknowns anymore, scammers nor telemarketing. Please specify the country so we can know what country you're talking about, and what the name of the list you enrolled in is.
Worth knowing for people who might not know; large telemarketing companies have campaigns on the internet to spread FUD about the effectiveness of these lists, so less people enroll. I'm not claiming that you is one of these, but unless we're being clear what lists/countries we're talking about here, it's borderline FUD rather than helpful to the conversation.
jaapz 9 hours ago [-]
You think scammers don't call you because you are on the opt-in no-call list? These are not good faith actors, they don't care you're on a list.
amoss 7 hours ago [-]
I'm on the Swedish list and I get exactly zero spam calls. As the parent post pointed out it is country specific.
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
I don't get scam calls, period. I don't think I never gotten scam calls either, and I my personal phone number is findable on the internet + every single email I send, been for decades at this point.
Maybe 5-6 years ago and before that, I used to get a lot of sales and telemarketing phone calls though, both from foreign and local landline and mobile phone numbers. Once I was on the list, and started just saying the name of the list, the calls eventually died down and today, I don't get a single spam call.
nemomarx 10 hours ago [-]
why do you assume Spain and Sweden are representative and not the US or Canada? I'm curious how many people live in countries with effective versions of this list vs not
in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country. you could do it by prefix if you wanted to still use the list mechanically, maybe? But the only reason I see for an opt in list is to allow the marketing companies to still exist
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
> why do you assume Spain and Sweden are representative and not the US or Canada?
... I don't? I'm just want to know what country ferngodfather is talking about, as I'm sure the experience differs a lot by country, made evident by countless of comments in this submission.
> in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country.
I don't disagree with this, but for people suffering from these daily spam calls today, there might be ways to fix that, in a shorter time-frame than "petition the government, then propose a law, then get the law into agreement, then get the law into effect". If we're being clear about what countries people are talking about, there wouldn't be so much FUD about the subject.
edgyquant 10 hours ago [-]
Most people here are American, and your reply comes off as standoffish
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
> Most people here are American
Whaaaat? On a American website, driven by a American VC company, are you sure? That has nothing to do with anything in the conversation...
If someone talks about "Most countries" they're not actually talking about some percentage of countries in the world generally, they're specifically talking about "most countries I know about", so when people start being fuzzy about those sort of details, it'd help all of us (not the ones from specific countries) actually understand what's going on and where. For all we know, they could be talking about India, especially since I've already added non-US context with my previous comment they themselves responded to...
Kon5ole 9 hours ago [-]
>unless we're being clear what lists/countries we're talking about here, it's borderline FUD rather than helpful to the conversation.
Why would a no-call list work well in one country but not others? I don't get it. At least explain what makes them work in Spain or Sweden if you are convinced they are the reason you don't get calls?
I think what you have noticed is that the GDPR made it harder for legitimate companies to cold-call all over the EU. But even the GDPR doesn't stop scammers, and neither does any no-call list. Not in any country.
We're all on the "please don't rob me" list and robberies are still a thing.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
> Why would a no-call list work well in one country but not others? I don't get it. At least explain what makes them work in Spain or Sweden if you are convinced they are the reason you don't get calls?
My parent (or parent-parent) comment made this clear, why a list in one country might work but in others not:
> I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too.
If there is no law about it, and no enforcement, then obviously such list would work less effectively than in countries where it is supported by a law somehow, and it is enforced.
> I think what you have noticed is that the GDPR made it harder for legitimate companies to cold-call all over the EU
It has not, why would GDPR have an effect on the telemarketing companies, especially trans-EU ones? They're properly registered as controllers (otherwise they'd be shut down), and added more controls around the data they store. GDPR doesn't outlaw storing data, just controls how companies do so.
Kon5ole 2 hours ago [-]
>It has not, why would GDPR have an effect on the telemarketing companies
The GDPR has fines up to 4% of the company's turnover if they contact people without consent or prior business reasons. If that doesn't work, then a "please don't call me" list where there are basically no consequences sure as hell won't.
edgyquant 10 hours ago [-]
I think in America at least the problem is most of these seem to be scams calls not legitimate. So they are criminals who don’t really care about the law
Kon5ole 8 hours ago [-]
>I know for a fact it works in Spain and Sweden
How do you know that a call that never reaches you was stopped by the no-call list as opposed to your number not being on the list of numbers to call today?
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
Me and others used to receive almost daily telemarketing calls. Once you enroll in the list and get the confirmation, you notice a drastic reduction in calls, and get maybe 2-3 per month. If you at that point start saying that you're on $NAME_OF_LIST to the companies who do still call, they say sorry, hang up, and you get less calls faster. This been the experience for 10+ people and myself who've used to get these calls, and no longer do.
The way the companies manage the lists, is basically that they have three types, they have huge unranked/unchecked lists of just numbers, one list of "good" numbers that are at least online, not on do-not-call lists, haven't recently been sold to already, and so on, then the group of blacklists essentially. Whenever the telemarketers work in their stations, the only numbers that even get dialed by the central robot for them, are the "good" numbers they've been assigned for their shift.
contubernio 6 hours ago [-]
In Spain I have recently been getting far more robo scam calls. New several a week.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
Are you on Lista Robinson, checked it's updated with your details and say "Estoy en Lista Robinson" if they call you?
reaperducer 10 hours ago [-]
What country are you in that it doesn't work in?
Maybe he's in France, since this article is about France having to ban all telemarketing calls since the block lists apparently don't work.
Don't let your regional indignation get in the way of doing basic logic.
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
> Maybe he's in France, since this article is about France having to ban all telemarketing calls since the block lists apparently don't work.
How on earth am I supposed to assume they live in France, just because that's in the submission article? Conversations in the comments regularly go beyond the scope of the article, and even the commentator themselves said "Most countries" so clearly they're talking about more than just one.
plastic_bag 8 hours ago [-]
Not true. DND works great in India. You can also report a spam call or an SMS and your mobile network provider has to provide a resolution. They usually do it by banning that abusing number.
DND is available both on Android and iOS.
RHSeeger 7 hours ago [-]
But don't they just "call" from a different number? Or a random number each time? There's no real verification on the number being called from - its specified _by_ the caller a lot of the time.
So unless the phone company starts banning phone companies that don't enforce correct caller id, it won't do anything.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> So unless the phone company starts banning phone companies that don't enforce correct caller id, it won't do anything.
But it evidently does do something, since now it's confirmed in these threads that at least 4 (possibly) more countries do have these lists, and they do work.
riedel 2 hours ago [-]
In Germany it is assumed illegal without prior consent or with calling machines [0]. However, practically you get a few of those calls per week. Also often from international numbers.
I need this. I've had bloody Freshworks calling me every single day for the past month, even though I ask them to remove me from their list every time. It doesn't matter if I ask nicely, whether I listen to their pitch or don't, whether I make threats, they still call.
I will never, ever, work with Freshworks, Freshdesk, Freshservice, or any of their other products as a direct result of this.
9dev 50 minutes ago [-]
As crude as it sounds; try pulling a madman show. Cussing, screaming, threatening to go after them, completely loosing it. I suspect they have a field for notes in the agent database and will mark you as difficult or improbable lead, and stop calling.
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
Look up what the name of the list is in your country, cite it the next time they call, and that you'll report them to <name of local agency> unless they cease, I'm sure they'll get the message :)
Most of the people doing cold-calling been trained to listen for the names of the lists, and have strict orders what to do with the number in case someone they call brings it up.
jeppebemad 6 hours ago [-]
Surprised that it was “Robinson” in Spain as well as Denmark, I had to look it up.
Apparently that name is used in germany, netherlands, Belgium and more. It stems from Robinson Crusoe, which of course makes sense, as he was disconnected from the world :)
Personal take: it has no real effect, as especially foreign spam/scam callers have no insight or interest in looking up the list. Any ban is welcome!
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> Surprised that it was “Robinson” in Spain as well as Denmark, I had to look it up.
Hah, I was similarly surprised, especially since in Sweden where I come from, it's called the "NIX-registry" for no rhyme or reason. At least Robinson makes sense to me :)
dolmen 8 hours ago [-]
We had this for years in France. But this is bypassed.
hallway_monitor 10 hours ago [-]
For all these countries that don’t get scam calls, it has nothing to do with your do not call list since these are criminals anyway. It has to do with the fact that Americans are Legion and have a lot of money.
bluebarbet 10 hours ago [-]
>Americans are Legion and have a lot of money
And perhaps also (unironically) more persuadable due to the rampant commercialism and historic openness (to ideas, strangers, everything) of their society.
elromulous 11 hours ago [-]
We have a "do not call" list in the us. It's effectively worthless.
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
That just sounds like you don't actually have a "do not call" list, you have something that is trying to be a "do not call" list ;)
Speak with your local politicians to fix the issues that bothers you. They don't listen, out on the streets and protest. Same way civilians communicate with their governments in every other democracy :)
mh2266 8 hours ago [-]
In the US, the local politicians are often the ones doing the spamming at this point. They've even specifically exempted themselves from the do not call laws, it's absurd.
They can also legally bypass "no soliciting" signs at people's homes.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
Social pressure, stigma and literally protest outside their workplace does wonders to get local politicians to remember who they actually work for :)
But requires grassroots organizing. Best day to start was yesterday, second-best day to start is today :)
bluefirebrand 10 hours ago [-]
> They don't listen, out on the streets and protest.
Protests have never once seemed effective my entire life, honestly
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
> Protests have never once seemed effective my entire life, honestly
Then time to crack open those dusty history books and start reading mate :) Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
You might still be young and haven't yet experienced it, but you're bound to at one point or another, even if you yourself might not be out on the streets protesting and agreeing with the movement(s) when that happen.
bluefirebrand 9 hours ago [-]
> Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
> You might still be young
I'm almost 40.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
Right, but just because the protests you've been to in your 40 years haven't worked in the way you wished, doesn't mean you think every single protest through all time also been unsuccessful in changing anything, right?
With that comes that protests can be successful, and the trick is to figure out why the protests you've gone to haven't been successful then, as they probably could have been, and then try to change it.
It's you, and many other people, but unless you all get together and do something, there will never be enough pressure for things to actually escalate. You cannot "stop then escalate", you put pressure until it escalates by itself. But the pressure thing is something that people need to actively participate in of course.
pessimizer 10 hours ago [-]
You might want to cite something, rather than do this.
Everybody seems to pretend to be black Americans, whose freedoms weren't gained simply by protest, but by being beaten and having dogs sicced on them while protesting before cameras, and the shame that white people felt while watching that on television - and the pressure of "whataboutism" coming from the Russians that the USA was being judgemental about freedom while also being an apartheid state.
Other people have aped the black civil rights struggle (deemed the "civil rights" struggle), and it has amounted to middle class people walking in the streets, congratulating each other and socializing. I don't know of any accomplishments resulting from that.
Street protests were traditionally a show of force; an indication that an overwhelming number of people were on the edge of violence. They often ended in a lynching, or the burning down of a building. Black people did not have that option, so they just offered their bodies to television cameras - this was not traditional, this was new. The only model they had before that was Gandhi, and that was not a traditional Indian thing as many think, but an idea he took from Tolstoy.
Time to crack open a history book and find out why Baltimore was called Mobtown.
Walking in the street has never done anything.
shermantanktop 7 hours ago [-]
Never done anything directly. But large-scale protests can move the Overton window.
DANmode 9 hours ago [-]
American? I felt and feel the same - but mostly about Americans.
And yes, some countries still seem to have effective protests. I just don't have a lot of confidence in the power of protest to overcome the power of lobbyists
DANmode 8 hours ago [-]
Lobbyists can’t control you if you and 3%-20% of the country are in the road instead of doing the transactions or paperwork the ownership class wants you to be doing.
Be like the Koreans.
bluefirebrand 7 hours ago [-]
Google AI overview for Korea population breakdown: South Korea is one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries globally, with ethnically Korean people making up roughly 95% to 99%
Google AI overview for Canada population breakdown: Canada is not homogeneous; it is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries in the world. Nearly one-quarter of people living in Canada were born outside the country.
Diversity is in fact not our strength. It keeps us fighting amongst ourselves while the lobbyists push government to do whatever they want
Not a very popular opinion, and probably going to earn me some ire, but oh well
DANmode 5 hours ago [-]
I also think this is a major factor.
jayknight 10 hours ago [-]
I have had some success in just asking the spam callers to remove me from their list. I still get a fair number of calls, but they are mostly blocked by Google's filter (though they do get sent to voicemail, which results in lots of 4 second silent messages).
The last few weeks it's been spammy text messages from politicians, though.
jaapz 9 hours ago [-]
Who wants these calls? It ends up that the people that don't know that these lists exist (my grandma) still receive these calls - so everyone who's likely to be baited in buying something they don't need for way too much money.
Also, it depends on the company keeping their word that they won't call you when you are on this list.
Nobody needs or wants these calls, they are always some company wanting to upsell you something you don't really need, they shouldn't be opt-out.
saidnooneever 4 hours ago [-]
in Netherlands you have 'bel me niet register' (dont call my registry) which makes it unlawful for legit telemarketing. but this is not about telemarketing only. there is many more spam. also the laws would only locally apply so international calls dont fall under it
Keyframe 9 hours ago [-]
i put my number on the list and it worked great for a bit until spam calls started calling from outside the country. At least now I know not to answer calls from outside the country. I see a ton of people moved over to actual calls via whatsapp though.
yolo3000 10 hours ago [-]
Same in the Netherlands, but it's not enforced. Although, it could be so easily enforced, at least for dutch numbers.
Marciplan 10 hours ago [-]
those lists exist everywhere. They don’t really work so well :)
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
I guess it's my word against yours :) What should we do?
Kon5ole 59 minutes ago [-]
>I guess it's my word against yours :) What should we do?
It only takes one example of someone on the list getting scam calls to prove they don't work. And also, no matter how many on the list are not getting calls it doesn't prove it was because of the list.
clownpenis_fart 3 hours ago [-]
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infogulch 5 hours ago [-]
The best technical solution I've seen is a spam review fee that turns into a reward and charged to the next closest originating peer.
For example say you get a spam call. You notify your service provider and pay $10 to have them review the call recording to verify that its spam. An employee listens to the call and determines that it is, in fact, spam. You get a $100 reward for reporting spam and your service provider forwards the charge (+10%=$110) to the peer network where the spam call originated. They will in turn forward it to the next peer, or if the originator is a customer, charge and/or close the offending account.
If this system is mandatory then the problem will quickly sort itself out.
saidnooneever 4 hours ago [-]
its unlikely going to be worth the costs involved for the telco to do this reviewing. perhaps AI systems and other filters could be used but ultimately its tons of time needed because audio takes time to play. a lot of cases will be clearcut instabans but for the ones that are not it requires all of them to be reviewed with _some_ depth and then some with much more.
its also prone to mistakes which is another process that needs to be managed etc.
from a consumer standpoint this sounds super good ofc tho.
i will post my phone nr everywhere :)
infogulch 3 hours ago [-]
Why? They get paid $10 every time spam is reported regardless of the outcome. Trained staff listening at 3x speed with AI assistance could classify 3 obvious spam calls in a minute. If you can't turn $1800/hr per employee into a profit center I don't know what to tell you. That's a lot of money to cover for extreme outliers.
Eventually the obvious spam callers would all quit and the volume would reduce to a handful of borderline cases. So the spam department wouldn't make a lot of money anymore, but the volume would be so low it would barely register.
Kon5ole 2 hours ago [-]
But your idea is basically that the telco pays anyone 90 dollars per spam call they receive, how does that become a profit center?
They can't get the money from the spammers, if they could this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
infogulch 1 hours ago [-]
They get the money from the peer networks that are the source of the spammers. If they don't cough up then you void your peering agreement. If they try to route around through a different trusted peer then that peer takes the hit. If its your own customers then you can do something about it. VOIP peers would quickly run into trouble and they'd probably require new customers to keep a spam deposit, carefully monitor their calls, and have a ramp up period that limits their outbound call rate and lifts it over time.
I don't see a downside yet.
4bpp 11 hours ago [-]
I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.
pwg 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is not that the originator can be found. The current, existing, legacy, phone system already can find the exact originator.
The problem is that enforcement of breaking the regulation is so non-existent that the criminals just place millions of calls knowing, at most, they might get a minor slap on the wrist that can be budgeted for as a "cost of doing business".
Every single call carried across the phone network is billed, and every hop along the path knows who to bill for their part of carrying the call. The billing system is the method to trace back to the originators, and then apply a fine sufficiently large enough to no longer be a cost of doing business.
But the regulators seem to have no idea that the billing system provides the traceability to find the criminals and then go after them. Instead we get things like stir/shaken that are trying to patch "authenticity" on top of a network never designed with that in mind.
marcosdumay 8 hours ago [-]
AFAIK, the problem is that the system works like international mail used to.
There are strict barriers at the borders to ensure everybody pays their dues. But once a call is accepted, there's no control at all about where it's going to.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
The problem is that it's a network. The hard part of networking isn't the technology - it's the other people. And short of a government regulation or a monopoly, they'll never all agree.
STIR/SHAKEN has an exception for calls passing through TDM trunks, which don't support it. This created a small industry for passing spam calls through TDM trunks. Such calls can trivially have their caller ID spoofed.
Frieren 10 hours ago [-]
> short of a government regulation or a monopoly,
Phone companies used to be monopolies, in Europe they were owned by the government as a public service. But when they become profitable politicians betrayed their citizens and sold them. Nowadays, phone companies are a source of scams, spam and everything wrong with big corporations. And all that profits are now private instead of helping to fund the country.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10 hours ago [-]
On this topic, phone lines are so ubiquitous that it is irresponsible for representative governments to continue to let private companies mess around with them. Doubly irresponsible to go from public to private after the increase in popularity.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
That was in the 2000s. Phone lines are an anomaly now but cellphones are not. The phone number is more like an ICQ number than an identifier of a physical connection, but is still regulated like the latter.
DANmode 9 hours ago [-]
You don’t get to tell these people you pay they can’t double-dip as telco shareholders!
ainiriand 11 hours ago [-]
The only limitation is cold hard cash. The phone companies make big bucks from telemarketers by providing an endless list of new numbers and multiple lines. The whole racket wouldn't work without the companies' greenlight.
hamdingers 7 hours ago [-]
Exactly. The same reason the bulk of paper mail is unsolicited garbage. The spammers/scammers are paying customers, without regulation the incentive for the phone company is to keep them flowing.
Compare to how effective spam filters are on email. It's a much harder problem, but the spam costs the provider money, so they address it.
MrDOS 10 hours ago [-]
Historically, in a world of analogue phone lines, spoofed phone numbers were a legitimate feature: if my business has more than one phone line, each of those lines is going to have its own distinct number; but I'm going to want outgoing calls from any of those lines to appear to originate from the same number (the one that I put on my promotional material, invoices, etc.).
Much the same as e-mail, identity within the phone system was, historically, entirely built on trust (because only Ma Bell could make configuration changes, and they could verify that what their customer was asking them to do was legit). Those assumptions were carried through deregulation, and are very deeply entrenched in the technical design of the network. Changing them will hopefully become easier over the next few years as analogue service is turned off entirely (e.g., BT/OR in the UK are set to turn off all analogue phone service by the end of January 2027).
jimmydddd 8 hours ago [-]
I've seen two reasons. 1) Backward compatibility--you would have to add an additional security layer, and some old legacy switching hardware (5% of the network?) wouldn't support this. 2) Phone companies profit from the calls, so they have no incentive to spend the money to upgrade and stop it.
elfly 11 hours ago [-]
It would work until you need to route an international call.
And there's a lot of telemarketing and scams happening across country lines.
I mean, they should still do it. It's just the first problem they'd face.
AnssiH 10 hours ago [-]
In Finland international inbound calls using Finnish caller ID are simply blocked (mandated by regulation since 2023).
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
That's fine. International calls pay a dollar a minute. If telemarketers had to pay that they'd be out of business.
bonzini 10 hours ago [-]
International calls pay whatever the caller network wants them to pay. You're assuming that the caller network isn't part of the scam.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Incorrect, it's the callee network
Marsymars 6 hours ago [-]
I'd love to be able to opt out of receiving any calls originating from out-of-country.
lightbendover 10 hours ago [-]
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Gigachad 13 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much we even need international calls from unknown numbers.
In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
Raudius 12 hours ago [-]
In the EU its not uncommon to receive phone calls from other countries. Just the other day I received a large package and the driver called with an international number to make sure I would be home to receive it.
cuu508 11 hours ago [-]
Delivery companies would adapt and drivers would have work-only dumb phones with correct country SIMs. Problem is, spam & scam callers would adapt as well.
account42 8 hours ago [-]
Those calls won't be from a random country on the other end of the world that is outside the purview of EU regulations though.
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
> In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally.
There are a ton of us who are from one country, but moved to another, maybe more in EU than other places (not sure), but I really wouldn't say it's uncommon or even out of the ordinary. And I think most of us in this situation, have received/made international calls at least once in our life.
topato 11 hours ago [-]
I think its way different in the EU vs the USA. In the United States, the number of people with passports HAS dramatically increased in the past 30 years, going from ~5% to a little more than 50%; but we mainly use them for traveling once or twice / getting into bars when you’re a 22yo with a misplaced driver’s license.
More relevant to the topic at hand, it’s extremely rare to receive an unsolicited call to an American phone number from a number outside the +1 country code. So I’m sure when an immigrant in the US gets an unknown call from their home country code, they can be pretty sure the call’s intentional and worth answering
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
> it’s extremely rare to receive an unsolicited call to an American phone number from a number outside the +1 country code.
Can't be THAT rare, can it? Isn't 15% of the current population in the US immigrants? Most of us immigrants do receive and make calls to our "mother country" every once in a while, even introverts like me. Or maybe you were excluding immigrants in that as you mention immigrants later?
bluefirebrand 10 hours ago [-]
> Most of us immigrants do receive and make calls to our "mother country" every once in a while,
Surely this would be covered by the fact that you're making calls as a "known number" not an "unknown number"?
natebc 11 hours ago [-]
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msh 12 hours ago [-]
I dont think unknown numbers should be allowed at all, esp for business. I think its a reasonable requirement that if a business wants to call someone they are willing to identify them self.
simiones 12 hours ago [-]
I think they meant "unknown numbers" as "numbers that are not saved in my phone", not hidden numbers.
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Spain went this route. We used to get telemarketing calls from random mobile phone numbers (or straight up "hidden" number), so was hard to really know where they came from, unless the person admitted it in the phone call. A year or so that was made illegal, and now every "unwanted telemarketing" call has to come from a landline with a regional code, or the toll-free numbers, which leads to them actually having to register first, so easier to crack down on the ones that don't follow the "anti-spam" lists like Lista Robinson and similar, or break the rules in other ways.
contubernio 6 hours ago [-]
My own bank in Spain calls me constantly cold from landlines.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, same, sadly the law makes exceptions for companies who already have existing relationships with you, but at least then you can vote against these sort of spam calls with your wallet.
How long you've been on Lista Robinson by the way?
klez 11 hours ago [-]
I suppose this is better than nothing, but how do they track companies that don't comply and still use fake/mobile/hidden numbers?
vanviegen 11 hours ago [-]
I hardly ever get international spam calls. Nowadays they seem to mostly come from domestic (Dutch) numbers in the range reserved for mobile phones. When answering the line is silent for two or three seconds (a lot of internet round-trips to somewhere in Asia, I imagine) before hearing call center background noises and a heavily accented English voice saying Hello and trying to pronounce my name. At which point I hang up, so I have no idea what comes after that. :-)
Laurel1234 9 hours ago [-]
Super common when looking for work in the EU tech scene.
epolanski 11 hours ago [-]
There's multiple scenarios where this has occurred to me:
1. when travelling, hotels or car rentals may need to call or update me with some information
2. friend/family member was abroad and had issues with its own phone
3. some service I was paying for had customer care in a different country
4. buying something from a seller abroad, especially in the nicher categories (like a custom made standing desk) required the seller to call me a bunch of times
tecleandor 11 hours ago [-]
Can't remember right now if it's a EU or a Spain thing, but here they made mandatory to use real numbers on the Caller ID, so you can't use fake or hidden numbers for telemarketing. That way, of you're abusing, your line can easily be tracked, blocked or fined.
There has been some waves of spammer calls, more like "fake job offer calls" or things like that, coming from cell phone numbers, and there's still some telemarketing, but it is way way lower than, say, ten years ago. Orders of magnitude .
Laurel1234 9 hours ago [-]
Don't know if I'm missing something really important or it was genuinely hell on earth 10 years ago but in Spain I get shitspammed by scammers all the time. Android blocks most of them thankfully but some still slip through.
pmontra 10 hours ago [-]
It happened in Italy too (and we also had the fake job offer calls.) Suddenly I got spam calls from France and Spain and not anymore from Italian mobile numbers.
vjk800 13 hours ago [-]
There doesn't need to be any kind of technical solution. If a telemarketer wants to sell something, they must declare the name of their company. The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.
Kon5ole 13 hours ago [-]
>The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.
This kind of happens today, but I think the problem is too big. You'll need to employ thousands to process all the complaints and by the time you issue a fine, the company has closed and a new one has started.
showsover 12 hours ago [-]
That's why you go after the people who run the company if they do that.
inferniac 11 hours ago [-]
So they setup an LLC, or the owner is a homeless guy who signed the paper for $50, or dozens of other options you could do to avoid
I wonder how enforceable that France thing will be
kijin 11 hours ago [-]
Anti-spam measures work by increasing cost and friction for spammers, not by stopping them completely. A burner LLC costs more than a burner SIM card, so it's a step in the right direction.
sumedh 12 hours ago [-]
How do you know who runs a company, aren't some European countries tax havens who dont share that information?
druskacik 12 hours ago [-]
> This kind of happens today
What do you report to the police if the act isn't illegal?
kijin 11 hours ago [-]
In some countries, it is illegal to make unsolicited calls to a number that is on an official "do not call" list.
Any number on that list is effectively a honeypot. I guess you could even distribute an app that automates the whole process: put your number on the list, log incoming calls, aggregate the data and report them in batches large enough to catch the government's attention.
wpietri 11 hours ago [-]
And if they don't declare the name of the company? There are a lot of shady people out there. Plenty of them will happily call and give a fake name, or just something vague that sounds important, like, "This is Rachel from cardholder services".
So it turns out we really do need a technical solution, which is unforgeable and easily traceable access to the telephone network. Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.
amiga386 10 hours ago [-]
> we really do need a technical solution, which is unforgeable and easily traceable access to the telephone network
Although STIR/SHAKEN is frequently described as a "caller ID authentication technology", it does not authenticate any caller ID per se. Instead, it authenticates the originating carrier, but that solves a different problem. [...]
It critically relies on a set of trusted certificate authorities (CAs) to manage digital certificates. In the USA, several telecom companies were appointed by the FCC as the CAs. They serve as the root of the trust. All other telcos, must not only trust these CAs but also pay them for compliance with STIR/SHAKEN, typically based on a percentage of their annual revenue. The reliance on trusted third parties severely limits STIR/SHAKEN to work across borders.
> Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.
The act requires FCC referrals to DOJ for willful robocall fraud. In the half-decade since enactment, with billions of scam calls and billions of dollars in consumer losses, the FCC made less than a dozen referrals.
ChrisMarshallNY 11 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a great way for unscrupulous companies to attack their competitors.
First, I am 100% for this legislation, but, as has been mentioned numerous times, here, it needs to be enforced.
We probably also need to marry it with a technical solution, that ensures that unverified numbers cannot be used (no spoofing possible).
Maybe a national "blacklist" of bad numbers, with a "three strikes and you're out" kind of thing.
But, human nature, that nasty old spoiler, is likely to raise its ugly head. I suspect this would be a great place for corruption to take hold.
aitchnyu 12 hours ago [-]
Same for online ads. Ads should take you to a landing page saying Google served it for ShadyGambling Inc, Enemystan/Enemypur and clicking further will take you to Play Store.
eru 13 hours ago [-]
What if the business says 'That wasn't me?'
I mean, everyone can call anyone and name any company already.
KSteffensen 10 hours ago [-]
Here in Denmark there is no block list, but you have to explicitly opt-in to receiving telemarketing calls. By default, it's illegal to call you.
I never opt-in to anything. If I do get a call, I usually ask for the callers employee name and employee ID, their supervisors name and employee ID and the name of the company. Then I point out that it is illegal to call me and ask for them to get my name off their list.
It's been years since I've gotten any sort of telemarketing or survey call.
ValentinPearce 12 hours ago [-]
I assume ownership of the caller's number can be logged/checked.
I haven't had too much trouble with telemarketers lately but there is a crowdsourced app in France called Saracroche that can be easily installed on your phone and blocks spam numbers by becoming the caller id service. You can also use the app to report a number and help build the huge database.
eru 12 hours ago [-]
> I assume ownership of the caller's number can be logged/checked.
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
Sayrus 12 hours ago [-]
Not in the domain at all but wasn't this the purpose of STIR/SHAKEN but the biggest blocker was that large telcos hadn't deployed it? I think Android and iOS dialer app show you whether there was Caller ID Verification done or not so you may be able to drop anything unverified.
vbernat 11 hours ago [-]
In France, thanks to STIR/SHAKEN, this is not possible any more for the fixed phone numbering plans (and telemarketers have to register their phone numbers in a subset of this numbering plan). For mobile lines, this is still not 100% implemented due to the difficulty of handling roaming, but I think it is becoming efficient as I didn't have a telemarketer with a mobile number since a long time (they seem to hide their number now).
petu 12 hours ago [-]
Phone number always belongs/registered to someone?
eru 12 hours ago [-]
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
petu 11 hours ago [-]
Spoofing a number can be a felony on it's own.
Even if there's no explicit laws around that, who's getting billed for the calls?
XorNot 11 hours ago [-]
That's where we can actually use technical solutions though: businesses shouldn't be able to place calls without cryptographically signing their origination with a key derived from their business registration.
Phone calls are essentially end to end voip these days so we have the ability to deliver that metadata.
PunchyHamster 12 hours ago [-]
I don't want to sit thru the phone call just to get the company name to report, that can also be just their competitor name they want to sink.
lifestyleguru 13 hours ago [-]
Most EU countries implemented registration of every mobile number with personal details and national id number. Yet in the same countries there exist entire office buildings with tens of people receiving salaries for spam/scam/cold calling, and they are fully anonymous?!
zeta0134 7 hours ago [-]
Personally I think the trust model for phone calls has worn itself out. The network is too large, and the risk too great, for "guess this 10 digit number and you can call me any hour of the night" to be at all sustainable. In practice, if you aren't already in my contact list, my phone does not ring. (Otherwise it would be ringing all day long.) Telemarketers do seem to have realized that calling at night is unwise, for now. Relatives meanwhile...
I feel like if we were designing telephones as a brand new concept today, some sort of two-way handshake would be standard, right? Like a Friend Request on nearly any other network, before DMs can be sent. Phones were invented before we thought we had a practical need for such a flow, and the human-operated switching networks helped to somewhat discourage blatant abuse.
ninalanyon 3 hours ago [-]
> I wonder how they can handle it,
In Norway there is a list [1] run by the state registry service (Brønnøysundregitrene). Any individual can add their phone number to the list.
Anyone cold calling is required to check that list at least once a month and there are fines for calling someone on the list.
> A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Of course it would be abused, but a properly verified caller id system for all the big ones; the inland revenue, the major banks, would mitigate 9/10 scam calls I get each day.
VorpalWay 10 hours ago [-]
I think you may be overthinking it. In Sweden we already have a registry where we can opt out of telemarketing[1] (as well as ads in our physical mailboxes[2]). Generally this works well. Yes I still get a couple of "this is Microsoft calling" in Indian accent per year. Two spam calls per year isn't bad though. And this has worked for decades here, without special technical measures.
(Companies with which you already have a prior relation are allowed to call / mail you though, but this is always possible to opt out of.)
General white-list is likely useless as number spoofing is still easy and prevalent in North America. Scammers would just set their number to a trusted one. You wouldn't have to see the list to assume that numbers from hospitals, doctors, utility companies, etc. would be included - unless they all had separate secret numbers to call out from. Likely this would be unreasonable - especially considering they still aren't able to end number spoofing.
LeBit 13 hours ago [-]
The whitelist managed by the government is not a bad idea.
I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).
I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
left-struck 13 hours ago [-]
Have you tried call screening? I know for sure apple phones can do this but I believe some android phones can too?
For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling”
The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important.
It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period.
I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
There we go again, technical solutions that doesn't actually solve the problem, yet works for the individual with the right technology :)
Jokes aside, besides just outlawing telemarketing as a whole, there are "bigger" solutions that can help more, like the opt-in "do not call" registries that bunch of countries have, that actually work, and works across landline/mobile phones, regardless of OS or manufacturer :) I'm not sure those lists exists in every country, but every country I've lived in (so far) has had a variant of those, that works.
12 hours ago [-]
arealaccount 8 hours ago [-]
Allow people to charge 25 cents to accept calls from unknown numbers.
I believe iOS has a feature to force unknown numbers to declare themselves before connecting, which is less good but still a thing.
boredumb 12 hours ago [-]
When I was getting a D&B number I missed their call I wasn't expecting because I wont answer unknowns and my phone blocks half the calls they think are spam anyway, then had to spend the better half of a week answering spam calls before finally getting what I needed.
stronglikedan 6 hours ago [-]
> and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
They do this to themselves if they don't leave a voicemail or can't bother to send a text. 99.9% of the scammers and spammers never do, so it's a good filter.
jimmydddd 8 hours ago [-]
But how do you enforce this? It seems like most of the US spam calls originate from India. Do you have to get cooperation from Indian authorities? Seems unlikely since it's helping their economy? Do you put the burden on the phone company? I guess the phone companies make money from the calls, so they don't care?
broadside1296 7 hours ago [-]
> Seems unlikely since it's helping their economy
All it helps is filling in the scammers' pockets without being taxed for it. Also, they do cooperate with Indian authorities:
If the threat of an 999999 $£€ fine per call isn't enough.
I opted in to a block list and after a few months received much less calls, but still more than zero. I think that now that everyone is on the block list by default companies will have to be more careful and it will be easier to report any issue.
baby 6 hours ago [-]
I think most legitimate businesses have moved away from phone calls for exactly this reason. In lots of countries they use whatsapp
maximilianburke 8 hours ago [-]
If only fucking Zoominfo would integrate with these whitelists.
Canada has a national do-not-call list and that hasn't stopped me from getting hit multiple times a week by startup sales reps.
branko_d 12 hours ago [-]
I feel this could be solved by crowdsourcing, assuming the support from the major phone manufacturers and possibly governments.
- After a call from an unknown number concludes, the phone could offer an option to the user to mark it as "spam" (blocking the number in the history would have the same effect).
- The spam mark would then go into the central database. If a phone number was marked as "spam" too many times, it would no longer be able to ring the phone (maybe it gets diverted into the "spam folder", like e-mails).
Or am I being too naive here? What are the obstacles for something like this actually happening?
clan 11 hours ago [-]
You cannot trust which number which is signalled to the end user.
Most spam calls I get is shown as legit numbers. If I call them back they will go to an innocent and unsuspecting user.
Google is already collecting this information and shows numbers as "probably spam". It is hard to enforce this harder even with collateral damage as you cannot trust the number which is signalled.
Legislation is in this case a good thing which might get the telcos to take this more seriously. This needs to be handled on an operator level. Nothing will happen without legislative incentives.
The world is run on SS7 which has a lot of problems which inertia and lacking incentives makes hard to overcome.
My google android phone already does this. I get basically no spam calls at all except very rarely. But I go to the spam tab in the phone app and I see there are dozens that got blocked
pipe2devnull 12 hours ago [-]
That would work well assuming scammers and stuff are actually blocked from spoofing phone numbers
inferniac 11 hours ago [-]
there are some apps that do this, I used to use truecaller, but here in poland orange phone seems to have better data
pndy 9 hours ago [-]
The Orange Telefon app? So far it's good but I had some reverse situation where my outgoing call to bank call center was marked as "unwanted".
I wonder why Orange so far doesn't support built-in iOS SMS/Call Reporting feature with that app
nehal3m 12 hours ago [-]
Marketing ruins everything it touches, from the public square to the internet and from the phone network to radio. I don’t know what the alternative is, but I don’t need one to see this is shit.
corford 11 hours ago [-]
These would all help: well funded public broadcasting (for TV & radio); strongly enforced regulations for public advertising (public square); encouragement of open source & open standards; real anti-trust enforcement.
Most of the above exists - the problem is political & regulatory capture constantly undermines and weakens a lot of it.
wolvoleo 12 hours ago [-]
Yes though most of the calls I get are scams. And most of them come from abroad now because Spain also banned them. It is not a very effective measure
kuboble 12 hours ago [-]
At least a strategy to ignore unknown international numbers has much less collateral damage if any.
All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers.
I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
Lista Robinson works great in Spain though, enroll there and enjoy the silence :) May take a month or two to really kick in, and if you've already enrolled but it's not working, check that the details are 100% correct. Worked both for me, my wife and tons of friends, although it takes time before it works.
wolvoleo 8 hours ago [-]
I am on that list and have been for years but it doesn't help me at all. I did stop getting spam calls but not scams. Scammers are criminals anyway so they don't give a shit about that list.
I especially get a LOT of energy scams. They pretend to be from Endesa and they have my details somehow (some company must have provided it to them or it was leaked by a criminal employee).
They're usually calling from numbers in Mallorca or the Canaries. However in this day and age of VoIP you don't know where the hell they really are of course.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
That's so strange, both me, my wife and friends and family had similar issues years ago, before I put everyone into Lista Robinson, and it worked for all of us, easily 10+ people throughout the years.
I wonder why it's so different between people. Does it depend on the region perhaps? We're all in Catalunya for what it's worth.
Maybe double-check the details, I remember for one person it didn't work at first, and the entered name had a typo, maybe it's really strict? Also try just say "Estoy en Lista Robinson" next time someone calls, makes them hang up quickly and blacklist your number at least within that company.
felooboolooomba 11 hours ago [-]
Here you are finally Kon5ole. I've been to reach you regarding a car accident that wasn't you fault, is that correct?
jmorenoamor 9 hours ago [-]
Marketers ruin every sales channel they can, it's their nature.
PunchyHamster 12 hours ago [-]
Just easy ability to report would be enough. Then the govt can get to the phone number owner and make any middle men also responsible (in "tell us who was your client or pay the fine" way)
epolanski 11 hours ago [-]
You don't need to ban telemarketing, you just need to make void and nulls contracts made by phone.
Do so, and 99% of telemarketers no longer have the incentive to call anybody.
wpietri 11 hours ago [-]
Walk me through an example here.
I'm a telemarketer who calls you up, sells you on something, and charges your card.
What changes in that scenario?
RiverCrochet 5 hours ago [-]
I report the fraud to my card company. The card company reverses the charges and purses action against the fraudster if possible. The card company then tells me that because contracts made over the phone are null and void, using the credit card to make purchases over the phone is not allowed and doing it again will result in my account being closed or a penalty fee being assessed.
The long term effect may be that credit card companies stop supporting remote transactions that don't use biometrics+attestation or the physical card.
JumpCrisscross 41 minutes ago [-]
> report the fraud to my card company. The card company reverses the charges
This already happens almost reflexively.
> long term effect may be that credit card companies stop supporting remote transactions that don't use biometrics+attestation or the physical card
Then I drop that card and switch to a competitor who doesn't do this.
epolanski 10 hours ago [-]
You can't charge nobody's card because in order to do so you'd first need to sign a verbal contract.
wpietri 8 hours ago [-]
Again, please explain the details of what you're thinking. If I get a card number, type it into my POS system, collect money, and send you a product, who's going to stop me?
epolanski 7 hours ago [-]
You can't ask for this data over phone, you can't pay over phone.
wpietri 32 minutes ago [-]
I obviously can. I can call anybody and ask them for all sorts of stuff. I'm asking what, in your proposed world, would stop me.
vntok 8 hours ago [-]
Wait, am I getting it right you're talking about collecting a prospective customer's card number and CVC over the phone, and then typing it yourself in a third party system?
Then it's trivial to settle: that's the big bad PCI DSS violation mouthful, so two to three things will happen. One, the customer's bank will reimburse them as soon as they complain that they have not authorized the fraudulent transaction that appears on their account. Product being sent, received, sent back, etc has no bearing on this. Two, you will be audited, fined $xx,xxx monthly and/or perhaps even get banned from the PSP layer. Again, sending real products has no bearing in this. Three, well the customer's own bank will be in touch pretty soon with yours to "settle things", as banks don't particularly like to advance reimbursements to their clients for fraudulent transactions. Hope you weren't using your own bank as a PSP as they kept receipts of everything you were doing (they just weren't looking until now).
wpietri 8 hours ago [-]
We're not talking about fraud, we're talking about telemarketing.
The case you describe is correct for fraud, but doesn't need any new law making "void and nulls contracts made by phone". That being epolanski's proposed fix for telemarketing.
vntok 8 hours ago [-]
Well you were the one talking about "If I get a card number, type it into my POS system, collect money".
A PCI DSS violation is indistinguisable from fraud. If you collect random credit card numbers and then transact on them, you'll be harshly punished. Actually providing a service on the side of the fraud does not make the fraud disappear.
The proposed fix to make contracts established over inbound calls void is useful as a guide for the public to clearly know their rights. And if a company still chooses to collect a payment over the phone, now that's not only a PCI DSS violation but also a theft because money changed hands from an individual to a company without a valid contract.
wpietri 7 hours ago [-]
I was talking about it in the context of a conversation with someone else, one easily available to you. It is frustrating to have someone not only give an irrelevant reply but then double down on the misunderstanding.
jareklupinski 11 hours ago [-]
hospitals, doctors, and utility companies are the last ones i want to have direct contact to me :(
they can continue to send me junk mail and unsolicited texts which already gets filed correctly
friends and family only
vanviegen 10 hours ago [-]
I can imagine quite a few scenarios in which I prefer for those companies to be able to reach me.
wl 9 hours ago [-]
Isn't the usual case for physicians and dentists appointment reminders? (I don't understand why utility companies need to interrupt my day, so I ignore that.) I wouldn't mind them being able to actually reach me about urgent things via phone, but I keep a calendar like a grown adult and appointment reminders do nothing for me except interrupt my day.
mh2266 8 hours ago [-]
Why? What situations do you need a doctor to use a synchronous, interrupting, unscheduled communication medium for, where the situation is not serious enough for you to already be in the hospital?
My doctors can communicate asynchronously through the MyChart app/website (the app is fairly terrible, I would rather them just use email, but oh well) where I can read and respond when it makes sense for me. Any test that they are running where the results could be bad is already asynchronous (or I am in the hospital) so delaying a few hours in reading it doesn't seem like a big deal even if it is something bad.
vanviegen 6 hours ago [-]
A loved one being treated in the ER? A concerning test result turning up, requiring me to come in soon? A spot for a treatment I've been queueing for becoming available last-minute?
Email can be unreliable and slow.
jareklupinski 10 hours ago [-]
it's always bad news with those guys; no thanks
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
Might want to re-visit your day-to-day health routine if every time you're in contact with a doctor or hospital you're only getting bad news.
jareklupinski 9 hours ago [-]
... why would my day-to-day involve calling a doctor or hospital if im healthy?
_they_ call _me_ with ideas on how to get me to pay them; when i go in, my vitals are strong
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
What I mean, is that normally, people go to the doctor and hospital for a whole host of reasons, and if the doctor never says "actually, that's nothing to worry about" or "the test was negative" then either maybe you're not going to the doctor enough, or your overall health is so bad you never get "good news" from the doctor when you go there.
But then I remembered that most people here are Americans, and you (if you're American, I'm assuming here) don't go to the hospital/doctor just because, as it costs so much, compared to the life I'm used to, where whenever there is a health worry, you go to the doctor/hospital and they say "don't worry, it's fine" most of the time.
8 hours ago [-]
germandiago 13 hours ago [-]
At the other side of the spectrum (they are mostly annoying, I agree) how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?
nkrisc 12 hours ago [-]
As a consumer, I don’t want you to find me. I’ll find you when I need you.
There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.
If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.
DEF14A 5 hours ago [-]
As someone who used to be in SaaS sales selling a complex platform, this might be the case for you if you're constantly doing a lot of research and keeping up with the market, but it's not for the vast majority of others. I can't tell you how many software engineers and leaders I cold called who thought our platform did one thing, but was surprised to learn we GA'ed a different capability, and then they'd mention they were talking about that with their team in standup recently, and then they'd take a meeting.
Again, not doubting there are people like you out there who stay up to date with vendors, but there was a lot of useful education being done in those cold call connects. That company still employs an army of BDRs doing the same thing today.
nkrisc 33 minutes ago [-]
Cold calling people at work is different than calling them at home when they’re not working.
jurgenburgen 13 hours ago [-]
Why should shits be given? Find a better way to advertise than harassing people.
Gigachad 13 hours ago [-]
Advertising is such a zero sum game as well. The only reason companies have to cold call market is because their competitors are cold calling. So you have to participate to keep up. If no one can do it, no one is getting a leg up over the rest.
nehal3m 12 hours ago [-]
You’re making a lot of assumptions. What is the cost benefit for cold calling? You could conceivably be better off letting the competition bleed. But I suspect a legit cost benefit analysis is hard to come by, mostly because marketing sells itself to management first.
n4r9 13 hours ago [-]
List it in a register that people can search when they're actively looking for products like yours.
ungreased0675 10 hours ago [-]
I’ve never gotten a cold call for a quality, useful product. It’s either scams or scam-adjacent.
Same thing with door-to-door salespeople. Seems like in the past the percentage of people selling useful stuff like cleaning products, Avon, or yard service was higher. Now it seems to be out of town companies selling solar scams, roof inspection, or some other multi-thousand dollar thing sold via high-pressure sales.
vjk800 13 hours ago [-]
Do you personally buy everything from the telemarketers? If not, how do you find the products you want to buy?
tuetuopay 13 hours ago [-]
As if we don't already have enough advertisement channels in our lives.
meindnoch 12 hours ago [-]
>how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?
This is a great move by France, but most of the rest of the world does not suffer from the telemarketing scam hell that Americans do.
I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy.
Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.
The US already has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to feel no financial or regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Maybe it's America's love of "market-based solutions" that prevents of from solving this problem the way everyone else has?
Rather then actually solve the problem via regulation, the US prefers to turn it into business opportunities to make the situation suck slightly less by letting the telcos sell subscriptions to moderately effective blocking programs and an creating an ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
paulluuk 10 hours ago [-]
> Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors
I live in the Netherlands, and I get several spoofed crypto-scam calls every day. I have also stopped picking up the phone for numbers I don't recognize. My own telephone number has been used to call others for a while, so I would get tons of "sorry I was busy, what did you call about?" return calls from random people when clearly I had not called them at all.
As far as I know, the only reason spoofing is even possible, is so that call centers in other countries can pretend to be calling from a local number, which.. why is that even a feature?
This feels very much like an example of "this should be run by the government" rather than letting this be run by companies.
account42 8 hours ago [-]
I'm curious, is that a landline or a mobile number?
Because I have two mobile numbers the country to the right of you and have gotten perhaps one marketing/scam call in the last decade. And those numbers have been used for 2FA for plenty of websites so surely must have leaked by now.
galleywest200 6 hours ago [-]
> As far as I know, the only reason spoofing is even possible, is so that call centers in other countries can pretend to be calling from a local number, which.. why is that even a feature?
It is very common for each individual phone in a call center to have a direct inward dial number, but when they dial out they want the main support contact number to be displayed so you can get routed appropriately and not harass their tech support employee.
I live in the U.S., have a U.S. phone number, and get maybe one spam call every six months. (Spam texts about once a month, with the exception of before elections, when it’s more.) I wonder what causes the difference. Do I have a newer phone number that isn’t on as many lists? Or is my carrier filtering calls before they get to my phone?
I briefly activated a second SIM on an MVNO that gave me a new number, and that one previously belonged to an old woman who got spam calls roughly every ten minutes. Clearly there is an issue here, but it doesn’t affect everyone equally.
jmuguy 7 hours ago [-]
I think its just luck of the draw. I find that the scam calls come in waves. I'll get several of the same scams, latest being spoofed calls from Google, every day for a week or two and then they'll stop completely for months. I haven't had any in a while now. Currently getting a ton of scam SMS.
riazrizvi 5 hours ago [-]
In the words of an effeminate man from Life of Brian, Ooh you lucky bastard.
davidmurdoch 8 hours ago [-]
How do you keep your phone out of data leaks?
snazz 7 hours ago [-]
Not sure! Used the same one for well over 10 years.
zamadatix 6 hours ago [-]
From what I can tell over time it seems to be random initial chance + random chance as your number gets shared with the 3rd parties you interact with. There are a few things one can do, like never pick up when it is a spam call, but at the end of the day there is still the element of chance to it.
I went a good 5+ years without spam calls/texts. Lately I've been getting the occasional scam recruitment text every 1-2 weeks for some reason. Hard to say why exactly, but hopefully it fades away and I get the peace again.
insane_dreamer 7 hours ago [-]
if you ever used your number to sign up for something online, then you'll likely eventually get tons of spam calls
snazz 7 hours ago [-]
I do and I have for the last decade. If anything, the spam calls have decreased over time.
insane_dreamer 3 hours ago [-]
lucky
hombre_fatal 7 hours ago [-]
The US has failed its people so badly here.
I heard a family member's spam call that used Trump's voice to personally ask for a donation. It made me wonder how many people might fall for that, especially people in cognitive decline. And the call was spoofed from their area code which is a dirty way to get people to answer.
It simply shouldn't be possible to spoof a call. Or spoof an IP packet origin.
shimman 7 hours ago [-]
The US hasn't failed anything, you're acting like politicians neglected to acted when they're doing exactly what telecom companies want: ensure they have no accountability.
Please don't forget neoliberalism is the actual economic policy of the US for the last 50ish years; with deregulation being a core tenant of neoliberalism.
deaton 8 hours ago [-]
As an American myself, I get multiple spam calls every day. Combine that with the fact that I am part of the generation that doesn't really do phone calls, and easily 95% or more of the phone calls I get are scams. Recently, for the past year or so, its mostly been the personal loan scams, but it changes over time. I clear out my voice mail box about once a week and almost always have 20+ messages using that same script.
collabs 12 hours ago [-]
My pet peeve is that a full class A attestation is still not a requirement in 2026. The US FCC won't do it. I have no hope from the current administration. However, perhaps France is in a unique position to implement this. The idea is that all calls that have a domestic caller ID will be required to have full class A attestation and all carriers will be required by law to block any calls that do not have such full attestation. Any carrier that attests phone numbers that it is not supposed to should get huge fines and criminal charges. This is my dream for what all Telecoms in the world should do, hopefully beginning with France. This requires broad support within the country and a firm deadline so companies don't shrug it off until the last moment and then demand an extension.
rr808 11 hours ago [-]
Me too. The problem is now I trust Meta with much of this instead of the FCC which is awkward for me. I use on Messenger and Whatsapp much more often for voice calls, and you know exactly who is calling.
dbgrman 6 hours ago [-]
Kudos to France. But the problem isn't telemarketing calls. It's the wholesale grab-fest of phone numbers from every.damn.nook.and.crany of the US soil. Hospitals, Car dealers, dentists, vets, brokerages, title offices... literally EVERY one of them is leaking YOUR information to everyone in the world.
within a week of closing a deal on my house i get a scam paper mail that almost looked legit asking me to pay $100 to get the title documents for my house. There aren't that many parties involved in the sale.. and its one of them (or all of them) broke the trust and bartered my information.
nearly all of them are uploading their contact list to meta and google.
THIS practice has to stop.
FizBack 5 hours ago [-]
Great tip I saw once - whenever you have to register through a form, use First Name + the name of the company / service you are leaving your data to. Once you start receiving spammy emails / text messages calling you by your « name », you know who you have to thank for leaking your data
gene91 6 hours ago [-]
In US, deed is public (grantor name, grantee name, property id). That’s probably how the scammers knew that you are involved in a recently recorded deed, and offered to send you a copy if you pay them.
deathanatos 4 hours ago [-]
When my parents closed on a house, me, and all of my siblings, regularly and illegally got scam/spam calls for my parents' home. We are not on the deed. We are not involved in the transaction in any way.
Also, don't buy a car, either; that also generates a significant volume of incoming scams & fraud, although most of that is in the snail mail. (But "at least" there I am the person in the transaction … I guess?
But fraud is still fraud.
baby 6 hours ago [-]
I think the problem is that you can’t create virtual, domain separated, phone numbers on demand
gwbas1c 9 hours ago [-]
> On the other hand, France's new law has raised concerns in Morocco, where Employment Minister Younes Sekkouri, said in March that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs were at risk in the country’s call centers. Sekkouri said the French market accounts for more than 80% of revenue in the sector.
Never build a business around hassling other people. It's always at risk that laws will suddenly change and destroy your livelihood; because good leadership will realize that the best approach to handling you is to exclude you from the negotiating table and abruptly cut you off.
This might come as a surprise to some people, but no one likes having their phone turned into a device that makes them listen to a commercial at random times throughout the day.
everdrive 9 hours ago [-]
It sounds like they could just block calls from Morocco and cut off much of the problem.
kergonath 5 hours ago [-]
Not practical. There are quite a lot of French-Moroccans and extended families living in both countries and traveling regularly. There are also more than a few support centres for French companies because the local workforce speaks French and is cheap. That’s a lot of legitimate phone calls.
gwbas1c 4 hours ago [-]
That's not a good faith suggestion. (It's impractical and you know it.)
The problem is that French companies contract with telemarketing firms in France. Banning incoming calls from Morocco doesn't solve the telemarketing problem in any way. It's just a xenophobic / racist / whatever excuse to inconvenience people you don't like without making any attempt to solve the telemarketing problem.
anonyme-honteux 9 hours ago [-]
"Just block calls between France and Marocco" is a very racist proposal
FYI there is at least 900k+ people in France either immigrant from Marocco or with an origin
and a 100k+ people with french nationality or origin living in Marocco
lalaland1125 7 hours ago [-]
Those people mostly use Whatsapp or similar at this point. Much cheaper and better quality.
ohyoutravel 6 hours ago [-]
Excuse me? What exactly do you mean by “those people??!” You’re on thin ice, buddy.
kergonath 5 hours ago [-]
Come on! It was a reply. The people in question are in the parent. They are the "at least 900k+ people in France either immigrant from Marocco or with an origin and a 100k+ people with french nationality or origin living in Marocco". It’s rather obvious.
jiaosdjf 8 hours ago [-]
That's not racist it's simply a practical solution to spam calls coming from Morocco.
It's completely irrelevant how many immigrants there are, they live in France now they can just dial out to Morocco and we ban inbound calls from Morocco.
anonyme-honteux 6 hours ago [-]
Yes that's racist to divide one million families just the same of cruelty, and also quite stupid because that's not how capitalism work when there is a cheaper source of labor of a call center that speaks the right language in the right timezone, it will find its way.
But racism and stupidity are usually good friends, so that checks out.
matsemann 11 hours ago [-]
Norway has the same law. I get no spam calls like this from Norway.
What I do get is spam calls from abroad. Often with a spoofed Norwegian number. Why can't operators block this? I know call centers and various things need to "spoof" a number they own, and when I myself call from abroad my Norwegian number will come from outside Norway.
But why can't they attest the numbers somehow? Owner of +47 XXXXXXX is currently not abroad. So why allow someone from the other side of the world to call me pretending to come from that number? Why does the Norwegian operators allow that?
Something similar is in place in Sweden. For landline numbers, it is of course easy. A number with, say, a Stockholm area code is not suddenly going to be in Nigeria. For mobiles it is trickier, because a Swedish mobile may very well be in Nigeria. Some additional database look-ups had to be added to the already rubegoldbergesque contraption that handles mobile phone calls.
realusername 11 hours ago [-]
It's even worse than that, I sometimes get calls from phone prefixes which do not even exist in the world.
They don't even check that the number can exist.
flyingshelf 13 hours ago [-]
Essentially useless. My country also banned them and has a "do not call" registry, doesn't stop scammers from calling my phone non-stop.
Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally.
You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.
mrweasel 11 hours ago [-]
As someone else pointed out, it's not about the scammers. The scammers could however be hampered if the phone system was safer.
There's no reason why the phone system should allow my number to be spoofed, but that's what happens. There might be some companies that benefit from having all outgoing calls shows coming from some main number, but in that case a solution where a set of numbers are allowed to pretend so be some other number could be implemented. The majority of scams I've encountered and have heard about involves someone calling you from a random number, belonging to someone that's not involved, but who are just having their number misused. I assume this is to avoid getting blocked or looking legitimate if the target looks up the number.
nexus6 13 hours ago [-]
At least it gives a legal framework for prosecution.
drcongo 12 hours ago [-]
It's not about scam calls.
OrangeMusic 5 hours ago [-]
"It's useless to make laws, bad guys will ignore them".
flyingshelf 2 hours ago [-]
You're not wrong, but with anything digital it's as easy as moving outside the country.
With the EU being one and many at the same time, all you need is to set up shop in Bulgaria and good luck prosecuting me. I'm actually in Turkmenistan anyway. There's a reason why a lot of scam calls actually come from India.
umeshunni 2 hours ago [-]
But in this case, that's essentially what's happened. No one gets legitimate telemarketing calls anymore. They're all scam calls from some slave compound in Cambodia.
ascari 12 hours ago [-]
Exactly, I think all these regulations in the Europe fail to understand the enforceability of these, any legitimate business won't be making unsolicited calls already. For instance, I weekly get unsolicited calls from a legit recruitment agency in the UK, never ever shared my data with them, they don't even email but directly call in absurd times. I requested removal of my data after months of ignored calls but they kept calling still, reported to ICO but no luck either.
I'm 30+ and was trying to buy some wine yesterday, and was IDed and i'm clearly well over 18 yet they had to take the bottle back as I didn't carry my ID with me. Essentially the same thing with pubs/bars etc, you're clearly over 18 but there is a weird power trip yet in some raves/clubs you still see under 18s being let in.
ValentinPearce 11 hours ago [-]
In France the CNIL is pretty good at enforcing regulation IIRC. And for any small to medium company, the fine should be enough of a deterrent.
I don't think companies big enough to just shrug the fine away resort to much telemarketing here.
thrance 12 hours ago [-]
This law is especially targeted at legit businesses... It's already illegal for scammers to call.
And I don't think something being hard to enforce is reason enough to not do anything about it. If we truly care about something, we can always find a way.
amoshebb 7 hours ago [-]
The correct solution is just giving people the option to charge people for phoning them.
Say minimum wage is 12euro/hour, and declining a call takes about a minute of your attention, so this is worth at least 20cent.
Instead of just "Answer" and "Hang-Up", there should be a gov't enforced "charge caller 20cent" option.
This would have no impact on 'real' calls, nobody would charge their Mother and if someone is tacky enough to charge their GP or mechanic they could just be billed for it, and it would hardly be worth someone's trouble to try to steal a phone to call themselves to collect 20c, but it would totally ruin the economics of these spam calls.
The same should exist for emails.
grouchomarx 7 hours ago [-]
impressively convoluted. Spam calls are coming from all over the world using voip and prepaid sims. There aren't any accounts to "bill". Not to mention a whole new arena for fraud in spoofing regular numbers for micropayments
tandr 5 hours ago [-]
To end up on your phone, VOIP have to terminate somewhere in local phone network. These networks need to stop accepting calls from shady places, or every call like this that they cannot charge back to original (or intermediary network) becomes a loss to them. And telecom companies do not like losses...
IncreasePosts 5 hours ago [-]
There a story, perhaps apochraphal, from 15 years ago of a man setting up a premium rate line and getting paid whenever telemarketers called him. I believe the phone service said anyone doing that would be fined because you need to inform potential callers it's a premium rate number
ZeWaren 13 hours ago [-]
The previous system never blocked scams because scammers didn't bother to check if your phone number was in the block-list before calling you.
That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.
stymaar 13 hours ago [-]
It's not about scams, it's about commercial telemarketing calls.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
mcv 12 hours ago [-]
> the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers
That is really great. I've had a lot of trouble with calls from spoofed numbers a couple of years ago (it ended when I installed a scam blacker on my phone), and when I looked into it at that time, my impression was that phone companies couldn't block spoofed numbers. On the other hand, if the scam blocking app can block them, there clearly must be some way to detect them.
Phone companies need to do a better job protecting their customers against this abuse.
Telaneo 12 hours ago [-]
The problem with spoofing is that there are legitimate uses of it. It's probably solvable by only allowing spoofing of numbers you actually own (so if a hospital has 20 phone lines, they can spoof their publicly posted phone number, but random spammers can't spoof your neighbour's phone number).
The fact that the phone companies haven't done this or much else yet goes to show how little they care.
AnssiH 12 hours ago [-]
Or just block international spoofing, to allow the case you mention.
> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public
international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.
disiplus 9 hours ago [-]
It's not that they don't care, it's just that the protocol behind it was never designed for it.
Compared for example to email where when you want to send email to somebody, you discover its MX settings on the DNS level and then send it directly and the receiver can verify are you allowed to send those emails. With phone calls it's basically a network of interconnects so I'm sending the call directly to my provider but that provider to reach the destination has multiple steps and they have to trust each other with the numbers signalling. Compare it to a regular snail mail where everybody can write anything as a sender.
What most of the providers are switching to now is for enduser the case is if the phone number that you want to signal is not registered with us, you are not allowed to signal it. Which is fine and covers most of the cases but imagine that you are a business and have multiple providers And you have boughta number block with one provider and another one is offering you better minute price for outgoing calls. Or you want to have a forwarding to your cell phone number. Or you want to signal your number when you're calling prospects from CRM. The regulation usuall differs from country to country, but most allow you to signal any number that you own with any provider that you use. And this is correct, but the problem is verification.
mcv 8 hours ago [-]
Whatever the issue is, they should figure out a system that can't be abused by scammers. Failing that, I'm totally fine with also blocking companies that have their own reasons to spoof numbers.
deaton 8 hours ago [-]
All of the problems are solvable though, and if they weren't then it would still be better to make a hospital just use a few different numbers rather than allowing a billion dollar scam industry to operate unchecked.
tlb 11 hours ago [-]
It's shocking that anyone can spoof the number of, say, my bank. At least large institutions should have authentication.
MiddleEndian 11 hours ago [-]
>when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
This is good but not far enough. They should not show up as "private number" they should simply now show up at all. After some time, any networks that even allow spoofed outgoing calls should be disconnected from the phone system.
redsocksfan45 12 hours ago [-]
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13 hours ago [-]
PunchyHamster 12 hours ago [-]
Someone is paying for the number, make them responsible.
And if that is a company that offers service of lending number for such calls, they deserve to suffer too
cindyllm 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
travisgriggs 6 hours ago [-]
As long as message broadcasting remains cheap (in any form; phone, email, text, etc) it will go on. All modern media has evolved technically (and financially) to benefit the producer (the talker). All at the expense of the consumer (listener). Make outgoing bandwidth cost per instance and you’ll see a reduction/optimization of the production. When signal is free to produce, you end up with a lot of noise.
ducdetronquito 5 hours ago [-]
Until this law is ever applied, I warmly recommend my fellow french to install the «saracroche» app to filter out unsollicited calls.
It’s free, open source, all my family uses it for about 2 months now and it just works.
Btw, if it’s creator read this : thanks A LOT ! :)
Was a recent convert. It's so much better than the competing apps, it's almost funny. It whips Google's antispam for example. And it's free software.
Though to be fair it is helped by the fact that businesses have mandatory phone prefixes to use when doing telemarketing in France.
RockstarSprain 5 hours ago [-]
+1
Great app, had no spam calls going through since installing it.
ttoinou 13 hours ago [-]
In the last 2-3 years, my impression is that most french numbers receive daily unsolicited phone calls. In 2026 they even started sending scammy “missing delivery” text message with your real name printed on an attached MMS picture (on a parcel to deliver), making it even more real.
Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
tuetuopay 13 hours ago [-]
Yup, having a French number is unbearable without automatic blacklist apps. I definitely notice it when it breaks after an iOS update, is start getting multiple calls a day. For any french here with an iPhone: Begone works great and has community lists for spam numbers.
The SMS are getting out of hand too, they send you a pre-recorded MP3 in addition to the picture too. At least they don't have enough information to know I don't have a letterbox.
> Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
Yeah, more and more French people are getting annoyed at it, esp. when companies always say "no worries no payment info leaked". I don't care, I can change my credit card but I can't change my personal informations.
And literally last week it's Bloctel that leaked! It's the government managed list of phone numbers that don't want to receive telemearketing calls, where anyone can add its own number to be excluded. Great idea on paper, goldmine of a data leak.
PunchyHamster 12 hours ago [-]
> goldmine of a data leak.
It's a number out of not so big pool of numbers. Spam caller can iterate every number in the country in a month
tuetuopay 12 hours ago [-]
It's worth quite a bit: the numbers on that list are live, with people smart enough to care, etc. Random numbers are worthless.
Vosporos 13 hours ago [-]
#FranceFuite
suslik 13 hours ago [-]
"God! I only asked her to be a hooker. It's not like I wanted her to work in telesales".
I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.
Telaneo 12 hours ago [-]
> It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'.
Assuming you can get access to their phone, only allowing calls from saved numbers would probably be the best solution, assuming she doesn't get random calls from hospitals and the like. If she's still using a landline though, that's a tough one to solve.
suslik 12 hours ago [-]
I can't just do that, she is an autonomous person, and quite willful also. Despite her age, she is not only as lucid as it gets - she still works (although from home) as an applied mathematician!
Telaneo 12 hours ago [-]
> I can't just do that
You can in fact just do that. Whether or not you should is another question.
jraph 11 hours ago [-]
In context, "I can't just do that" means "I shouldn't do that".
Telaneo 11 hours ago [-]
In context, me saying 'You can just do that' means 'You should do that' (barring there being good reason, which I haven't seen so far).
I hate that phrasing. It was weaponised by teachers in my youth. It's still used by some people to close doors and remove options without good reason. I'll make fun of it whenever I can.
jraph 11 hours ago [-]
Ah, I see! I was a bit annoyed by you seemingly pointlessly correcting the parent, but now I understand your PoV.
> In context, me saying 'You can just do that' means 'You should do that'
That's not very consistent. You wrote that whether they should was another question.
> (barring there being good reason, which I haven't seen so far)
I disagree with you. Someone being autonomous is a good reason for not wanting to take a decision for them against their will.
It follows that:
> It's still used by some people to close doors and remove options without good reason
This didn't happen here. No doors were closed without a good reason, because there is one.
Telaneo 11 hours ago [-]
> I disagree with you. Someone being autonomous is a good reason for not wanting to take a decision for them against their will.
Tell that to society at large. No man is an island.
It's a sensible default and should be enabled as such. They wouldn't know the difference if it already were. If they can articulate a specific and valid reason as to why they don't want it that way, then fair. It should be an option open to change. It simply being 'impolite' is somewhere between 'open to interpretation in specific cases' and 'wrong'. Many aspects of what is normally called politeness are constructs that have no or limited use in the current world. This is one of them. My conclusion is thus that their reason is invalid.
I'm making some assumptions. If any are counter to the reality of the situation, then there might be good reasons not to change it.
Edit to your edit:
> That's not very consistent. You wrote that whether they should was another question.
Emphasis is a common literary tool.
> This didn't happen here. No doors were closed without a good reason, because there is one.
I disagree on the reason given being good.
jraph 10 hours ago [-]
> I disagree on the reason given being good.
Okay, that's what you probably implied in your first reply, and I think that's what's actually interesting to discuss.
I don't think not acting against someone's will is a question of mere politeness. In social care, it's often considered mistreatment to do so.
For instance if it is not considered that an adult who's not otherwise autonomous can't express consent and doesn't want to take their pills, social workers normally shouldn't (and legally can't) force them to take them, even if it's good for them.
At least where I live.
Not all act against someone's will is mistreatment, but it definitely goes beyond politeness.
Telaneo 10 hours ago [-]
> I don't think (not) acting against someone's will is a question of mere politeness. In social care, it's often considered mistreatment.
The reason given by the person in question was politeness. I'm not talking about whether or it's polite to change this setting.
> For instance if it is considered that an adult who's not autonomous can express consent and doesn't want to take their pills, social workers normally shouldn't (and legally can't) force them to take them, even if it's good for them.
That's because 'I want to die' is a valid reason. Or at least it should be. I doubt that social workers actually come to their conclusions from that framework. They probably do it like you said; simply acting against autonomy is itself bad within their framework, but this is inconsistent with society's behaviour at large.
Similarly, if GP's grandmother's reason was 'I want to receive random spam calls and calls from telemarketers' or 'I have friends overseas who might not be able to reach me', then I'd have nothing to say. Those are valid reasons. On the other hand, perceived potential impoliteness, which actually isn't, is not.
jraph 10 hours ago [-]
Ah, by "reason", you meant the grandmother's reason!
Yeah, I don't think that's a good reason neither. Now, it not being a good reason is not a pass to act against her will either.
I think OP needs to convince her that it's a bad reason first.
> That's because 'I want to die' is a valid reason. Or at least it should be
That's a very reasonable reason not to want to take a pill, but that's not even necessarily the actual reason. Often the reason is completely unknown. Possibly the person refusing the pills doesn't really know why they are refusing it / doesn't even have good reasons. The actual reasons behind the refusal doesn't theoretically matter much in whether they should be forced to take the pills. They should only matter to convince them that they should take the pill for their own good. (the reality is probably more "dirty" than that though)
> simply acting against autonomy is itself bad within their framework, but this is inconsistent with society's behaviour at large.
Possibly, but, depending on what you mean:
* society at large acting against autonomy isn't necessarily a good thing / a good justification for doing it. Society at large needs a fix.
* fighting fire with fire is not necessarily the right approach
Telaneo 10 hours ago [-]
> Often the reason is completely unknown. Possibly the person refusing the pills doesn't really know why they are refusing it / doesn't even have good reasons. The actual reasons behind the refusal doesn't theoretically matter much in whether they should be forced to take the pills. They should only matter to convince them that they should take the pill for their own good. (the reality is probably more "dirty" than that though)
Given that they're working of incomplete information or in otherwise difficult situations, it's understandable why they've taken the shortcut to 'just don't work against autonomy'. The reality that they're taking another shortcut through dirtier solutions doesn't surprise me.
> * society at large acting against autonomy isn't necessarily a good thing / a good justification for doing it. Society at large needs a fix.
Society definitely needs a fix in this area, but I'm unsure whether or not it's viable or even reasonable to expect complete autonomy (or even as complete as one can imagine until it starts bumping into other rights or major problems. Compare freedom of speech). It's probably something worth thinking about.
jraph 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the interesting discussion!
flyingshelf 13 hours ago [-]
It's funny and sad to see polite people run into scammers. I witnessed to a young man being almost unable to keep saying "no" for the 20th time to an insistent seller on a beach.
When it happens to me, they're met with silence or "GTFO" after the 3rd question. I am impolite.
Telaneo 12 hours ago [-]
To me it's just sad. Scammers and pushy sellers aren't acting in good faith, but polite people seem to be unable to recognise this, or unwilling to change their modus operandi in spite of it. Like, if you know the person in front of you is a knobhead who wants nothing more than for you to part with your money in exchange for nothing, why are you even entertaining the idea of treating them with even a sliver of respect?
Add in the fact that the person on the other end isn't even a human (it's not a human spam calling you; at best it's an automated call which get dumped on a human when it connects), and the whole thing gets even more absurd.
This seems so much of a no-brainer to me due to scammy calls to elderly and pure time loss responding to calls it is interesting not much has been done about it in other countries. I guess the telemarketers have a good lobby.
mcv 12 hours ago [-]
That's great. Netherland banned them a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I still receive them. Sometimes a lot. A year or two ago, I received calls almost every week from a major TV/internet provider (Ziggo-Vodafone; total crooks). I told them not to call me again, I complained to the regulator, but as far as I can tell, nothing was ever done about it.
So banning it is great, but you still need to enforce that law.
conradfr 12 hours ago [-]
In France it's multiple calls per day.
Especially on landlines mostly used by older people.
abdullahkhalids 6 hours ago [-]
Aren't there decent apps that maintain shared blacklists for spam numbers?
Xmd5a 12 hours ago [-]
>Sometimes a lot. A year or two ago, I received calls almost every week
4-5 a day here.
mcv 12 hours ago [-]
From the same company? That's crazy. You'd think they'd get the message, but they're really stubborn. Most Dutch companies seem to obey the rules, but this one (and it's a big one) clearly does not. I still don't understand why they weren't fined into oblivion.
Fnoord 12 hours ago [-]
Were you a former customer of Vodafone-Ziggo? If yes, did you delete your account?
mcv 11 hours ago [-]
Even if, they shouldn't call me again after I tell them not to.
Fnoord 7 hours ago [-]
Next one who calls you is likely a colleague of the one who just phoned you. Don't inform the colleague you cannot be converted to a sale. Let them waste their time, not reaching their targets.
mcv 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but then they're also wasting my time.
Maybe I'd need an app that recognises the scam call, and then lets an AI waste their time.
dakial1 10 hours ago [-]
In Brazil no one uses common phone lines anymore because, in part, of the telemarketers and scams calls. Most people I know enable “silence unknown callers” and use almost exclusively Whatsapp for communication.
The government tried to control this with an official (no call list) that is usually ignored by companies who use third parties and disposable mobile numbers to do their dirty work.
Telcos have the power to control that but they are usually an internal mess and this is low in their priority list as they consider the voice calls a lost battleground.
marcosdumay 8 hours ago [-]
ANATEL says we will have authenticated numbers by 2028. After that, it's a matter of pressuring the government to punish the people doing the undesired calls.
The second implementation (AFAIK, we are in the 3rd now) of that no-call list was quite successful in pressuring companies. It can be done.
a3_nm 7 hours ago [-]
A perspective as I live in France:
- There was already an easy statewide system to opt-out of telemarketing calls
- Having always been on that system, I still got many scam calls that sound like telemarketing
So it's great to have a ban rather than an opt-out, but this will not solve the issue of scam calls
cpa 7 hours ago [-]
Bloctel ineffectiveness (the previous opt-out system) was cited as one of the reasons for moving to a ban.
I was on this system too and used to get scam calls too (they would come in waves, like 3-4 calls in a week, nothing for a month, then another 3-4 calls). I stopped receiving calls from reputable companies (that probably abode by Bloctel's list) when I signed up though.
amelius 14 hours ago [-]
And what about those marketing people who approach you on the streets? Can we make that illegal too? And the people going from door to door?
riffraff 13 hours ago [-]
How many door to door salesman do you encounter? Where do you live, if you can share?
I haven't seen one in decades, and even then it was usually some pamphlets or books to support a cause or the other.
On the phone (Italy), OTOH, I used to get daily scam call to buy "Amazon stocks" or change utility providers or install water filters. That seems to have massively faded out due to new regulations tho.
Macha 11 hours ago [-]
Ireland, small town, average reputation housing estate: 1-2 per week. Primarily charities, ISPs and energy companies
Telaneo 12 hours ago [-]
Probably a bit more than one per year. Mostly painters telling me I need to repaint.
Norway.
lifestyleguru 13 hours ago [-]
Jehovah's Witnesses, across Europe, still even nowadays. Some other minor religious sects targeting elderly, usually offering care or attention followed by vicious takeover of real estate.
Only because you have not been profiled as lone and vulnerable, doesn't mean the practice doesn't exist:)
72deluxe 12 hours ago [-]
I know JWs go door to door but I don't think they sell anything nor do they ask for donations - all their stuff is free? To qualify as a salesman you'd have to be selling something, surely?
My local C of E cathedral sent out a mailshot during COVID asking for donations with a range from £50 - £1000 options on the card (yes, really). I've never had anything like that from JWs.
I get visits from the local air ambulance team looking for donations but I'd classify them as a charity, not a salesman. Even though the person is under contract (employed) to do the task of going door to door, it would be a charitable engagement and not a sale. I asked the last guy if he got commission - he said no.
lifestyleguru 12 hours ago [-]
DON'T APPROACH ME WITH YOUR RELIGION. PERIOD.
72deluxe 12 hours ago [-]
I understand the sentiment but I don't understand why you're shouting a response at me; I was trying to highlight the difference between charities and salesmen.
I think your issue is with religion, not sales people, which is what this article is about.
amelius 12 hours ago [-]
No, you cannot hide behind "but I'm not selling anything".
Because then a marketing person could say "but I'm only trying to make you aware of $PRODUCT; I'm not trying to sell it!"
72deluxe 12 hours ago [-]
Yes of course. But I was saying of the people I've had at my door, only some have been trying to sell things, which is what a "salesman" is.
The guy from the local baptist church gave me a some book about being saved by Jesus (it had instructions on how to pray I think? dunno threw it away) but he didn't ask me for any money.
By contrast, the Lithuanian girl who was trying to sell religious books (no idea who they were - some encyclopedias? it was very odd) was trying to sell them to me (nice girl, had come to this country and was living in a dorm? was confused why UK taps had hot/cold separately instead of a combined tap). The guys scamming me about a roof repair were definitely not doing it free. Nor were the guys trying to get me to switch internet provider, nor the guy offering me window replacement and double glazing, nor the woman selling me "lucky lavender", nor the guy selling sponges and cleaning products for tiny amounts of change.
That's what I was saying - people who ask for money or donations are salesmen. People who don't, aren't.
Nuisance religious callers and general unsolicited visitors is another topic. The article is about sales calls, not general nuisances.
amelius 12 hours ago [-]
> The article is about sales calls, not general nuisances.
So someone calling you to "make you aware of $X" does not count as sales?
And they would be permitted to call you?
I hope they fix this loophole quickly!
72deluxe 11 hours ago [-]
In the UK the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is the register for saying "I don't want unsolicited live sales or marketing calls". "Making you aware of" on behalf of a business is a marketing call, so there is no "loophole" to fix.
If the business ignores the rules, there is little that can be done legally.
UK law differentiates between businesses, charities and individuals. I do not know how it is done in other countries, but in the UK you can't pretend that a lone individual ringing you is a "marketing" call, no matter how much you dislike the other person or their topic. If it is a person ringing on behalf of a business, it's a business or marketing call, and therefore subject to TPS.
I do not know how registered charities (not businesses) relate to TPS. I haven't received a call from a charity that I can remember, but my grandma once did get a call from the RSPB whose telehandler seemed oblivious to her having suffered a stroke with speech difficulties, and subsequently arranged for a boatload of bird seed and pamphlets for her to distribute (which would be impossible!).
TPS also does not apply to individuals, which is why any individual can lawfully ring someone else, unless the calls are repeated (harassment), but again that doesn't fall under TPS.
You can become "ex-directory" to stop your number being listed, but this doesn't stop organisations just iterating phone numbers incrementally hoping to find someone.
For visitors to your door, you can put a sign up. I have. It stops all visitors. I also have a video doorbell so I can decide whether I bother answering the door.
redsocksfan45 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
simiones 12 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure that would fall under freedom of religion rights, and it couldn't be banned. Especially as proselytizing is a well known and well established religious practice.
lifestyleguru 12 hours ago [-]
Don't conduct your religious practices onto me please.
simiones 11 hours ago [-]
I'm personally atheistic, and thus have no religious practices whatsoever. However, just like it's legal to build churches, to ring church bells, to wear visible religious imagery, it's also legal and highly protected to talk to others, even strangers, about your religious beliefs (or lack thereof).
petepete 12 hours ago [-]
I get several a year (UK). So far in 2026, I've had:
* Jehovah's Witnesses
* people offering to steam clean my roof/drive
* the local Fibre company trying to sign me up.
* well known scammers who claim to be on some kind of prison release scheme selling overpriced kitchen/household tat
asdfsa32 13 hours ago [-]
What other kind of infantilizing laws do you purpose? Perhaps they should also make it illegal for people to interact with you if you find unpleasant? Ban small talk at checkouts?
lifestyleguru 13 hours ago [-]
Ban "give a tip", "donate to charity", and "buy insurance" in checkout and payment screens, yes please.
Ekaros 13 hours ago [-]
Sounds good. I see no reason why not treat all that with same distaste as say sexual harassment.
Telaneo 12 hours ago [-]
Yes please!
msh 12 hours ago [-]
In my country door to door sales are illegal.
richarme 12 hours ago [-]
In my personal experience basically all spam calls in France come from a fixed set of number prefixes. [0]
So phone companies could just offer to block those prefixes - it would be a trivial solution to the problem. But it's not an option [1], so either they make good money from those calls, or there's some other hurdle or legal issue.
Either way the new law could (in addition to making it illegal for companies to make spam calls) also simply have mandated that network operators block the known ones. Too bad.
No, that's a bad idea. There's no hurdle or legal issue, and money isn't behind it either. Those "prefixes" (area codes) are all the same segments of this or that national numbering plan that are also allocated by legitimate businesses both for placing legitimate outbound calls to their customers and for numbers that connect e.g. switchboards/IVRs to serve customers who are calling in.
VariousPrograms 5 hours ago [-]
Unless you can block illegal unsolicited scam/marketing calls, the medium of phone calls is dead to me.
If it had 25% unsolicited calls, it would be a bad way to communicate, and in the US it's more like 95%. You could cut the majority of spam calls and I'd still associate phone calls as mostly a waste of time.
DivingForGold 8 hours ago [-]
You would think that of all the "great achievements" our current administration likes to boast about, they would put some serious TEETH into SPAM and telemarketing calls - - like prison time, and rabid enforcement. Everyone I know does not answer any live calls unless it's someone on their known "list", everything else is texting only. I discovered that when I respond to all unknown calls with "please text me", the spammers system won't take it and comes back with "error, invalid number" . . . then I know it's a scammer / spammer, and I block it.
But blocking them is useless because the next time they use that fake number to try to call you it comes up blocked by you, so now they know they have a live connected number, and that encourages them to hammer away at you.
I heard they get paid by how many numbers they dial out -- NOT by making a connection to a live human being.
The fact that the Gov't cannot effectively block all these calls shows how insecure our phone system really is.
torcete 4 hours ago [-]
I reckon that the best way to stop spam calls (and messages) is to start charging for them again. No more flat rates.
The scheme that I have in mind is to charge a small amount to the caller and give it to the recipient. I reckon that the balance between groups of friends or family would be zero.
Companies surely could pay this money but spammers won't be able to explore a whole list of numbers to try to fish a victim.
I had a bit of a funny situation happen where putting myself on the do not call list stopped calls from more reputable sources but also caused an even bigger increase in sketchy calls. I switched to using a free service tied to my phone company that makes callers enter a number before being forwarded. Turns out nearly 100% of these remaining calls were automated and got dropped. Turns out sometimes you need two fences to make good neighbors.
snovymgodym 6 hours ago [-]
In America we have amazing, reliable communication systems (postal, sms, email, telephone) that are rendered horribly degraded in terms of their actual usability because we allow them to be clogged with filth.
When you buy a car in the US, there's an entire industry of psuedo-scammers that scrapes the new vehicle registration data and will send you letters soliciting you to buy a "warranty" with horrible terms and pricing, which are intentionally crafted to look like they come from the dealership, manufacturer, or a more reputable insurance company. This is just one example, the only silver lining is that junk mail has existed for long enough that even most senior citizens understand that they need to be skeptical of anything they receive.
SMS and Email is a constant adversarial game where you will be inundated with scams, advertising, political solicitations, and all other manner of noise as you try to combat it with spam filters, blocklists, hidemyemail, burner addresses all the while hoping you don't miss an important communication from someone you actually care about.
As for phones, scam calls and telemarketing has gotten so bad that most people will not answer a call from an unknown number unless they're expecting to hear from someone (e.g. doctor, mechanic). But lots of older people still hold onto the unfortunately outdated cultural norm that you always pick up the phone when it rings, and that's one of the most common attack vectors for scamming the elderly.
I think it's critical that people understand that it does NOT have to be like this. The US has a business regulatory regime that biases towards letting an entity get away with pretty much anything, and alternatives exist even among capitalist countries.
dools 13 hours ago [-]
The only effective way to police this is to make the telco accountable and have a reporting system. Someone is terminating the calls and getting paid for doing it.
ccakes 13 hours ago [-]
Automatic filtering on modern iOS has been a game changer here. Assume Android has something similar, but I can't speak highly enough of that one feature
dd8601fn 13 hours ago [-]
If only it didn’t show the missed call pip for filtered calls.
erikprotagonist 12 hours ago [-]
I use SpamBlocker for filtering (available on F-Droid) to block calls, and with at least newish Samsung there is an option to hide blocked calls in the menu of the phone app.
I've got it configured to block on a country basis, with previous calls and contacts as a whitelist - that works for me.
Schiendelman 13 hours ago [-]
I found a good solution for that - just remove the "phone" app from the home screen.
dd8601fn 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah… I’m an old. I still make and receive phone calls pretty regularly.
Schiendelman 11 hours ago [-]
I do too. You don't need to have the phone app on your home screen to do either of those.
mallory854 4 hours ago [-]
Let's bring this across the pond. I've taken to speaking different languages and just trying to confuse them. If you're going to call me fifty times a day, you're going to get messed with.
tlogan 10 hours ago [-]
The main problem and challenge with all these regulations is enforcement. How are they actually going to enforce them?
The U.S. already has very strict rules against unsolicited calls, yet I still get around 20 spam calls a day saying things like "press 2 to be connected" or offering some "$64K loan."
At the same time, I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.
The same is true for text messages. In 2023, the U.S. introduced stricter regulations, and companies like Twilio responded with very strict anti-spam rules. The rules are now so restrictive that we are forced to stopped using Twilio for text important notification to our my own team.
Yet I still receive dozens of spam text messages every week.
So the question is whether the regulations can actually be enforced against the people who are already ignoring them.
tremon 10 hours ago [-]
> I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.
Yet you receive 20 spam calls a day through a known company, namely your phone provider. The way to solve this is to forcibly draft the providers into this; for example: any time you receive a spam call, you can dial a special *# number after hanging up. This message will have the effect of crediting $5 on your next phone bill, and allows the provider to recoup that loss from the originating provider, etc, all the way to the caller itself. The first company in the chain not cooperating in this scheme is out $5 per spam call through their network.
Of course, something like this needs the usual protection against abuse, but that's equally manageable.
Lvl999Noob 10 hours ago [-]
Have an LLM listen in on all the calls and automatically flag unsolicited calls?
ornornor 10 hours ago [-]
That’s a terrible idea. Just think about privacy, pollution, cost.
10 hours ago [-]
Highbrow 13 hours ago [-]
A welcoming move.
I am from India and I use Truecaller premium to filter calls.
It has become a big head-ache, making us to miss important calls
magnetic 9 hours ago [-]
Here's what has worked for me (in the US), after feeling helpless for so long: Call Screening.
I had no idea this existed on iOS (there may be an equivalent on Android), and I was very skeptical about it, but it has turned spam calls into a non-issue for me.
I turned this on a few days ago. Looking good so far (UK)
rtkwe 8 hours ago [-]
So many of the calls I get (in the US) have no mention of a company name and if you ask they hang up immediately AND they come from fake numbers so blocking or reporting is meaningless. Is the situation in France different? I don't think this would really do much for the situation in the US sadly unless we got reliable non spoofable caller ID.
sschueller 10 hours ago [-]
I hope they can make it work
We have a ban on telemarketing calls regarding insurance in Switzerland. But we still get them.
So what happens is that insurance agents (which are required to be licensed) don't call them selves. Instead they use 3rd party call centers outside the country which make the calls. They "warmup" the clients to get a meeting in which the agent then in a visit can make the sale.
For law enforcement to punish these people and revoke their licenses they would need to do costly sting operation which they can only do so much.
greggoB 10 hours ago [-]
This sounds like the basis of a scam involving a company called Clark that I had the displeasure of dealing with in the past. From what I understand, they had/have an operation running in Spain, the purpose of which is to get people signed up for insurance-based pillar 3a products. I don't know what has happened with this subsequently.
victoriaeast 10 hours ago [-]
It’s crazy the amount of phone operator companies sell our data and numbers to those people. I really wish it would stop because scammers can also use it. So frustrating.
bocytron 12 hours ago [-]
Note that in France, telemarketing calls are already required to use specific number prefixes. This is already very useful: you can immediately tell whether a call is from a telemarketer just by looking at the number prefix.
flgggd 11 hours ago [-]
> Note that in France, telemarketing calls are already required to use specific number prefixes. This is already very useful: you can immediately tell whether a call is from a telemarketer just by looking at the number prefix.
This is useful only for the few who care enough to operate legally. I activated a white list mode that prevents any call from a number that isn't in my current phone book because there's a constant flood of calls from regular mobile numbers (prefixed 06), most likely from spoofing. The phone network is unbearable in France without a white list mode.
brushfoot 10 hours ago [-]
"Cold calls annoy me" is one angle, and from that perspective, sure.
But "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is another angle. Because giant corporations may not need to make cold calls. It's the small bootstrapped startup that does.
Hopefully lawmakers will include provisions for small businesses making well-researched calls. Because otherwise, this is just one more way of pulling up the ladder.
faeyanpiraat 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah this is something which got on my radar as a potential way to get web development clients, like just call companies with kind of bad websites and see if they need new ones?
This gotta be an outdated way to get business, but regardless of whether this would work on a small scale (havent tried yet) would this be considered spam aswell?
altern8 11 hours ago [-]
Using the web is basically impossible without an ad blocker, and having a phone is basically impossible without a call blocker.
Spam has taken over every form of communication, but luckily there are easy ways to stop it.
I use AdGuard as ad blocker, blocks ads as a browser extension and ads on websites and apps as a mobile app. For telemarketers I use Should I Answer, it works GREAT. Never ever receive a single call from a telemarketer, they all get blocked automatically.
konart 8 hours ago [-]
I stopped getting spam calls in Russia after operators started blocking unsigned (unmarked?) calls. (all outgoing call from business and sole proprietors are required to be signed since September 2025).
Not sure if this will hold for too long, because there is always a way, but still.
erremerre 12 hours ago [-]
At least most of the Spanish one can be banned by blocklisting a whole company. which is what I did following a guide I found, and have reduced my Spam calls from 2 per day, to 3 per year.
However, the only way to solve this I believe is that you could once you get an unsolicited call to press a combination like ##01, and automatically this is passed to an agency that deals to punish whoever is behind the call in real time. At least if they call from a national number.
kristopolous 10 hours ago [-]
In the US, effectively 100% of the calls are criminals and scammers.
I really don't understand. Isn't the government listening to all the phone calls? Wasn't that the disclosure like 2 decades ago.
The very first time someone tries that dumb Yahoo security scam, the number should be automatically disconnected. I really don't get it
p-e-w 10 hours ago [-]
What benefits would the government (not the people) get from shutting down scammers? Scammers still pay taxes, and companies like Amazon that benefit from revenue obtained by scammers are major donors.
kristopolous 9 hours ago [-]
Uh, it's a representative democracy... The government isn't some nebulous mythical gorgon, it's supposedly responsive and representative of the people's needs.
Also I assure you, scammers aren't honestly filling out I-9s and W-4s adding up all the Western Union receipts. They're scamming the IRS as well
Telaneo 7 hours ago [-]
> it's supposedly responsive and representative of the people's needs.
It's damn near proven that the US representative branch doesn't give a shit about its electorate, within margin of error.
Stating that doesn’t make it so. The US government doesn’t “represent” its people any more than the Chinese government does. Quite possibly less so.
gunalx 10 hours ago [-]
Never going to fix the inherent problem og spam calls though.
Even if all would follow the ban (witch they wont as i get frequent calls and am on a legally dont call list) thee is the inherent problem of foreign spammers also often masquerading as local numbers.
If noe positive thing the twlecompanies would het it å bit easier filtrering and the amount would be less.
throwitaway222 4 hours ago [-]
Just ban all out of country calls, and I think the phone network would be fixed.
monegator 4 hours ago [-]
Italy already did that, guess how it's working
throwitaway222 4 hours ago [-]
People are switching to online meetings and email and spam is blocked. Just kill all phone calling, it will work great.
maelito 12 hours ago [-]
Actually, people that installed the open-source Saracroche app don't really have this problem anymore.
Credits for this incredible independent app, available on third-party stores. Even better, the dev has added OpenStreetMap information about legit enterprises calling you.
if the fines are only leveled at the actual people making these calls, its a useless law - like anyone is going to see a centime from a call center located in morocco. its only if the carriers have some liability that this will have any effect.
perarneng 10 hours ago [-]
Spam calls killed telephony. The greed of phone companies allowed it to happen. They could have addressed the problem with technical measures, such as displaying the verified name of the caller—whether a person or a company. Showing only a phone number is not good enough.
monegator 11 hours ago [-]
Telemarketers here have been banned in various ways for i don't know... ten times? in the last ten years.
As long as service providers are not held accountable for, and they let the scammers spoof the caller ID, the problem will not be solved
__then you start investigating, and see where these call centers come from and who they are tied with..__
mattrighetti 11 hours ago [-]
I think Italy did something similar a couple of years ago.
You would need to put your number in a special register to opt-out of these calls.
I don't know if this ever worked or not, but giving your number to government feels odd to me so I never signed up. It's a lot more simple to just outright block unknown callers.
daneel_w 10 hours ago [-]
Sweden has such a system*, and a couple of related laws, since the early 2000s. In my personal experience it works very well here, and I've never heard friends or acquaintances complain either about getting unsolicited calls despite having signed up on the list. An identical system would of course not perform equally in any other country, depending on local "telephone culture" and general moralities.
I'm really curious to see what impact the new law will have on this scourge.
ChrisRR 13 hours ago [-]
I suspect the data may be misleading. Unsolicited sales calls from genuine businesses are not the same as spam/scam calls
Raed667 13 hours ago [-]
i don't want either, unless you're calling about a legitimate transaction i initiated, don't ever call me unsolicited
shakna 13 hours ago [-]
Spam is generally defined as "unwanted and/or unsolicited communication". Which I'm pretty sure an unsolicited sales call, from a genuine business, still is.
williamdclt 13 hours ago [-]
not the same as scam, but how is it not spam?
AussieWog93 11 hours ago [-]
I run a few small businesses and quite regularly get unsolicited emails/calls.
There's absolutely a real, qualitative difference between contact from a real human being who respects everyone's time and has done actual research, and someone who is just playing the numbers game and blasting as many people as they can (regardless of how "warm" the leads are).
It's a bit of a spectrum, but if someone has taken the time to handwrite and research an email or call, I'll at least try to give them the courtesy of a response.
11 hours ago [-]
Telaneo 12 hours ago [-]
The pictures are identical.
jamesnorden 10 hours ago [-]
They are to me.
pythonRon 11 hours ago [-]
Let's hope other countries follow suit. Next, let's go after the email spammers! YES!
ninalanyon 3 hours ago [-]
Good to hear they are catching up.
LelouBil 11 hours ago [-]
Living in France, right now the only kind of spam calls I am getting are prerecorded voice loops.
I admit they are done pretty well, it took 2-3 different calls (accross months) for me to notice I wasn't talking to a real person !
notorandit 7 hours ago [-]
Useless. They tried already in Italy. Results? Unsolicited iphone calls from other EU country codes.
realmoravec 12 hours ago [-]
Has anyone tried https://www.donotcall.gov/? curious, if folks have other lpts. These calls when they happen are relentless.
nilamo 8 hours ago [-]
The USA did the same thing decades ago with the TCPA. It's not enforced, but it was still technically done.
nf-x 12 hours ago [-]
some of the third-party apps can show if a number is potentially a spam or a business. it's handy when your phone number is listed in the business directory to avoid those annoying calls.
balderdash 10 hours ago [-]
take a c-level position at a company and your cell phone (you work phone as well, but your personal non-work affiliated cell phone) will ring multiple times a day with sales people (recruiting firms, software companies, cleaning companies, consultants, financing or financial products etc.) because some asshole uploaded their address book so they could play some game or use some stupid app…
rcbdev 9 hours ago [-]
I never knew that this is not illegal everywhere. In Austria, this has been illegal for as long as I can think.
londons_explore 11 hours ago [-]
Phones could be set to "allow incoming calls from contacts only" by default.
Then a spammer has to persuade you to add them to contacts before they spam you
dragg87 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know about france, but in Italy the phone network is pretty much dead except for spam calls. No one uses it anymore.
SpecialistK 13 hours ago [-]
Are calls originating in France a major source of these unsolicited calls? According to the article, a lot of the calls are coming from Morocco, outside of their jurisdiction.
I'm in North America and most of the calls I get are using local numbers, often spoofed from (I suspect) South and South East Asia. Good luck enforcing Canadian or American law in literal slave camps on the China-Myanmar border.
johncoltrane 13 hours ago [-]
Morocco is just where lots of french-speaking call centers are located. The industry generates a non-negligible part of Morocco's GDP and most of the clientele is from France. So yeah, Morocco may be right to be concerned by an eventual shrinking of the market.
The call centers themselves are in Morocco but the calls never come from +212.
fryanyway_swe 11 hours ago [-]
>Morocco is just where lots of french-speaking call centers are located.
"just"?
Or is it deliberately done because it is cheaper?
Why not have these in France proper giving jobs to French people?
johncoltrane 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, "just". Because the Morocco bit of the article is mostly inconsequential. Those unsolicited telemarketing calls are extremely annoying no matter who is calling and from where. That's what this is all about.
> Or is it deliberately done because it is cheaper?
Well, of course it is.
> Why not have these in France proper giving jobs to French people?
Because you would have to pay them French wages, which would make no economical sense. If anything, the fact that most of that industry is abroad probably makes it easier to pass such a law.
fryanyway_swe 11 hours ago [-]
>Because you would have to pay them French wages, which would make no economical sense.
So, same for any profession. Why have any jobs in the EU at all then?
AnssiH 13 hours ago [-]
If a legitimate French business contracts with a Moroccon call center, they will then of course follow French law since the French business is liable.
As for international scam calls, not sure what the situation is in France and what measures they have in place, but one relatively easy way is to block international callers from spoofing a local caller ID, which decimated these calls in Finland a couple of years ago:
https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...
maeln 13 hours ago [-]
So, this is specifically for telemarketing call, not scam call. In the context of telemarketing, it doesn't matter that the company call center is outsourced in other country. The company who contracted them are in France, trying to sell their business in France, they are responsible.
So if you get a telemarketing call from RandoCallCenterCo S.A trying to sell you on BusinessABC Ltd., they have been contracted by said company to do so and BusinessABC Ltd. will be on the hook.
tuetuopay 13 hours ago [-]
All calls at least appear with a Caller ID from France (+33). Are they really from france or just spoofing them is anyone's guess (not really, former French colonies in the Magrheb like Morocco make good money running call centers for French numbers).
lefra 13 hours ago [-]
My anecdotal experience is yes, most spam calls come from french numbers.
jplrssn 13 hours ago [-]
Is there a technical reason why phone numbers would be easier to spoof in North America than other places?
Anecdotally I’ve not heard as much about it being a problem in other places such as the UK.
nephihaha 12 hours ago [-]
It is possible to "spoof" numbers in the UK. I've seen it. Calls from outside the UK masquerading as UK numbers. They tend to use London numbers which is the main giveaway.
kotaKat 13 hours ago [-]
I'd say the deregulation of the telephone industry in America, breaking up the baby Bells, etc would have probably been the biggest hand.
We broke everything up and let any old player enter the telco world over here which broke the entire sanctity of the security of the telephone network.
nephihaha 12 hours ago [-]
In the UK, a lot of the calls were coming from India and vsrious countries in Africa. I think India has cleaned up its act, but it's prevalent elsewhere. The callers pretend to be UK-based but there sre a number of giveaways.
josefrichter 11 hours ago [-]
Surprised it’s not banned there yet. It’s banned in Czechia, so I was expecting it to be the same across the whole EU.
Cider9986 13 hours ago [-]
The problem is Phone numbers. No Band-Aids will fix them.
Gigachad 13 hours ago [-]
There have actually been a number of band aids which have been fixing it. A few years ago I used to receive multiple malicious text messages and phone calls a day, then the Aus government cracked down on verification requirements for senders and I get zero.
I still get constant unsolicited sales calls but these are technically legal.
jiaosdjf 8 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just block inbound calls from India?
broadside1296 7 hours ago [-]
Indians do not speak French.
jiaosdjf 4 hours ago [-]
Neither do French
timcobb 9 hours ago [-]
Georgie W bush passed this for the USA but instead of enforcing it he did the Iraq war
charlieyu1 10 hours ago [-]
Probably won’t work at all, the calls don’t even come inside the country
farhanhubble 6 hours ago [-]
Regulation is necessary but it won't be sufficient. In India they have the do not call registry but despite that I get twenty odd spam calls a day whenever my number is active.
Personally I've benefited 100x more by using Truecaller but with time the app has been enshittified with weird features. That and my migration to iOS which has questionable support for Truecaller has made me the target of spammers again.
Furthermore many telemarketers are now using Whatsapp bypassing such regulations.
medlazik 13 hours ago [-]
Current law forces them to use known phone number ranges and to my surprise they respect it. I'm using an app that blocks those ranges, I receive about 3 unsolicited calls per day they're all blocked. We even have a phone provider that can block them for you.
I fear the ban will just make them use random numbers we can't block
kvam 10 hours ago [-]
75k per call. CAC is about to go through the roof
philippemnoel 4 hours ago [-]
Enfin!!
pessimizer 4 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, the US cut out a special exception to the do-no-call list for political text spam, leading to me personally for about a year getting about 10-15 text messages a day from Democratic scam PACs that have to be "unsubscribed" from individually, from each of hundreds or thousands of phone numbers. So an exception, and the exploitation of a loophole. They'll never stop punishing me for having donated to Bernie a decade ago.
Even worse, the PACs known to be scams where 98% of their proceeds just go to known, named party insiders. Even if I were a Democrat, they'd just have been preying on me and playing me for a fool.
-----
> After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network's FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
We already had a system in France which is phased out. The difference is that that previous system was opt-in, and now it i the duty of the telemarketers to get authorization.
The problem is that many of the calls come from abroad (and most will move there), so there is no easy way to enforce this requirement. It is only if someone files a complaint ... and the authorities track the number abroad ... and match it to a French provider ... that it will work.
Anyway it is better than nothing.
I stopped to reply to calls that I do not have in my contacts. If it is important someone will leave a message or send an SMS/WhatsApp
phtrivier 9 hours ago [-]
This law is entirely meant for retirees with landlines (the only constituency that matters anyway in our gerontocracy.)
In a sense, it's good to have someone try to tackle an actual problem (I know it's a pain to have to pick up the phone several times a day because of telemarketer. Especially when you're retired and have nothing to do all day than calling friends and discuss how you're going to spend the money from millennials salaries, share buybacks by the employers of millennials, and rents from the kids of millenials who'll never get a house, a job, or a retirement ever.)
I suppose we'll have to wait a few decade for a government with a majority to pick up other small topics (climate change, debt wall, increasing inequalities, geopolitics, demographics, water shortages, draughts, food tension, and, oh, the general despair of the generation born after 2000.)
But, okay, fine, in the meantime, getting rid of unsolicited phone calls is still _something_.
It's a shame the law will not actually, hum, you knows, stop the unsolicited phone calls (they come from abroad and the callers could not care less), and so the retirees with a landline will not see a difference, and will do the natural thing, and vote for Trumpists even more than they expected to anyway.
At least we don't get political ads on the phone...
bediger4000 5 hours ago [-]
The only way to enforce this is letters of marque. Anyone holding such a letter can track down telemarketers and punish them.
somid3 10 hours ago [-]
The US should do the same!
karim79 10 hours ago [-]
I just don't answer calls if I don't recognise the number, and especially if it's from an "unknown caller". If someone has my number, they can text me. If they know who I am and who they are reaching then they probably have my email address as well.
This shit needs to stop.
deaton 8 hours ago [-]
As nice as this would be, as an American (notably not a Frenchman), I find that 90% or more of the unsolicited calls I get are scammers, not telemarketing, so I don't know how much something like this would do. The US also has donotcall.gov, which no telemarketer bothers with.
jambalaya8 12 hours ago [-]
I wonder how this will affect their economy and unemployment rate?
jambalaya8 11 hours ago [-]
Interesting someone voted this down when literally I was asking how it will affect unemployment rates, not suggesting I am a fan of robocalls and telemarketing. Guess I was not being clear enough that was not a rhetorical question or some sort of pleading for unsolicited calls. Note, not posting to complain about the vote down but to be more clear.
'unsolicited', means every contract or click will include accepting calls.
Canada tried this years ago and it has barely made a dent. What we really need is a secure telephone system but our regulators refuse to consider doing so
adolph 9 hours ago [-]
I think this is an economic problem to solve, not a legal one.
The telephone, like postal mail, email, http and a myriad of other protocols suffers from a lack of transaction costs. Why is there so much junk postal mail? Because the post office has discounted rates for such mail.
Likewise, back when there were "long distance" tolls (nevermind the 10 cent SMS), there was less telemarketing because it was more expensive to operate call centers in each domain. I'm old enough to remember the sound of a phone ringing as evoking a happy "who could it be?" instead of "what scam is bothering me now?"
Granted, nobody is going to rewrite all the old protocols to bolt on a payment clearinghouse. And legislation is weak against a large pool of relatively minor miscreants since it requires expensive prosecutorial time to enforce, either directly in criminal law or indirectly by regulating major gateways' compliance activities.
To reduce unsolicited commercial contacts, people need to learn to accept expensive communication patterns. Currently we all already pay with the shadow work of curating contact lists, missing important calls because ringer off, deleting and marking as spam junk texts, etc. This shadow work could be reduced by accepting that a communique costs $X, with the knowledge that all the $X spent by others contacting oneself will offset one's own outbound costs.
2OEH8eoCRo0 9 hours ago [-]
It's interesting that we all hate anonymous or spoofed calls over the phone but when it comes to the internet this is apparently the highest form of free protected speech. Why is this OK on one network but not another?
Narishma 8 hours ago [-]
Not sure what you mean. The equivalent on the internet is probably spam and scam emails and they're also typically blocked by your email provider.
nojvek 10 hours ago [-]
Love it!
Razengan 10 hours ago [-]
How was this not "banned" 50 years ago..
reaperducer 10 hours ago [-]
How is this possible?
We have been chided over and over and over again on HN by the fine citizens of the E.U. that unsolicited telemarketing calls are purely an American problem, are completely unheard of in Europe, and that this never happens in "civilized" nations with "a functioning legal system."
mkbkn 11 hours ago [-]
As soon as I realise it's a spam call, I just put myself on mute and let the spammer blabber himself/herself. They get frustrated and never call me again.
sylware 11 hours ago [-]
Hasn't been already the case for a while now?
Oo
(and I am french)
Narishma 8 hours ago [-]
The law just entered into effect today.
6r17 10 hours ago [-]
Same announcement every year for the past 10 years and same shit.
jstummbillig 11 hours ago [-]
Or: How to transfer less money from old to young people.
(I am jesting. Fuck telemarketing.)
cynicalpeace 8 hours ago [-]
Scams are bad. But cold-calling selling a genuine B2B product is a beautiful right-of-passage for anyone doing sales.
Teaches you grit, rejection, tonality, relationship-building, and the elation of closing a sale all-in-one.
It's also one of the few outbound marketing channels that isn't yet swallowed up by Meta/Google, and can be done by any scrappy teenager.
Unpopular opinion here, I'm sure.
p1dda 10 hours ago [-]
Why haven't politicians stopped this before? It has taken advantage of the elderly for decades yet the fucking, lowlife politicians has done NOTHING!
mytailorisrich 13 hours ago [-]
Another distraction, probably useless in practice, and in typical French government fashion they carved out a number of exceptions including to sell you subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, because...
nipunaeka89 8 hours ago [-]
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zhixingheyi2023 9 hours ago [-]
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CurbStomper 10 hours ago [-]
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djfjfndmwpekdm 10 hours ago [-]
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janci 13 hours ago [-]
In my experience, GDPR works wonders here. After saying I do not wish my personal information to be processed and revoke any consents a few times I do not receive these calls anymore.
dotcoma 13 hours ago [-]
Where is ‘here’? France?
nottorp 13 hours ago [-]
It works for those who want to be sorta legal. Usually I ask to talk to their GDPR officer first thing. Call ends.
But not everyone wants to be sorta legal.
xenator 14 hours ago [-]
Article is not clear. Does this law blocks B2B calls? If so then it can cause damage to the business.
docdeek 12 hours ago [-]
A business can call another business it there’s an existing relationship. This means you can introduce an upgrade, a new product line, or something unrelated to their current contract - but the contract needs to be there first.
Other than that, the business needs the call receipient to opt in. They can dop this on a webform, a physical form, or by initiating the contact and, say, leaving a message for the vendor asking to be called back. It means the business needs to concetrate on avenues other than cold calling for getting themselves in front of a prospect.
skinfaxi 5 hours ago [-]
If you do a B2B call to someone's personal device, you should be arrested, straight to jail.
alex95 14 hours ago [-]
"After a joint call by 11 consumer groups" - going to guess its B2C given "consumer groups".
Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.
I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too. Obviously hospitals, doctors, utility companies and similar don't cross-reference against these lists, as they have actual relationship with you already.
Both in Sweden and in Spain I used to receive a lot of spam calls, like multiple per week, and once enrolled on these lists, the calls are non-existent, the only telemarketing calls I get now are from the companies I already have relationships with, which happens maybe once a month.
If you suffer greatly by the constant spam calls, like I did once before, do take a look and see if there are similar opt-out lists in your country :) They may take a month or two before actually eliminating all calls, but they do work, apparently.
> In January 2009, numerous media and consumer advocacy organizations reported that anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer and download a set of numbers from the list for a $50 fee. It took their reporter ten minutes to do so. It has been proposed that list may be being downloaded and used as a telemarketing list overseas, where there's little that can be done as the CRTC has no jurisdiction outside of Canada
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List
And the rest are political calls, which are exempt. This the most annoying, come election time, I get 5-6 texts or calls per day asking for money or votes.
Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.
Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.
Bans on unsolicited calls, or do-not-call lists, can be effective for the former, as it moves the behavior from being legal to being illegal, while for the latter, they are already breaking laws, often in a more severe way, and technical measures or enforcement are more important.
A phone company trying to trick someone into paying more per month for something they don't need is likely to be worried about being fined if caught calling a number on a do-not-call list. A scammer pretending to be the tax office and demanding payment of supposedly unpaid taxes is going to be in trouble if caught regardless of rules about what numbers can be called.
Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.
The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.
I consider marketing is a plague on attention and view it highly negatively - but in the case of tools to reduce unwanted phone calls there are some real differences in what's available to legitimate vs. scam callers and a do not call list can only ever be effective against people working within the system.
I replied, "Stop providing politicians exemption to spam constituents." Strangely, they didn't respond.
i get mostly robocalls from scam centres in india. most are filtered but some go through. 0 telemarketing.
There are exceptions for nonprofits, political campaigns and surveys and to be honest those do seem to be the nature of all the non-scam unsolicited calls I receive (and of course they are somewhat difficult to distinguish from scams anyway), based on the voicemails they sometimes leave, so it may well actually be working.
I suppose many people would wonder what the difference is between a legitimate caller you don't want and a fake one.
If you're the sort of person that is too polite to just hang up and you might get hooked by a scam caller because you let them talk to you, then it's a big difference
So it worked for a time, legit companies stoped calling; however most people didn't knew about Bloctel as it was little advertised.
Meanwhile, spam calls turned into scam calls, and a real issue especially with the elderly.
So I think that banning all unsolicited calling kills two birds with one stone, spam becomes illegal and scams as a consequence becomes easier to spot as there are no more unsolicited calls.
Years ago when I first found Lista Robinson was because I felt like I received calls once a day and had to do something about it because it was too much. If I got 3-6 calls per day I'd think I'd get rid of my phone in total, I wouldn't want to have a phone at all if that happened :P Then some of the residents in the US are used to gunshots going off in their neighborhood, I just don't know what to think anymore...
I am not sure why it works so well here. I have vague recollections of news articles about it being ignored in the past. I guess they just struck down hard on those. Also, I imagine if you put yourself on that list you would be really grumpy if someone called to try to sell you something.
I'm guessing (since Norway and Sweden tends to be more similar than different) that Norway also have something similar to the Swedish "Marknadsföringslagen" ("The Marketing Act") that effectively outlaws companies from calling people who obviously don't want to be called. They quite literally get fines if they call people on these lists, hence the companies actively cross-reference against them.
I've worked in cold-calling telemarketing in both Sweden and Spain in my previous life, both companies I worked for were deadly afraid of accidentally calling people on these lists, and actively instructed employees to basically say "Sorry", hang up and flag the number if someone mentioned the name of the lists.
There are tax benefits to having the company foot the phone bill, but it's not worth it, currently.
Now it was decades ago I worked in cold calling telemarketing, but back then, the company basically purchased/subscribed to various lists of numbers they get from other companies, and also had lists of numbers to not call, either obtained from the do-not-call registries, or their own lists of "unsellable" customers, bad numbers and so on, simply crossed-references the ones that they for legal (or otherwise) shouldn't call, then the telemarketers who all sit in basically automated stations, end up just calling the "good" numbers. Different teams get different chunks of the numbers, but all the calls they're supposed to be doing, are supposed to not be on any of the do-not-call lists already.
The telemarketers themselves are told to basically hang up and mark the number as "do not call" if anyone picks up and says/mentions the name of lists. Most companies I knew from then took the lists seriously since their mechanism is based on actual laws in the countries, and evidently since I nor the people I enrolled in these lists receive marketing calls, the companies today takes them equally seriously.
I'm not sure how enforcement works, from the copy on their website it seems like it's purely voluntary to even check there, but serious companies do because their customers will hate them forever if they call people who are registered.
I'm actually surprised it works so well given the apparent lack of enforcement. The only calls I ever get these days are from someone with an Indian accent who says "hello I'm calling from Blockchain", and even that has been a while!
I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
What country are you in that it doesn't work in? I know for a fact it works in Spain and Sweden, but it'll really depend on the country. You'd help by others by being a bit more explicit :)
> I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
That does suck and seems counter-productive indeed! Even more curious what exact country you're talking about now.
Worth knowing for people who might not know; large telemarketing companies have campaigns on the internet to spread FUD about the effectiveness of these lists, so less people enroll. I'm not claiming that you is one of these, but unless we're being clear what lists/countries we're talking about here, it's borderline FUD rather than helpful to the conversation.
Maybe 5-6 years ago and before that, I used to get a lot of sales and telemarketing phone calls though, both from foreign and local landline and mobile phone numbers. Once I was on the list, and started just saying the name of the list, the calls eventually died down and today, I don't get a single spam call.
in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country. you could do it by prefix if you wanted to still use the list mechanically, maybe? But the only reason I see for an opt in list is to allow the marketing companies to still exist
... I don't? I'm just want to know what country ferngodfather is talking about, as I'm sure the experience differs a lot by country, made evident by countless of comments in this submission.
> in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country.
I don't disagree with this, but for people suffering from these daily spam calls today, there might be ways to fix that, in a shorter time-frame than "petition the government, then propose a law, then get the law into agreement, then get the law into effect". If we're being clear about what countries people are talking about, there wouldn't be so much FUD about the subject.
Whaaaat? On a American website, driven by a American VC company, are you sure? That has nothing to do with anything in the conversation...
If someone talks about "Most countries" they're not actually talking about some percentage of countries in the world generally, they're specifically talking about "most countries I know about", so when people start being fuzzy about those sort of details, it'd help all of us (not the ones from specific countries) actually understand what's going on and where. For all we know, they could be talking about India, especially since I've already added non-US context with my previous comment they themselves responded to...
Why would a no-call list work well in one country but not others? I don't get it. At least explain what makes them work in Spain or Sweden if you are convinced they are the reason you don't get calls?
I think what you have noticed is that the GDPR made it harder for legitimate companies to cold-call all over the EU. But even the GDPR doesn't stop scammers, and neither does any no-call list. Not in any country.
We're all on the "please don't rob me" list and robberies are still a thing.
My parent (or parent-parent) comment made this clear, why a list in one country might work but in others not:
> I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too.
If there is no law about it, and no enforcement, then obviously such list would work less effectively than in countries where it is supported by a law somehow, and it is enforced.
> I think what you have noticed is that the GDPR made it harder for legitimate companies to cold-call all over the EU
It has not, why would GDPR have an effect on the telemarketing companies, especially trans-EU ones? They're properly registered as controllers (otherwise they'd be shut down), and added more controls around the data they store. GDPR doesn't outlaw storing data, just controls how companies do so.
The GDPR has fines up to 4% of the company's turnover if they contact people without consent or prior business reasons. If that doesn't work, then a "please don't call me" list where there are basically no consequences sure as hell won't.
How do you know that a call that never reaches you was stopped by the no-call list as opposed to your number not being on the list of numbers to call today?
The way the companies manage the lists, is basically that they have three types, they have huge unranked/unchecked lists of just numbers, one list of "good" numbers that are at least online, not on do-not-call lists, haven't recently been sold to already, and so on, then the group of blacklists essentially. Whenever the telemarketers work in their stations, the only numbers that even get dialed by the central robot for them, are the "good" numbers they've been assigned for their shift.
Maybe he's in France, since this article is about France having to ban all telemarketing calls since the block lists apparently don't work.
Don't let your regional indignation get in the way of doing basic logic.
How on earth am I supposed to assume they live in France, just because that's in the submission article? Conversations in the comments regularly go beyond the scope of the article, and even the commentator themselves said "Most countries" so clearly they're talking about more than just one.
DND is available both on Android and iOS.
So unless the phone company starts banning phone companies that don't enforce correct caller id, it won't do anything.
But it evidently does do something, since now it's confirmed in these threads that at least 4 (possibly) more countries do have these lists, and they do work.
[0] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html
I will never, ever, work with Freshworks, Freshdesk, Freshservice, or any of their other products as a direct result of this.
Most of the people doing cold-calling been trained to listen for the names of the lists, and have strict orders what to do with the number in case someone they call brings it up.
Apparently that name is used in germany, netherlands, Belgium and more. It stems from Robinson Crusoe, which of course makes sense, as he was disconnected from the world :)
Personal take: it has no real effect, as especially foreign spam/scam callers have no insight or interest in looking up the list. Any ban is welcome!
Hah, I was similarly surprised, especially since in Sweden where I come from, it's called the "NIX-registry" for no rhyme or reason. At least Robinson makes sense to me :)
And perhaps also (unironically) more persuadable due to the rampant commercialism and historic openness (to ideas, strangers, everything) of their society.
Speak with your local politicians to fix the issues that bothers you. They don't listen, out on the streets and protest. Same way civilians communicate with their governments in every other democracy :)
They can also legally bypass "no soliciting" signs at people's homes.
But requires grassroots organizing. Best day to start was yesterday, second-best day to start is today :)
Protests have never once seemed effective my entire life, honestly
Then time to crack open those dusty history books and start reading mate :) Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
You might still be young and haven't yet experienced it, but you're bound to at one point or another, even if you yourself might not be out on the streets protesting and agreeing with the movement(s) when that happen.
Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
> You might still be young
I'm almost 40.
Right, but just because the protests you've been to in your 40 years haven't worked in the way you wished, doesn't mean you think every single protest through all time also been unsuccessful in changing anything, right?
With that comes that protests can be successful, and the trick is to figure out why the protests you've gone to haven't been successful then, as they probably could have been, and then try to change it.
It's you, and many other people, but unless you all get together and do something, there will never be enough pressure for things to actually escalate. You cannot "stop then escalate", you put pressure until it escalates by itself. But the pressure thing is something that people need to actively participate in of course.
Everybody seems to pretend to be black Americans, whose freedoms weren't gained simply by protest, but by being beaten and having dogs sicced on them while protesting before cameras, and the shame that white people felt while watching that on television - and the pressure of "whataboutism" coming from the Russians that the USA was being judgemental about freedom while also being an apartheid state.
Other people have aped the black civil rights struggle (deemed the "civil rights" struggle), and it has amounted to middle class people walking in the streets, congratulating each other and socializing. I don't know of any accomplishments resulting from that.
Street protests were traditionally a show of force; an indication that an overwhelming number of people were on the edge of violence. They often ended in a lynching, or the burning down of a building. Black people did not have that option, so they just offered their bodies to television cameras - this was not traditional, this was new. The only model they had before that was Gandhi, and that was not a traditional Indian thing as many think, but an idea he took from Tolstoy.
Time to crack open a history book and find out why Baltimore was called Mobtown.
Walking in the street has never done anything.
These folks get it done, and embarrass us as a society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Protests_in_South_Kor...
Especially the most recent strike.
And yes, some countries still seem to have effective protests. I just don't have a lot of confidence in the power of protest to overcome the power of lobbyists
Be like the Koreans.
Google AI overview for Canada population breakdown: Canada is not homogeneous; it is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries in the world. Nearly one-quarter of people living in Canada were born outside the country.
Diversity is in fact not our strength. It keeps us fighting amongst ourselves while the lobbyists push government to do whatever they want
Not a very popular opinion, and probably going to earn me some ire, but oh well
The last few weeks it's been spammy text messages from politicians, though.
Also, it depends on the company keeping their word that they won't call you when you are on this list.
Nobody needs or wants these calls, they are always some company wanting to upsell you something you don't really need, they shouldn't be opt-out.
It only takes one example of someone on the list getting scam calls to prove they don't work. And also, no matter how many on the list are not getting calls it doesn't prove it was because of the list.
For example say you get a spam call. You notify your service provider and pay $10 to have them review the call recording to verify that its spam. An employee listens to the call and determines that it is, in fact, spam. You get a $100 reward for reporting spam and your service provider forwards the charge (+10%=$110) to the peer network where the spam call originated. They will in turn forward it to the next peer, or if the originator is a customer, charge and/or close the offending account.
If this system is mandatory then the problem will quickly sort itself out.
its also prone to mistakes which is another process that needs to be managed etc.
from a consumer standpoint this sounds super good ofc tho.
i will post my phone nr everywhere :)
Eventually the obvious spam callers would all quit and the volume would reduce to a handful of borderline cases. So the spam department wouldn't make a lot of money anymore, but the volume would be so low it would barely register.
They can't get the money from the spammers, if they could this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
I don't see a downside yet.
The problem is that enforcement of breaking the regulation is so non-existent that the criminals just place millions of calls knowing, at most, they might get a minor slap on the wrist that can be budgeted for as a "cost of doing business".
Every single call carried across the phone network is billed, and every hop along the path knows who to bill for their part of carrying the call. The billing system is the method to trace back to the originators, and then apply a fine sufficiently large enough to no longer be a cost of doing business.
But the regulators seem to have no idea that the billing system provides the traceability to find the criminals and then go after them. Instead we get things like stir/shaken that are trying to patch "authenticity" on top of a network never designed with that in mind.
There are strict barriers at the borders to ensure everybody pays their dues. But once a call is accepted, there's no control at all about where it's going to.
STIR/SHAKEN has an exception for calls passing through TDM trunks, which don't support it. This created a small industry for passing spam calls through TDM trunks. Such calls can trivially have their caller ID spoofed.
Phone companies used to be monopolies, in Europe they were owned by the government as a public service. But when they become profitable politicians betrayed their citizens and sold them. Nowadays, phone companies are a source of scams, spam and everything wrong with big corporations. And all that profits are now private instead of helping to fund the country.
Compare to how effective spam filters are on email. It's a much harder problem, but the spam costs the provider money, so they address it.
Much the same as e-mail, identity within the phone system was, historically, entirely built on trust (because only Ma Bell could make configuration changes, and they could verify that what their customer was asking them to do was legit). Those assumptions were carried through deregulation, and are very deeply entrenched in the technical design of the network. Changing them will hopefully become easier over the next few years as analogue service is turned off entirely (e.g., BT/OR in the UK are set to turn off all analogue phone service by the end of January 2027).
And there's a lot of telemarketing and scams happening across country lines.
I mean, they should still do it. It's just the first problem they'd face.
In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
There are a ton of us who are from one country, but moved to another, maybe more in EU than other places (not sure), but I really wouldn't say it's uncommon or even out of the ordinary. And I think most of us in this situation, have received/made international calls at least once in our life.
More relevant to the topic at hand, it’s extremely rare to receive an unsolicited call to an American phone number from a number outside the +1 country code. So I’m sure when an immigrant in the US gets an unknown call from their home country code, they can be pretty sure the call’s intentional and worth answering
Can't be THAT rare, can it? Isn't 15% of the current population in the US immigrants? Most of us immigrants do receive and make calls to our "mother country" every once in a while, even introverts like me. Or maybe you were excluding immigrants in that as you mention immigrants later?
Surely this would be covered by the fact that you're making calls as a "known number" not an "unknown number"?
How long you've been on Lista Robinson by the way?
1. when travelling, hotels or car rentals may need to call or update me with some information
2. friend/family member was abroad and had issues with its own phone
3. some service I was paying for had customer care in a different country
4. buying something from a seller abroad, especially in the nicher categories (like a custom made standing desk) required the seller to call me a bunch of times
There has been some waves of spammer calls, more like "fake job offer calls" or things like that, coming from cell phone numbers, and there's still some telemarketing, but it is way way lower than, say, ten years ago. Orders of magnitude .
This kind of happens today, but I think the problem is too big. You'll need to employ thousands to process all the complaints and by the time you issue a fine, the company has closed and a new one has started.
I wonder how enforceable that France thing will be
What do you report to the police if the act isn't illegal?
Any number on that list is effectively a honeypot. I guess you could even distribute an app that automates the whole process: put your number on the list, log incoming calls, aggregate the data and report them in batches large enough to catch the government's attention.
So it turns out we really do need a technical solution, which is unforgeable and easily traceable access to the telephone network. Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.
We have that, but it's insufficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN#Limitations
> Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.Quite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRACED_Act#Criticism
First, I am 100% for this legislation, but, as has been mentioned numerous times, here, it needs to be enforced.
We probably also need to marry it with a technical solution, that ensures that unverified numbers cannot be used (no spoofing possible).
Maybe a national "blacklist" of bad numbers, with a "three strikes and you're out" kind of thing.
But, human nature, that nasty old spoiler, is likely to raise its ugly head. I suspect this would be a great place for corruption to take hold.
I mean, everyone can call anyone and name any company already.
I never opt-in to anything. If I do get a call, I usually ask for the callers employee name and employee ID, their supervisors name and employee ID and the name of the company. Then I point out that it is illegal to call me and ask for them to get my name off their list.
It's been years since I've gotten any sort of telemarketing or survey call.
I haven't had too much trouble with telemarketers lately but there is a crowdsourced app in France called Saracroche that can be easily installed on your phone and blocks spam numbers by becoming the caller id service. You can also use the app to report a number and help build the huge database.
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
Even if there's no explicit laws around that, who's getting billed for the calls?
Phone calls are essentially end to end voip these days so we have the ability to deliver that metadata.
I feel like if we were designing telephones as a brand new concept today, some sort of two-way handshake would be standard, right? Like a Friend Request on nearly any other network, before DMs can be sent. Phones were invented before we thought we had a practical need for such a flow, and the human-operated switching networks helped to somewhat discourage blatant abuse.
In Norway there is a list [1] run by the state registry service (Brønnøysundregitrene). Any individual can add their phone number to the list.
Anyone cold calling is required to check that list at least once a month and there are fines for calling someone on the list.
[1] https://www.brreg.no/om-oss/registrene-vare/om-reservasjonsr...
Of course it would be abused, but a properly verified caller id system for all the big ones; the inland revenue, the major banks, would mitigate 9/10 scam calls I get each day.
(Companies with which you already have a prior relation are allowed to call / mail you though, but this is always possible to opt out of.)
[1] https://www.nixtelefon.org/
[2] https://nixa.nixadresserat.se/
I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).
I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling” The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important.
It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period.
I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.
Jokes aside, besides just outlawing telemarketing as a whole, there are "bigger" solutions that can help more, like the opt-in "do not call" registries that bunch of countries have, that actually work, and works across landline/mobile phones, regardless of OS or manufacturer :) I'm not sure those lists exists in every country, but every country I've lived in (so far) has had a variant of those, that works.
I believe iOS has a feature to force unknown numbers to declare themselves before connecting, which is less good but still a thing.
They do this to themselves if they don't leave a voicemail or can't bother to send a text. 99.9% of the scammers and spammers never do, so it's a good filter.
All it helps is filling in the scammers' pockets without being taxed for it. Also, they do cooperate with Indian authorities:
* https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cbi-busts-gurugram-ca...
* https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/fbi-tip-lea...
If the threat of an 999999 $£€ fine per call isn't enough.
I opted in to a block list and after a few months received much less calls, but still more than zero. I think that now that everyone is on the block list by default companies will have to be more careful and it will be easier to report any issue.
Canada has a national do-not-call list and that hasn't stopped me from getting hit multiple times a week by startup sales reps.
- After a call from an unknown number concludes, the phone could offer an option to the user to mark it as "spam" (blocking the number in the history would have the same effect).
- The spam mark would then go into the central database. If a phone number was marked as "spam" too many times, it would no longer be able to ring the phone (maybe it gets diverted into the "spam folder", like e-mails).
Or am I being too naive here? What are the obstacles for something like this actually happening?
Most spam calls I get is shown as legit numbers. If I call them back they will go to an innocent and unsuspecting user.
Google is already collecting this information and shows numbers as "probably spam". It is hard to enforce this harder even with collateral damage as you cannot trust the number which is signalled.
Legislation is in this case a good thing which might get the telcos to take this more seriously. This needs to be handled on an operator level. Nothing will happen without legislative incentives.
The world is run on SS7 which has a lot of problems which inertia and lacking incentives makes hard to overcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7
I wonder why Orange so far doesn't support built-in iOS SMS/Call Reporting feature with that app
Most of the above exists - the problem is political & regulatory capture constantly undermines and weakens a lot of it.
All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers.
I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".
I especially get a LOT of energy scams. They pretend to be from Endesa and they have my details somehow (some company must have provided it to them or it was leaked by a criminal employee).
They're usually calling from numbers in Mallorca or the Canaries. However in this day and age of VoIP you don't know where the hell they really are of course.
I wonder why it's so different between people. Does it depend on the region perhaps? We're all in Catalunya for what it's worth.
Maybe double-check the details, I remember for one person it didn't work at first, and the entered name had a typo, maybe it's really strict? Also try just say "Estoy en Lista Robinson" next time someone calls, makes them hang up quickly and blacklist your number at least within that company.
Do so, and 99% of telemarketers no longer have the incentive to call anybody.
I'm a telemarketer who calls you up, sells you on something, and charges your card.
What changes in that scenario?
The long term effect may be that credit card companies stop supporting remote transactions that don't use biometrics+attestation or the physical card.
This already happens almost reflexively.
> long term effect may be that credit card companies stop supporting remote transactions that don't use biometrics+attestation or the physical card
Then I drop that card and switch to a competitor who doesn't do this.
Then it's trivial to settle: that's the big bad PCI DSS violation mouthful, so two to three things will happen. One, the customer's bank will reimburse them as soon as they complain that they have not authorized the fraudulent transaction that appears on their account. Product being sent, received, sent back, etc has no bearing on this. Two, you will be audited, fined $xx,xxx monthly and/or perhaps even get banned from the PSP layer. Again, sending real products has no bearing in this. Three, well the customer's own bank will be in touch pretty soon with yours to "settle things", as banks don't particularly like to advance reimbursements to their clients for fraudulent transactions. Hope you weren't using your own bank as a PSP as they kept receipts of everything you were doing (they just weren't looking until now).
The case you describe is correct for fraud, but doesn't need any new law making "void and nulls contracts made by phone". That being epolanski's proposed fix for telemarketing.
A PCI DSS violation is indistinguisable from fraud. If you collect random credit card numbers and then transact on them, you'll be harshly punished. Actually providing a service on the side of the fraud does not make the fraud disappear.
The proposed fix to make contracts established over inbound calls void is useful as a guide for the public to clearly know their rights. And if a company still chooses to collect a payment over the phone, now that's not only a PCI DSS violation but also a theft because money changed hands from an individual to a company without a valid contract.
they can continue to send me junk mail and unsolicited texts which already gets filed correctly
friends and family only
My doctors can communicate asynchronously through the MyChart app/website (the app is fairly terrible, I would rather them just use email, but oh well) where I can read and respond when it makes sense for me. Any test that they are running where the results could be bad is already asynchronous (or I am in the hospital) so delaying a few hours in reading it doesn't seem like a big deal even if it is something bad.
Email can be unreliable and slow.
_they_ call _me_ with ideas on how to get me to pay them; when i go in, my vitals are strong
But then I remembered that most people here are Americans, and you (if you're American, I'm assuming here) don't go to the hospital/doctor just because, as it costs so much, compared to the life I'm used to, where whenever there is a health worry, you go to the doctor/hospital and they say "don't worry, it's fine" most of the time.
There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.
If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.
Again, not doubting there are people like you out there who stay up to date with vendors, but there was a lot of useful education being done in those cold call connects. That company still employs an army of BDRs doing the same thing today.
Same thing with door-to-door salespeople. Seems like in the past the percentage of people selling useful stuff like cleaning products, Avon, or yard service was higher. Now it seems to be out of town companies selling solar scams, roof inspection, or some other multi-thousand dollar thing sold via high-pressure sales.
You don't.
I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy.
Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.
The US already has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to feel no financial or regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Maybe it's America's love of "market-based solutions" that prevents of from solving this problem the way everyone else has?
Rather then actually solve the problem via regulation, the US prefers to turn it into business opportunities to make the situation suck slightly less by letting the telcos sell subscriptions to moderately effective blocking programs and an creating an ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
I live in the Netherlands, and I get several spoofed crypto-scam calls every day. I have also stopped picking up the phone for numbers I don't recognize. My own telephone number has been used to call others for a while, so I would get tons of "sorry I was busy, what did you call about?" return calls from random people when clearly I had not called them at all.
As far as I know, the only reason spoofing is even possible, is so that call centers in other countries can pretend to be calling from a local number, which.. why is that even a feature?
This feels very much like an example of "this should be run by the government" rather than letting this be run by companies.
Because I have two mobile numbers the country to the right of you and have gotten perhaps one marketing/scam call in the last decade. And those numbers have been used for 2FA for plenty of websites so surely must have leaked by now.
It is very common for each individual phone in a call center to have a direct inward dial number, but when they dial out they want the main support contact number to be displayed so you can get routed appropriately and not harass their tech support employee.
https://cyberscoop.com/fcc-robocall-action-operation-robocal...
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/fcc-proposes-new-numbering...
I briefly activated a second SIM on an MVNO that gave me a new number, and that one previously belonged to an old woman who got spam calls roughly every ten minutes. Clearly there is an issue here, but it doesn’t affect everyone equally.
I went a good 5+ years without spam calls/texts. Lately I've been getting the occasional scam recruitment text every 1-2 weeks for some reason. Hard to say why exactly, but hopefully it fades away and I get the peace again.
I heard a family member's spam call that used Trump's voice to personally ask for a donation. It made me wonder how many people might fall for that, especially people in cognitive decline. And the call was spoofed from their area code which is a dirty way to get people to answer.
It simply shouldn't be possible to spoof a call. Or spoof an IP packet origin.
Please don't forget neoliberalism is the actual economic policy of the US for the last 50ish years; with deregulation being a core tenant of neoliberalism.
within a week of closing a deal on my house i get a scam paper mail that almost looked legit asking me to pay $100 to get the title documents for my house. There aren't that many parties involved in the sale.. and its one of them (or all of them) broke the trust and bartered my information.
nearly all of them are uploading their contact list to meta and google.
THIS practice has to stop.
Also, don't buy a car, either; that also generates a significant volume of incoming scams & fraud, although most of that is in the snail mail. (But "at least" there I am the person in the transaction … I guess?
But fraud is still fraud.
Never build a business around hassling other people. It's always at risk that laws will suddenly change and destroy your livelihood; because good leadership will realize that the best approach to handling you is to exclude you from the negotiating table and abruptly cut you off.
This might come as a surprise to some people, but no one likes having their phone turned into a device that makes them listen to a commercial at random times throughout the day.
The problem is that French companies contract with telemarketing firms in France. Banning incoming calls from Morocco doesn't solve the telemarketing problem in any way. It's just a xenophobic / racist / whatever excuse to inconvenience people you don't like without making any attempt to solve the telemarketing problem.
FYI there is at least 900k+ people in France either immigrant from Marocco or with an origin and a 100k+ people with french nationality or origin living in Marocco
It's completely irrelevant how many immigrants there are, they live in France now they can just dial out to Morocco and we ban inbound calls from Morocco.
But racism and stupidity are usually good friends, so that checks out.
What I do get is spam calls from abroad. Often with a spoofed Norwegian number. Why can't operators block this? I know call centers and various things need to "spoof" a number they own, and when I myself call from abroad my Norwegian number will come from outside Norway.
But why can't they attest the numbers somehow? Owner of +47 XXXXXXX is currently not abroad. So why allow someone from the other side of the world to call me pretending to come from that number? Why does the Norwegian operators allow that?
They don't even check that the number can exist.
Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally.
You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.
There's no reason why the phone system should allow my number to be spoofed, but that's what happens. There might be some companies that benefit from having all outgoing calls shows coming from some main number, but in that case a solution where a set of numbers are allowed to pretend so be some other number could be implemented. The majority of scams I've encountered and have heard about involves someone calling you from a random number, belonging to someone that's not involved, but who are just having their number misused. I assume this is to avoid getting blocked or looking legitimate if the target looks up the number.
With the EU being one and many at the same time, all you need is to set up shop in Bulgaria and good luck prosecuting me. I'm actually in Turkmenistan anyway. There's a reason why a lot of scam calls actually come from India.
I'm 30+ and was trying to buy some wine yesterday, and was IDed and i'm clearly well over 18 yet they had to take the bottle back as I didn't carry my ID with me. Essentially the same thing with pubs/bars etc, you're clearly over 18 but there is a weird power trip yet in some raves/clubs you still see under 18s being let in.
I don't think companies big enough to just shrug the fine away resort to much telemarketing here.
And I don't think something being hard to enforce is reason enough to not do anything about it. If we truly care about something, we can always find a way.
Say minimum wage is 12euro/hour, and declining a call takes about a minute of your attention, so this is worth at least 20cent.
Instead of just "Answer" and "Hang-Up", there should be a gov't enforced "charge caller 20cent" option.
This would have no impact on 'real' calls, nobody would charge their Mother and if someone is tacky enough to charge their GP or mechanic they could just be billed for it, and it would hardly be worth someone's trouble to try to steal a phone to call themselves to collect 20c, but it would totally ruin the economics of these spam calls.
The same should exist for emails.
That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
That is really great. I've had a lot of trouble with calls from spoofed numbers a couple of years ago (it ended when I installed a scam blacker on my phone), and when I looked into it at that time, my impression was that phone companies couldn't block spoofed numbers. On the other hand, if the scam blocking app can block them, there clearly must be some way to detect them.
Phone companies need to do a better job protecting their customers against this abuse.
The fact that the phone companies haven't done this or much else yet goes to show how little they care.
E.g. in Finland the relevant regulation (https://traficom.fi/files/media/regulation/M_28_L_EN.pdf) says (in section 10):
> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.
Compared for example to email where when you want to send email to somebody, you discover its MX settings on the DNS level and then send it directly and the receiver can verify are you allowed to send those emails. With phone calls it's basically a network of interconnects so I'm sending the call directly to my provider but that provider to reach the destination has multiple steps and they have to trust each other with the numbers signalling. Compare it to a regular snail mail where everybody can write anything as a sender.
What most of the providers are switching to now is for enduser the case is if the phone number that you want to signal is not registered with us, you are not allowed to signal it. Which is fine and covers most of the cases but imagine that you are a business and have multiple providers And you have boughta number block with one provider and another one is offering you better minute price for outgoing calls. Or you want to have a forwarding to your cell phone number. Or you want to signal your number when you're calling prospects from CRM. The regulation usuall differs from country to country, but most allow you to signal any number that you own with any provider that you use. And this is correct, but the problem is verification.
This is good but not far enough. They should not show up as "private number" they should simply now show up at all. After some time, any networks that even allow spoofed outgoing calls should be disconnected from the phone system.
And if that is a company that offers service of lending number for such calls, they deserve to suffer too
It’s free, open source, all my family uses it for about 2 months now and it just works.
Btw, if it’s creator read this : thanks A LOT ! :)
https://saracroche.org/fr/
Though to be fair it is helped by the fact that businesses have mandatory phone prefixes to use when doing telemarketing in France.
Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
The SMS are getting out of hand too, they send you a pre-recorded MP3 in addition to the picture too. At least they don't have enough information to know I don't have a letterbox.
> Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
Yeah, more and more French people are getting annoyed at it, esp. when companies always say "no worries no payment info leaked". I don't care, I can change my credit card but I can't change my personal informations.
And literally last week it's Bloctel that leaked! It's the government managed list of phone numbers that don't want to receive telemearketing calls, where anyone can add its own number to be excluded. Great idea on paper, goldmine of a data leak.
It's a number out of not so big pool of numbers. Spam caller can iterate every number in the country in a month
I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.
Assuming you can get access to their phone, only allowing calls from saved numbers would probably be the best solution, assuming she doesn't get random calls from hospitals and the like. If she's still using a landline though, that's a tough one to solve.
You can in fact just do that. Whether or not you should is another question.
I hate that phrasing. It was weaponised by teachers in my youth. It's still used by some people to close doors and remove options without good reason. I'll make fun of it whenever I can.
> In context, me saying 'You can just do that' means 'You should do that'
That's not very consistent. You wrote that whether they should was another question.
> (barring there being good reason, which I haven't seen so far)
I disagree with you. Someone being autonomous is a good reason for not wanting to take a decision for them against their will.
It follows that:
> It's still used by some people to close doors and remove options without good reason
This didn't happen here. No doors were closed without a good reason, because there is one.
Tell that to society at large. No man is an island.
It's a sensible default and should be enabled as such. They wouldn't know the difference if it already were. If they can articulate a specific and valid reason as to why they don't want it that way, then fair. It should be an option open to change. It simply being 'impolite' is somewhere between 'open to interpretation in specific cases' and 'wrong'. Many aspects of what is normally called politeness are constructs that have no or limited use in the current world. This is one of them. My conclusion is thus that their reason is invalid.
I'm making some assumptions. If any are counter to the reality of the situation, then there might be good reasons not to change it.
Edit to your edit:
> That's not very consistent. You wrote that whether they should was another question.
Emphasis is a common literary tool.
> This didn't happen here. No doors were closed without a good reason, because there is one.
I disagree on the reason given being good.
Okay, that's what you probably implied in your first reply, and I think that's what's actually interesting to discuss.
I don't think not acting against someone's will is a question of mere politeness. In social care, it's often considered mistreatment to do so.
For instance if it is not considered that an adult who's not otherwise autonomous can't express consent and doesn't want to take their pills, social workers normally shouldn't (and legally can't) force them to take them, even if it's good for them.
At least where I live.
Not all act against someone's will is mistreatment, but it definitely goes beyond politeness.
The reason given by the person in question was politeness. I'm not talking about whether or it's polite to change this setting.
> For instance if it is considered that an adult who's not autonomous can express consent and doesn't want to take their pills, social workers normally shouldn't (and legally can't) force them to take them, even if it's good for them.
That's because 'I want to die' is a valid reason. Or at least it should be. I doubt that social workers actually come to their conclusions from that framework. They probably do it like you said; simply acting against autonomy is itself bad within their framework, but this is inconsistent with society's behaviour at large.
Similarly, if GP's grandmother's reason was 'I want to receive random spam calls and calls from telemarketers' or 'I have friends overseas who might not be able to reach me', then I'd have nothing to say. Those are valid reasons. On the other hand, perceived potential impoliteness, which actually isn't, is not.
Yeah, I don't think that's a good reason neither. Now, it not being a good reason is not a pass to act against her will either.
I think OP needs to convince her that it's a bad reason first.
> That's because 'I want to die' is a valid reason. Or at least it should be
That's a very reasonable reason not to want to take a pill, but that's not even necessarily the actual reason. Often the reason is completely unknown. Possibly the person refusing the pills doesn't really know why they are refusing it / doesn't even have good reasons. The actual reasons behind the refusal doesn't theoretically matter much in whether they should be forced to take the pills. They should only matter to convince them that they should take the pill for their own good. (the reality is probably more "dirty" than that though)
> simply acting against autonomy is itself bad within their framework, but this is inconsistent with society's behaviour at large.
Possibly, but, depending on what you mean:
* society at large acting against autonomy isn't necessarily a good thing / a good justification for doing it. Society at large needs a fix.
* fighting fire with fire is not necessarily the right approach
Given that they're working of incomplete information or in otherwise difficult situations, it's understandable why they've taken the shortcut to 'just don't work against autonomy'. The reality that they're taking another shortcut through dirtier solutions doesn't surprise me.
> * society at large acting against autonomy isn't necessarily a good thing / a good justification for doing it. Society at large needs a fix.
Society definitely needs a fix in this area, but I'm unsure whether or not it's viable or even reasonable to expect complete autonomy (or even as complete as one can imagine until it starts bumping into other rights or major problems. Compare freedom of speech). It's probably something worth thinking about.
When it happens to me, they're met with silence or "GTFO" after the 3rd question. I am impolite.
Add in the fact that the person on the other end isn't even a human (it's not a human spam calling you; at best it's an automated call which get dumped on a human when it connects), and the whole thing gets even more absurd.
Fun fact, Bloctel, the service that was supposed to allow us to ask not to be harassed, leaked last week... https://www.universfreebox.com/article/596529/piratage-de-bl...
So banning it is great, but you still need to enforce that law.
Especially on landlines mostly used by older people.
4-5 a day here.
Maybe I'd need an app that recognises the scam call, and then lets an AI waste their time.
The government tried to control this with an official (no call list) that is usually ignored by companies who use third parties and disposable mobile numbers to do their dirty work.
Telcos have the power to control that but they are usually an internal mess and this is low in their priority list as they consider the voice calls a lost battleground.
The second implementation (AFAIK, we are in the 3rd now) of that no-call list was quite successful in pressuring companies. It can be done.
- There was already an easy statewide system to opt-out of telemarketing calls
- Having always been on that system, I still got many scam calls that sound like telemarketing
So it's great to have a ban rather than an opt-out, but this will not solve the issue of scam calls
I was on this system too and used to get scam calls too (they would come in waves, like 3-4 calls in a week, nothing for a month, then another 3-4 calls). I stopped receiving calls from reputable companies (that probably abode by Bloctel's list) when I signed up though.
I haven't seen one in decades, and even then it was usually some pamphlets or books to support a cause or the other.
On the phone (Italy), OTOH, I used to get daily scam call to buy "Amazon stocks" or change utility providers or install water filters. That seems to have massively faded out due to new regulations tho.
Norway.
Only because you have not been profiled as lone and vulnerable, doesn't mean the practice doesn't exist:)
My local C of E cathedral sent out a mailshot during COVID asking for donations with a range from £50 - £1000 options on the card (yes, really). I've never had anything like that from JWs.
I get visits from the local air ambulance team looking for donations but I'd classify them as a charity, not a salesman. Even though the person is under contract (employed) to do the task of going door to door, it would be a charitable engagement and not a sale. I asked the last guy if he got commission - he said no.
I think your issue is with religion, not sales people, which is what this article is about.
Because then a marketing person could say "but I'm only trying to make you aware of $PRODUCT; I'm not trying to sell it!"
The guy from the local baptist church gave me a some book about being saved by Jesus (it had instructions on how to pray I think? dunno threw it away) but he didn't ask me for any money.
By contrast, the Lithuanian girl who was trying to sell religious books (no idea who they were - some encyclopedias? it was very odd) was trying to sell them to me (nice girl, had come to this country and was living in a dorm? was confused why UK taps had hot/cold separately instead of a combined tap). The guys scamming me about a roof repair were definitely not doing it free. Nor were the guys trying to get me to switch internet provider, nor the guy offering me window replacement and double glazing, nor the woman selling me "lucky lavender", nor the guy selling sponges and cleaning products for tiny amounts of change.
That's what I was saying - people who ask for money or donations are salesmen. People who don't, aren't.
Nuisance religious callers and general unsolicited visitors is another topic. The article is about sales calls, not general nuisances.
So someone calling you to "make you aware of $X" does not count as sales?
And they would be permitted to call you?
I hope they fix this loophole quickly!
If the business ignores the rules, there is little that can be done legally.
UK law differentiates between businesses, charities and individuals. I do not know how it is done in other countries, but in the UK you can't pretend that a lone individual ringing you is a "marketing" call, no matter how much you dislike the other person or their topic. If it is a person ringing on behalf of a business, it's a business or marketing call, and therefore subject to TPS.
I do not know how registered charities (not businesses) relate to TPS. I haven't received a call from a charity that I can remember, but my grandma once did get a call from the RSPB whose telehandler seemed oblivious to her having suffered a stroke with speech difficulties, and subsequently arranged for a boatload of bird seed and pamphlets for her to distribute (which would be impossible!).
TPS also does not apply to individuals, which is why any individual can lawfully ring someone else, unless the calls are repeated (harassment), but again that doesn't fall under TPS.
You can become "ex-directory" to stop your number being listed, but this doesn't stop organisations just iterating phone numbers incrementally hoping to find someone.
I do not know if you're in the UK, but you can see the definitions of problematic calls and what you can do according to OFCOM here: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/scam-calls-and...
For visitors to your door, you can put a sign up. I have. It stops all visitors. I also have a video doorbell so I can decide whether I bother answering the door.
* Jehovah's Witnesses
* people offering to steam clean my roof/drive
* the local Fibre company trying to sign me up.
* well known scammers who claim to be on some kind of prison release scheme selling overpriced kitchen/household tat
So phone companies could just offer to block those prefixes - it would be a trivial solution to the problem. But it's not an option [1], so either they make good money from those calls, or there's some other hurdle or legal issue.
Either way the new law could (in addition to making it illegal for companies to make spam calls) also simply have mandated that network operators block the known ones. Too bad.
[0] https://lemagdelaconso.ouest-france.fr/dossier-2418-demarcha...
[1] https://communaute.orange.fr/t5/mon-telephone-par-internet-e...
If it had 25% unsolicited calls, it would be a bad way to communicate, and in the US it's more like 95%. You could cut the majority of spam calls and I'd still associate phone calls as mostly a waste of time.
I heard they get paid by how many numbers they dial out -- NOT by making a connection to a live human being.
The fact that the Gov't cannot effectively block all these calls shows how insecure our phone system really is.
When you buy a car in the US, there's an entire industry of psuedo-scammers that scrapes the new vehicle registration data and will send you letters soliciting you to buy a "warranty" with horrible terms and pricing, which are intentionally crafted to look like they come from the dealership, manufacturer, or a more reputable insurance company. This is just one example, the only silver lining is that junk mail has existed for long enough that even most senior citizens understand that they need to be skeptical of anything they receive.
SMS and Email is a constant adversarial game where you will be inundated with scams, advertising, political solicitations, and all other manner of noise as you try to combat it with spam filters, blocklists, hidemyemail, burner addresses all the while hoping you don't miss an important communication from someone you actually care about.
As for phones, scam calls and telemarketing has gotten so bad that most people will not answer a call from an unknown number unless they're expecting to hear from someone (e.g. doctor, mechanic). But lots of older people still hold onto the unfortunately outdated cultural norm that you always pick up the phone when it rings, and that's one of the most common attack vectors for scamming the elderly.
I think it's critical that people understand that it does NOT have to be like this. The US has a business regulatory regime that biases towards letting an entity get away with pretty much anything, and alternatives exist even among capitalist countries.
I've got it configured to block on a country basis, with previous calls and contacts as a whitelist - that works for me.
The U.S. already has very strict rules against unsolicited calls, yet I still get around 20 spam calls a day saying things like "press 2 to be connected" or offering some "$64K loan."
At the same time, I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.
The same is true for text messages. In 2023, the U.S. introduced stricter regulations, and companies like Twilio responded with very strict anti-spam rules. The rules are now so restrictive that we are forced to stopped using Twilio for text important notification to our my own team.
Yet I still receive dozens of spam text messages every week.
So the question is whether the regulations can actually be enforced against the people who are already ignoring them.
Yet you receive 20 spam calls a day through a known company, namely your phone provider. The way to solve this is to forcibly draft the providers into this; for example: any time you receive a spam call, you can dial a special *# number after hanging up. This message will have the effect of crediting $5 on your next phone bill, and allows the provider to recoup that loss from the originating provider, etc, all the way to the caller itself. The first company in the chain not cooperating in this scheme is out $5 per spam call through their network.
Of course, something like this needs the usual protection against abuse, but that's equally manageable.
I am from India and I use Truecaller premium to filter calls. It has become a big head-ache, making us to miss important calls
I had no idea this existed on iOS (there may be an equivalent on Android), and I was very skeptical about it, but it has turned spam calls into a non-issue for me.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/screen-and-block-call...
We have a ban on telemarketing calls regarding insurance in Switzerland. But we still get them.
So what happens is that insurance agents (which are required to be licensed) don't call them selves. Instead they use 3rd party call centers outside the country which make the calls. They "warmup" the clients to get a meeting in which the agent then in a visit can make the sale.
For law enforcement to punish these people and revoke their licenses they would need to do costly sting operation which they can only do so much.
This is useful only for the few who care enough to operate legally. I activated a white list mode that prevents any call from a number that isn't in my current phone book because there's a constant flood of calls from regular mobile numbers (prefixed 06), most likely from spoofing. The phone network is unbearable in France without a white list mode.
But "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is another angle. Because giant corporations may not need to make cold calls. It's the small bootstrapped startup that does.
Hopefully lawmakers will include provisions for small businesses making well-researched calls. Because otherwise, this is just one more way of pulling up the ladder.
This gotta be an outdated way to get business, but regardless of whether this would work on a small scale (havent tried yet) would this be considered spam aswell?
Spam has taken over every form of communication, but luckily there are easy ways to stop it.
I use AdGuard as ad blocker, blocks ads as a browser extension and ads on websites and apps as a mobile app. For telemarketers I use Should I Answer, it works GREAT. Never ever receive a single call from a telemarketer, they all get blocked automatically.
Not sure if this will hold for too long, because there is always a way, but still.
However, the only way to solve this I believe is that you could once you get an unsolicited call to press a combination like ##01, and automatically this is passed to an agency that deals to punish whoever is behind the call in real time. At least if they call from a national number.
I really don't understand. Isn't the government listening to all the phone calls? Wasn't that the disclosure like 2 decades ago.
The very first time someone tries that dumb Yahoo security scam, the number should be automatically disconnected. I really don't get it
Also I assure you, scammers aren't honestly filling out I-9s and W-4s adding up all the Western Union receipts. They're scamming the IRS as well
It's damn near proven that the US representative branch doesn't give a shit about its electorate, within margin of error.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43281052
yours and mine.
Stating that doesn’t make it so. The US government doesn’t “represent” its people any more than the Chinese government does. Quite possibly less so.
Even if all would follow the ban (witch they wont as i get frequent calls and am on a legally dont call list) thee is the inherent problem of foreign spammers also often masquerading as local numbers.
If noe positive thing the twlecompanies would het it å bit easier filtrering and the amount would be less.
Credits for this incredible independent app, available on third-party stores. Even better, the dev has added OpenStreetMap information about legit enterprises calling you.
https://saracroche.org
(of course its better to forbid them)
As long as service providers are not held accountable for, and they let the scammers spoof the caller ID, the problem will not be solved
__then you start investigating, and see where these call centers come from and who they are tied with..__
You would need to put your number in a special register to opt-out of these calls.
I don't know if this ever worked or not, but giving your number to government feels odd to me so I never signed up. It's a lot more simple to just outright block unknown callers.
* https://nixtelefon.org/
https://youtu.be/1HoU17dIEos?is=8giBMS_TRJEvmzM3
I'm really curious to see what impact the new law will have on this scourge.
There's absolutely a real, qualitative difference between contact from a real human being who respects everyone's time and has done actual research, and someone who is just playing the numbers game and blasting as many people as they can (regardless of how "warm" the leads are).
It's a bit of a spectrum, but if someone has taken the time to handwrite and research an email or call, I'll at least try to give them the courtesy of a response.
I admit they are done pretty well, it took 2-3 different calls (accross months) for me to notice I wasn't talking to a real person !
Then a spammer has to persuade you to add them to contacts before they spam you
I'm in North America and most of the calls I get are using local numbers, often spoofed from (I suspect) South and South East Asia. Good luck enforcing Canadian or American law in literal slave camps on the China-Myanmar border.
The call centers themselves are in Morocco but the calls never come from +212.
"just"?
Or is it deliberately done because it is cheaper?
Why not have these in France proper giving jobs to French people?
> Or is it deliberately done because it is cheaper?
Well, of course it is.
> Why not have these in France proper giving jobs to French people?
Because you would have to pay them French wages, which would make no economical sense. If anything, the fact that most of that industry is abroad probably makes it easier to pass such a law.
So, same for any profession. Why have any jobs in the EU at all then?
As for international scam calls, not sure what the situation is in France and what measures they have in place, but one relatively easy way is to block international callers from spoofing a local caller ID, which decimated these calls in Finland a couple of years ago: https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...
Anecdotally I’ve not heard as much about it being a problem in other places such as the UK.
We broke everything up and let any old player enter the telco world over here which broke the entire sanctity of the security of the telephone network.
I still get constant unsolicited sales calls but these are technically legal.
Personally I've benefited 100x more by using Truecaller but with time the app has been enshittified with weird features. That and my migration to iOS which has questionable support for Truecaller has made me the target of spammers again.
Furthermore many telemarketers are now using Whatsapp bypassing such regulations.
I fear the ban will just make them use random numbers we can't block
Even worse, the PACs known to be scams where 98% of their proceeds just go to known, named party insiders. Even if I were a Democrat, they'd just have been preying on me and playing me for a fool.
-----
> After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network's FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-08-02/spam-texts...
https://pacspam.org/vendors
The problem is that many of the calls come from abroad (and most will move there), so there is no easy way to enforce this requirement. It is only if someone files a complaint ... and the authorities track the number abroad ... and match it to a French provider ... that it will work.
Anyway it is better than nothing.
I stopped to reply to calls that I do not have in my contacts. If it is important someone will leave a message or send an SMS/WhatsApp
In a sense, it's good to have someone try to tackle an actual problem (I know it's a pain to have to pick up the phone several times a day because of telemarketer. Especially when you're retired and have nothing to do all day than calling friends and discuss how you're going to spend the money from millennials salaries, share buybacks by the employers of millennials, and rents from the kids of millenials who'll never get a house, a job, or a retirement ever.)
I suppose we'll have to wait a few decade for a government with a majority to pick up other small topics (climate change, debt wall, increasing inequalities, geopolitics, demographics, water shortages, draughts, food tension, and, oh, the general despair of the generation born after 2000.)
But, okay, fine, in the meantime, getting rid of unsolicited phone calls is still _something_.
It's a shame the law will not actually, hum, you knows, stop the unsolicited phone calls (they come from abroad and the callers could not care less), and so the retirees with a landline will not see a difference, and will do the natural thing, and vote for Trumpists even more than they expected to anyway.
At least we don't get political ads on the phone...
This shit needs to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192829
Canada tried this years ago and it has barely made a dent. What we really need is a secure telephone system but our regulators refuse to consider doing so
The telephone, like postal mail, email, http and a myriad of other protocols suffers from a lack of transaction costs. Why is there so much junk postal mail? Because the post office has discounted rates for such mail.
Likewise, back when there were "long distance" tolls (nevermind the 10 cent SMS), there was less telemarketing because it was more expensive to operate call centers in each domain. I'm old enough to remember the sound of a phone ringing as evoking a happy "who could it be?" instead of "what scam is bothering me now?"
Granted, nobody is going to rewrite all the old protocols to bolt on a payment clearinghouse. And legislation is weak against a large pool of relatively minor miscreants since it requires expensive prosecutorial time to enforce, either directly in criminal law or indirectly by regulating major gateways' compliance activities.
To reduce unsolicited commercial contacts, people need to learn to accept expensive communication patterns. Currently we all already pay with the shadow work of curating contact lists, missing important calls because ringer off, deleting and marking as spam junk texts, etc. This shadow work could be reduced by accepting that a communique costs $X, with the knowledge that all the $X spent by others contacting oneself will offset one's own outbound costs.
We have been chided over and over and over again on HN by the fine citizens of the E.U. that unsolicited telemarketing calls are purely an American problem, are completely unheard of in Europe, and that this never happens in "civilized" nations with "a functioning legal system."
Oo
(and I am french)
(I am jesting. Fuck telemarketing.)
Teaches you grit, rejection, tonality, relationship-building, and the elation of closing a sale all-in-one.
It's also one of the few outbound marketing channels that isn't yet swallowed up by Meta/Google, and can be done by any scrappy teenager.
Unpopular opinion here, I'm sure.
But not everyone wants to be sorta legal.
Other than that, the business needs the call receipient to opt in. They can dop this on a webform, a physical form, or by initiating the contact and, say, leaving a message for the vendor asking to be called back. It means the business needs to concetrate on avenues other than cold calling for getting themselves in front of a prospect.