June 16, 2009 update: Fox News has a story on the auto-warranty Scammers.
With the implementation of the National Do-Not-Call registry, you'd think that telemarketing activity would decrease. Instead, telemarketing activity is increasing. Of course, it's impossible to measure, because there are no reliable statistics for illegitimate telemarketing activity. By illegitimate, I mean not just that they're not supposed to call you, but they're trying to scam you with a bogus auto warranty, fake sweepstakes winnings, or fake identity-theft protection services.
The cost of calling has dropped dramatically. With SIP trunking and the g729 codec, I can squeeze a hundred calls across a T1. The SIP trunk will cost me $.01 per call-minute. An open-source PBX will cost a few hundred dollars for server hardware. Robocalling and autodialing scripts are free. Add in a kilobuck hardware codec card, and I can start calling every number there is. A thousand sixty second robocalls cost me $10.00 and take only ten minutes to complete at a hundred concurrent calls a minute. My caller ID is whatever I enter into the caller id field. Faking caller id is trivial and legal. Even if only one in a thousand calls hooks me up to a sucker, I'm making money.
If I'm a telescammer, I'm not really concerned with the do not call list. If I'm faking my ID, what are you going to do -- report a number? A company that doesn't exist? I'm practically untraceable. If you *69 me, all you get is the faked caller ID number. You'd need a trap-and-trace from your phone company, and you can't do that without a threat. Even if you do get one, I've already called. I'm not going to call again, and if I do, it'll be from a different number. In Canada, the do-not-call list is a service for scammers to get Canadian phone numbers.
The economics make it almost as cheap as spam, and spam is a LOT easier to block than roboscammers. Blacklisting phone numbers, or even faked caller-id numbers is not easy. There are several free web services tracking this type of information, like whocalled.us and 800notes.com. However, there's no update service to add this to phone blocklists, which don't exist. Vonage won't let you blacklist numbers unless you get their Wifi hardware phone. Even Verizon's anonymous call blocking permits obviously bad 000-000-0000 numbers through.
Freepbx has a great blacklist, but it blacklists only known bad numbers. What we really need is a shared database of bad originating numbers.
Update: If you got a call about a car warranty, it looks like the FTC got them with a (minor) fine. It's good to know that if you dial every phone number in the country, eventually, some government agency will track you down and fine you far less than you've already scammed out of people:
ReplyDeletehttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/ftc-nukes-extended-warranty-robocallers-from-orbit.ars