The solution is accessible law, not better anti-fraud tooling. Introduce a spam / fraud button, using it requires your pin and costs $10, but obliges your telecom provider to record the call (preferably including a few minutes before you hit the button), email you a signed recording and if found to be spam deposit $100 onto your account. Your provider may then hand the fee +10% for himself to whatever network the call in question entered his own network from. The last cooperative network in the chain gets stuck with the fee, forcing them to either reclaim the money from the malicious customer, the next network in the chain (in court) or pony up the money themselves.

Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.

One of the biggest concerns I have with phone scams is that the people most vulnerable are the elderly, and they don’t have the knowledge on how to block these calls (if a technical solution is the only option).

And further to that, the elderly are also the ones who cannot block unknown numbers, because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from (they may have a pool of numbers but it’s not reasonable to add all of them to contacts). Blocking all unknowns would block these important health related calls as well.

I no longer can answer my phone. I get at least 20-40 spam/scam calls per day, and many are legitimate companies calling for loans and refinancing offers, which started after I got a home loan. I cannot seem to stop them from calling, and even though my phone number is listed in National Do Not Call Registry for many years, it hasn't worked at all. The only relief is that on my iPhone, I was able to block all calls not found in my contacts (ie whitelist phone numbers only).

Now, my only worry is that I might get a call from someone who I need to talk to, but is blocked and I won't even know it. For example, what if I get an emergency call from police/fire/hospital and I won't even know it. I also tried using "Screen unknown caller" feature, but then, no one likes them and sometimes they think it is AI bot and they usually just hang up (which is great for spam caller but not for legitimate caller)

My only solution that I could think of is to have a dedicated phone line just for friends/family/work, and a second line for banking/shopping/utilities/everything else.

An ask: I'm trying to find out where substantive discussion by carriers AND other parties on mitigating phone spam (voice or text) is occurring. I'd very much appreciate replies here, email (see my profile), or hop on this Fediverse thread: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/116984051310517623>

Broadband Breakfast does seem to be one of those entities. ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) is another, though as a telco alliance I consider it highly suss.

(Submitter.)

I got an obviously-AI voice agent spam call yesterday. Had a bit of fun getting it to answer trivia questions (when was the treaty of westphalia ratified? answer in a rhyming couplet) as a precondition to handing over the keys to my bank accounts.

Commerce should never have been made possible to happen on the internet. The moment it became possible to send and receive money through the internet, the end times began.

T-Mobile’s Scam Shield works really well for me. But you have to get the premium tier.

I genuinely don't understand why this is so hard to tackle.

Phone numbers are a scare resource and the telecommunications networks heavily regulated with numerous central points of control.

This bullshit is scaling because the companies which gate and sell that access have no obligations, legal or otherwise, to deny scammers access to their resources.

Funny, the same telecoms that whine about how hard this traffic is to stop... are also selling a "premium" service to customers- who then manually tag unwanted calls so that the telecom can sell that data back to other customers...

There are a number of options. My view is that carrier-based filtering (rather than on-device filters) are where effort must be focused. Much as we learned with email: if you're routing traffic for many people, mass-contact attempts and patterns become quickly visible. Individuals see only a minuscule fraction of traffic, networks see overall patterns.

The other element is that carriers can act at the network level, noting how much abusive traffic arrives from given peers, and taking direct action against those peers. That could involve rejecting traffic outright, subjecting it to stronger challenges, and/or diverting it to investigative / law-enforcement bodies (I'd suggest both national and state entities) for both tracking and enforcement. Power-law relations mean that at any given time, a small number of networks will account for the overwhelming majority of spam, though which networks will likely change over time.

The key problem with this is getting the carriers to act, which ... will probably involve a few carrots and sticks. I'll address those in another comment, except to mention bonding: <https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/telreg>.[1]

Individual action will not solve this problem, but there are steps you can take.

Most major US carriers now offer some form of robocall blocking. "Scam Shield" from T-Mobile, "ActiveArmor" from AT&T, "Call Filter" from Verizon.

MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) may or may not offer scam / robocall blocking themselves (though IMO they should, and should be required to). Some will identify spam calls, but those are still passed through to your handset.

Beyond this, there are on-device apps which can be used, some are carrier-based (e.g., "Call Filter Plus", from Verizon, similar tools exist for Verizon and AT&T), some are third-party. These of necessity share your voice/text activity with third parties, which is its own concern and consideration.

Full Android, iOS, and several full-featured Android alternatives (GrapheneOS, /e/OS, LineageOS, etc.) offer unknown caller rejection. Numbers not in your contact list are directed to voicemail. At present, few spam calls will leave voicemail, though some do, and as AI expands in capabilities, applications, and adoption this will all but certainly increase. I'd strongly encourage use of this.

Feature phones / dumbphones ... have far less capability. Most cannot even reject unknown numbers, which ... seems a ripe target for legislation and/or regulation. Phone frameworks such as AOSP / KaiOS seem to afford little capability for even creating a call-blocking app. This and other dumb devices (e.g., traditional landlines) are a strong argument for carrier/network level mitigations.

The company everyone loves to hate, Comcast/Xfinity, actually has one of the most sophisticated voice/text spam blocking systems, and one I'd like to see mandated to all carriers: <https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/spam-blocker-overvi...>

It's risk based.

It classifies calls into three categories: high, medium, and low risk.

It adjudicates calls based on risk.

High-risk calls are terminated entirely.

Medium-risk calls are directed to voicemail.

Low-risk calls are subjected to an audio CAPTCHA (enter a two digit value to ring through), otherwise are directed to voicemail.

(It's not clear whether or not a whitelisted number will escape any treatment, perhaps subject to conditions such as originating from the appropriate/approved network for that call.)

I haven't used that system, but in advising people still moving off landlines, or looking at VOIP solutions, it's making Comcast an attractive option.

(I don't know what other VOIP providers, say, Twillo or Asterisk, offer, but suspect at least some have similar if not more-capable systems.)

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Notes:

1. California requires a $100,000 bond by all telemarketers in the state. The state has a small fraction of the incidence of robocalls of the worst US states. Several others have some bond. My view is that bonding should apply at the carrier level and be surrenderable to both contacted individuals and downstream peering networks, to provide both a strong financial penalty to abusers, and an incentive to downstream networks to pursue abusive calls.