Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

My friend works for a big telco and is the guy fixing this problem for them. They have amazing powers of deception when they need it. New numbers can be conjured up at any time.

The new fad among wireless carriers here in the US is to route what they think are spam calls to a fake voicemail box.

Voicemail that is left in this generic voice mail box never makes it to their customer and the customer is completely unaware that some of their calls have been diverted.

Better yet, route all calls for all disconnected/unassigned numbers in their part of the numbering plan to it. It would probably kill robocalling overnight.

Wow. There should be a way to opt out of this, at least. Isn't this a violation of common carrier laws?

Then suddenly, calls from consenting callers to consenting receivers are labeled as spam and blocked. What can you do about it? Nothing. Switch to email, I guess. Oh wait, same problem.

reductio ad absurdum: we're back to Pony Express

Simple: shoot the messenger.

I called out email because email actually has this problem. It's not reductio ad absurdum if it's true.

Not sure about all carriers, but on mine I still get a push notification when a call gets blocked blocked by the spam filter.

Bulk scams by mail are at least less common because mail fraud is investigated pretty seriously and results in federal felony charges. Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher. Unfortunately individuals are still sometimes targeted.

Who tells them the number is disconnected? That would have to come from the shady carrier enabling this stuff.

> Not to mention the cost of initiation is much higher

This is the thing we screwed up for email and phone (after per call fees dropped to zero).

It's not rocket science to create systems that net to zero for common usage (balanced in-bound vs out-bound), but charge an arm and a leg for bulk senders.

The physical mail spammers know to only use deceptive tricks, like "FINAL NOTICE" or pretending to be affiliated with you using some publicly available information. I have not yet seen one dare to full-on lie, because there would be real consequences.

If a scammer puts "FINAL NOTICE" on a solicitation they mailed with no prior relationship, I do still report it as fraud. But that's probably wishful thinking.

Until you're running a file server or the equivalent. There has to be some way for a willing recipient to zero-rate or reverse-charge the responses to their requests. The Internet gets this wrong.

You sound like an advocate for telemarketers. Am I correct?

I doubt very seriously that the pool of people who have knowingly and intentionally and explicitly opted in/consented to telemarketing - that is, without any dark pattern involvement and with a clear and unmbiguous consent experience, is very large. In fact I think it is infinitesimal because I can’t recall seeing such a consent UX- they ALL involve dark patterns. And if you pair that with “marketer who diligently implements all state & FTC requirements and does timely and accurate processing of removal requests, I think that the 3 relationships left are web app UX testers.

I think the world would be a better place without telemarketing or email marketing. Maybe a “one email per year” limit per merchant who you have actually paid money to and not opted out of.

The pony express put significant cost burden on the sender per message, which is inherently self regulating.

I’m not OP, but my worry is about the false positives. I have real inbound calls and emails getting detected as spam all the time. Luckily my VoIP provider has a spam box I can look in, but at this point I just have to go through them every so often to make sure I’m not missing anything important.

If the telecoms can perfectly predict the telemarketers, then I’d love it. But in practice how often is this going to block people I know from calling me? Probably not never, and then we just have to give up on phones as a reliable method of communication.

I’ll take my chances. 99%of the people I want to talk to either email/text me first or are already in my contacts list (which I’m not really all that picky about). I’ll accept that failure rate.

Sounds like a shadow-ban.

Isn't "emailing you first" just kicking the can down the road? What stops spam emails getting through to you? (Besides the exact kind of heuristic filtering you seem to be objecting to, that is.)

I hate to say this.. but I find this very difficult to believe..

I don't think any telco puts effort into stopping spammers.. I'd like them to but I don't think it's something they either can care or legally capable of fixing.

Exactly. Many people want to be able to receive phone calls from their doctors, airlines and schools. These types of B2C calls are presumably most likely to be marked as spam in the event of false positives.

Email spam filters have the advantage of being able to see the content of the message, so hopefully they're more accurate.

The disadvantage of email is that it doesn't work for urgent use cases, like Disneyland calling the parent of a lost child.

I work for a telco, though not in that department. We put a lot of effort into trying to block spam calls, and adapting systems to the newest tricks. The reason why the results aren't better is (I'm being told) a combination between IP telephony making reliable source tracing all but impossible, and common carrier laws which mean that you can't block a call unless you're 100% certain it's a scam, otherwise you open yourself up to being sued.

Disneyland will have a handful of IPs and phone numbers, and I'd bet my hat will have a team aggressively calling any ISP or provider that flags them as spam.

Even better : ignore unknown numbers, real unknown people can leave voicemail.

(Hopefully leaving voicemail keeps out of reach of spammers, I guess it's just too expensive for them ?)

I imagine that many of us would gladly accept blocking call with a much lower certainty. Maybe we need an audio catcha.

Thank you for the insight.