There are wars popping up all over, and even the obvious villains have proponents. Whatever the cause, the weather seems to be more prone to extremes, with heat getting worse and the storms more violent. Whether it's a pair of shoes, a bag of chips or a movie ticket, prices seem to be going up. Social media is worse than crack, politics has become a steel cage death match as opposed to a forum for collective action, and half the country thinks the other half is crazy (and right back atcha). But regardless of your point of view on any of that, we can all agree on the single, most pervasive extensional threat to our world.
Spam calls.
Forget authoritarian strong men, rogue terrorists and greedy corporations. Those may all be villains in some arena and likely adversaries in the next James Bond movie. But some scam mill in a strip mall in Abilene or call center in Manilla or PC in a basement in suburban Philadelphia is the thing that will make you crazy, cause you to start yelling incoherently and rip the receiver from the wall or hurtle your iPhone into the couch. It's the communications version of "Whack A Mole." Block one number and they just pop up somewhere else.
Estimates vary, but phone spam in the US accounts for more 25% of all calls, more than 2.3 billion every month. According to Truecaller, a spam and fraud combatant, between June 2023 to May 2024 Americans wasted an estimated 227 million hours on answering spam calls. which equates to 9.4 million days or 311,000 months. In other words, you could spend the better part of your day yelling "STOP CALLING THIS NUMBER!"
There have been numerous attempts to control the problem with regulations and legislation, but with little practical effect. The Federal Trade Commission has a Do Not Call registry, which last year received more than 2.1 million complaints and added 2.7 million new numbers to its tally. Washington State passed a law and Wisconsin has a proposed one that would fine spammers and make it easier to sue them. But it's been left more to the individual to take action to stop them in the first place, by blocking individual numbers they see pop up on their caller ID, or by just not answering.
The problem is that with number spoofing software you don't actually know if the readout that pops up is accurate. It might look like your bestie calling when it's actually a mortgage offer from "Linda" in Hyderabad, India. Answer just once, and they know they have a working phone. That means that your number is coded as a "possible" and goes into the dark web marketplace to be called and recalled again to sell you insurance, offer you a loan, free up your frozen Amazon delivery or suspend your Social Security account.
My mother's phone rings 30 times a day with this nonsense. She is old (93) and old school, so as many times as I tell her not to even answer she just does. She has learned to hang up immediately, but by then the damage is done. Her answering just confirms there is a potential mark, and they call again. And again. And again. It is literally impossible to sit in her living room for more than 20 minutes without the phone ringing.
Seeking some relief, I chummed around for a solution. Blacklists, whitelists, even a new phone number: all considered and ultimately decided to be not effective. Until I found a deceptively simple solution, based on the practical fact that computer dialing systems don't have opposable thumbs.
I found a phone that has an auto block function that works like this. Before any call is allowed to ring, the caller gets a recording of their own that says "If you want to be connected, press 1." If you do, the phone is allowed to ring. If you don't, you get put on a "Block Call" list and it hangs up. Since most robo calls are made by just that, robos, they dial, wait for a person to answer, then shunt the call to a live operator. Saying "Hello" or "Goodbye" or swearing at them doesn't stop them or even slow them down. But asking them to perform a physical action? You might as well ask Alexa to cook an egg. She knows the right pan, how hot it should be, how long it should cook. But cracking it? Not gonna happen.
I hooked up the phone to her jack and tested it. Sure enough, when I called I got the challenge, pressed one, and her phone rang. We sat and chatted for another half hour before it was lunch time. As she was getting ready to go out, I picked the handset up, wondering if it was even working, as it had been almost too quiet. Lo and behold, half a dozen calls were in the "Not On My Watch" register, with time stamps over the past 20 minutes. They had been blocked, slammed to the ground, and forgotten. Silence was indeed golden.
I'm sure some spammers and scammers will still get through. And software will get better, and eventually figure out this dodge and how to beat it. In the meantime, my mom has been well schooled in "Hello? Goodbye!" I can only hope that when the need does arise, she hasn't fallen out of practice.
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford almost never answers his phone. His column appears weekly via email and online http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/ and https://marcwollin.substack.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment