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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2090 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 26, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I see Americans complaining online about how many spam telephone calls they are getting, to the point they don't even pick up the phone when the caller is unknown.

This is pretty alien to me; I live in Sweden and have literally never gotten a spam call in my life. (Maybe the reason for this is that the scammers naturally won't bother learning Swedish?)

So, potential silly lifehack: why not get a foreign telephone number from e.g. Denmark or something, and then never get spammed again? Presumably your calls will be more expensive as you'd be paying the international rate constantly, but this can be ameliorated by getting a plan where that's cheaper.

I have a US number from a state I used to live in but don't have any contacts in anymore. Spammers assume I live there, so it's been a pretty effective filter, and more practical than using a foreign number. Only downside is some people won't answer out of state numbers, but most people don't answer their phone these days anyway.

You can do this, through various SIP or other voice services. But a lot of normal people can't or won't be able to call you, including a lot of services that you may specifically be after a phone number to support: a large portion of Americans don't even know how country codes work and may literally have never used one other than 1, a VOIP solution I've deployed defaults to not recognizing any of them at the dial plan level, and a lot of businesses that require phone numbers to talk to you won't recognize anything but 10 digits (or may find that their shitty phone TFA doesn't work).

So there are tradeoffs.

Not sure.

If there are any, they aren't enforced as Czech republic has an ecosystem of web pages listing telemarketing numbers and telemarketing companies.

Nice thing is newer android phones integrate this so suspicious numbers are tagged by default and you can probably reject numbers that appear often enough in such databases.

I'm wondering when we're going to get a first case of a businessman hiring someone to get his competitor's phone numbers listed there just to bully them.

I get about 1-3 phone spam events per week.

Spam text messages seem restricted to the operator, but no way of getting the greedy assholes at o2 to stop sending me the nonsense at times.

So does America, but roboscammers in India don't much care. It's automated mass calls from computers in India.

And for me occasionally fake IRS calls from Caribbean islanders.

Yeah, but presumably scammers don't care about that wherever they are.

Sweden is probably too small of a market, it's smaller than Moscow alone. I get a few spam calls a week, about two thirds are robocalls and the rest are split between actual humans trying to sell me something and scammers.

One other explanation is that Swedish service providers are more aggressive about terminating spammers' accounts. How easy is it to get a burner phone number in Sweden?

I live in a smaller market than Sweden and still get an occasional scam attempt. Being on the business registry might have something to do wih it.

That and American law enforcement is kinda lax on consumer protection laws. A lot of consumer products are legal here and illegal elsewhere, a lot of chemicals are forbidden in foods in Europe that are perfectly fine in America, and Europe takes consumer privacy much more seriously than Americans do. As such, the odds of what’s being done being illegal, the person getting caught, and serious consequences following are slim to none in the USA.

The introduction of the Do Not Call List more or less ended "legitimate" spam calling in the US. The remaining spam calls are almost all scams, which would be illegal regardless of the medium of communication. The reason they are so prevalent here is that VOIP technology has made it extremely cost-efficient for foreign actors (mostly in India) to operate outside the reach of US law enforcement. If someone tried operating these kind of boiler rooms inside the US using a POTS system they'd be shut down pretty quickly. Overseas with Google Voice there's little the FTC can do but warn people.

Before 2022 it was really easy, you could just buy a prepaid card with cash in a store and it'd have nothing tying it to yourself. Nowadays you need an ID. I checked a random telephone provider (Telenor) and they require you to use the national e-ID to buy a SIM card (or apparently upload a photo of your passport for international customers).

But yes, it's probably the limited market size and language barrier; especially since the prime target for scammers are old people who don't speak English very well.

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