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706 points ortusdux | 2 comments | | HN request time: 1.754s | source
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bsdice ◴[] No.42141280[source]
The scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this day. And has been for 10 years.

A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable.

It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as number@t-mobile.de for example, while a spam call would say fakenumber@01012.com.

Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away.

It works great to this day, because I never published it.

replies(7): >>42142020 #>>42142297 #>>42142911 #>>42144101 #>>42144804 #>>42145235 #>>42168051 #
1. globalise83 ◴[] No.42142297[source]
I have both a German mobile number and landline number, and have never once received a scam and spam call on either in the 8 years I have been living in Germany. I guess it is a problem of having a public contact number on a website.
replies(1): >>42150839 #
2. filmor ◴[] No.42150839[source]
Depends on the prpvider as well. Vodafone seems to have (had?) zero qualms about passing my old landline number to multiple shady call centers after taking over Unitymedia. The number was not known to anyone but my parents and I opted out of erverything I could find, still for some time got weekly calls. I haven't had that woth Telekom so far.

Spam calls (and even more so: SMS) have gotten much more frequent on my mobile number in the last 2 years. But in this case, it's a number that has been in active use for the last decade and has by now probably been in multiple data leaks... :/