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FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections

(docs.fcc.gov)
379 points impish9208 | 1 comments | 25 Aug 25 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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zeta0134 ◴[25 Aug 25 18:43 UTC] No.45017407[source]▶
At this point I'm firmly of the opinion that "leak this 10 digit code and anyone on the planet can call me relentlessly" is just a broken model. Maybe that worked better when the calls carried a significant cost, but clearly the scammers are able to do this sort of thing at scale.

In practice of course, my phone is 100% permanently in "do not disturb" mode and does not ring at all unless I've added you to my contact list. Which means the scammer, already pretending to live in small town rural USA (where they most certainly are not) has to correctly guess the number of one of my relatives before my pocket actually rings. It also means I'm unreachable for anything actually important that isn't in my contact list. That's an annoying price.

I'm not sure what the correct end solution is, but the current solution seems to be very broken.

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Terr_ ◴[25 Aug 25 19:29 UTC] No.45017924[source]▶
I suggest the caller stakes a little bit of money as a deposit that is, by default, returned to them within a day... But an angered recipient can retaliate by choosing to seize the deposit.

I think this works for many situations:

1. Between amicable friends and businesses/clients, nothing changes.

2. If there was a normal relationship, but one side starts unfairly seizing call-deposits... Well, maybe it's time to no longer have them as a vendor/customer/friend.

3. Spammers either eat the additional cost, or they have to work harder to make sure they only call people who are unlikely to retaliate.

_____

There's still a problem where someone asks to be called (the number needn't actually be theirs) as a way to trick the caller into losing money... But even then, I think it represents an improvement over what we've got now.

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1. drysart ◴[26 Aug 25 04:07 UTC] No.45022164[source]▶
> There's still a problem where someone asks to be called (the number needn't actually be theirs) as a way to trick the caller into losing money... But even then, I think it represents an improvement over what we've got now.

That's basically the purpose toll free area codes used to serve; and there's no reason that same sort of solution (with some adjustments for the modern era) couldn't continue to be used under a deposit based system. Just add some universal prefix, some unused country code for instance, that can be dialed for a "no deposit" call; and then give control to the recipient whether they want to accept such calls.

Or, well, since most modern dialing is done by submitting the whole number at once rather than digit-by-digit; it could even be a suffix. If your number is +12125551212, maybe something like +12125551212*0 could indicate a "no deposit" call. I mean, the whole suffix space could even be turned into something akin to a password so instead of just opening up accepting "no deposit" calls from the entire world, you might only accept them from specific whitelisted suffixes; and if someone leaks one and you start getting spam calls on it, you can just turn off that suffix. There might need to be some provider-enforced fail2ban to prevent wardialing those suffixes, but it doesn't sound like it'd be too difficult.