Scam Calls

I just got a scam call from someone claiming to be a Columbus, OH detective. He called another family member five minutes before me. She didn’t answer, and he left a voicemail. Yet another family member called the number from a payphone (yes, they still exist), and the number isn’t in service. Hopefully, the scammer ditched the burner after I called him out for scamming.

I have a suggestion for ending these scam calls (and solicitation calls too):

1. Stop allowing phone companies to pass along spoofed numbers. The phone companies have to bill their customers, so they know the precise phone number making the call.

2. Charge 25 cents per dialed call. The called party gets 20 cents. The remaining nickel is shared by the phone companies involved. This fee would be waived if the calling number is in the contacts of the called phone or if the called phone selects a button to waive the fee and accept the call.

Let market forces do the regulation that the government and the phone companies find it impossible to do.

I think most people would like the idea of getting a major portion of their phone bill paid by scammers and telemarketers.

Wait till you receive a robo call displaying your personal fone number on the fone you are holding...

solus said:

Wait till you receive a robo call displaying your personal fone number on the fone you are holding...

Click to expand...

That has happened to me with both landline AND a Yahoo email addy. It's weird getting a SPAM email from "myself".

Spoofing the 'from' address on an e-mail is cake - you can make an e-mail 'come from' any address you want. Even better is these idiot scammers sending out the 'we hacked your account and turned your webcam on while you were on the dirty site wink wink' e-mails demanding random amounts of money paid in bitcoin. They use the same thing and are not actually sending from the recipients e-mail, but spoofing the from address. They also like to send to totally random addresses that never have and never will exist. My e-mail server is configured to drop e-mail to invalid recipients into a 'catchall' account for deletion so that sending to an invalid address does not generate a NDR - it's kind of comical some of the addresses they come up with.

Spoofing phone numbers takes a little more doing. I know how it works when you are dealing with a phone system connected to a PRI, but I'm not sure how the spammers/scammers are doing it.

It would be nice if there was a * code you could dial after hanging up to collect the call metadata and deliver it somewhere for investigation. With today's telephone infrastructure almost certainly being 100% digital, I can't imagine it would be that hard for every call stream to contain every detail about it - from the exact port at the local CO that the call originated from, to every switch, backbone or other link it hopped through, right down to the exact port that the call went out at the destination CO. That is if that data isn't already there. If they would actually start investigating, finding and prosecuting these fraudsters, one would hope it would start to go away.

May be some action from the FCC.


Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), warned phone service providers that if they don't crack down on fraudulent caller IDs from robocallers his agency will step in with regulation. Pai sent letters to major wireless carriers in November demanding that they adopt industry-wide frameworks to crackdown on the practice of "spoofing

Report: Americans got 26.3 billion robocalls last year, up 46 percent from 2017

Americans are now getting so many robo-calls on a regular basis that many are simply choosing not to answer the phone altogether.
That’s one big takeaway from a report released Tuesday by Hiya, a Seattle-based spam-monitoring service that analyzed activity from 450,000 users of its app to determine the scope of unwanted robo-calling — and how phone users react when they receive an automated call.

VPN's...pick a server, any server, anywhere in the world...go ahead, I dare ya...I double dog dare ya!

Scam callers are sometimes entertaining at a certain point.

Not in my experience. A while back, someone I know who was dealing with some real world issues was the subject of a few of these scam calls. The result was horrifying—even though no one was ultimately taken in by the calls.

These calls are not just nuisances. They can have genuine negative impacts on lives apart from and without any money changing hands fraudulently. Please don’t take them so lightly. Thank you.