FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections

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.

As others have alluded, there are unknown third parties who must call you (and you would want their call). For example, the hospital: something has happened with a loved one. We can probably solve this problem with certification. Show me your medical license (or hospital scale equivalent) and you get to make unsolicited calls. Then we allow people to select certified unsolicited calls by category: medical, financial, civic, etc.

Even in this case, I'd rather get a text message. A mere call doesn't provide any context and is not informative. Maybe your loved one showed up in their ER or maybe it's a billing issue.

The text message should explain the nature of the call and which number to call in reply.

> The text message should explain the nature of the call and which number to call in reply.

That’s basically how most SMS scams work.

Are phone calls less scammy?

It seems strange to me that the solution would be “mimic SMS scams”.