This may just be a curious coincidence, but during the recent brief period in which India and Pakistan appeared on the verge of all total thermonuclear war, my daughter and I noticed that the number of spam phone calls and messages received on our cellphones fell off precipitously. It also just may be a coincidence that when we answer somewhat questionable phone calls, which we must for business reasons – quite often we wind up having a brief conversation with a person speaking English, often very bad English, with a marked Indian/South Asian accent. Neither of us can limit ourselves to answering calls only from a contact list as is often recommended, since the spam organizations have begun spoofing local numbers, and we can’t totally ignore local calls. My cellphone is the main conduit for potential clients to connect with the Teeny Publishing Bidness, and my daughter’s cellphone is similarly the main method of communicating with new and existing real estate clients and realtors.
Honestly, I feel rather sorry for anyone from the Indian sub-continent honestly trying to make a legitimate career in the US in the customer service/public relations field. After years of spam calls, attempted shakedowns from persons with that accent representing themselves to be officers of the law, the IRS, and the Social Security Administration, from banks, debt collectors, and most recently – administrators of the toll roads – my initial reaction and shared with many others, is to hang up so fast that the person on the other end will have their ears ring like the gong that started off old British movies from the J. Arthur Rank Organization. Such spammy-scammy callers – even if the accent isn’t suspect – often also betray a distinct lack of familiarity regarding how American civil authorities really operate. This very week, both my daughter and I both received the following text message (errors and typos included):
“Final notice: Enforcement will begin after May 14st. As of today, your tolls are still unpaid. If you still don/’t pay your tolls tomorrow, you will face the following consequences:
The DMV will suspend your vehicle.
You will face legal action and damage to your credit
You may be considered an illegal driver
Please pay before enforcement”
Pay Now: (link omitted. Of course I don’t click on such things. I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night. This particular toll-road scam has been repeated so often that the Texas DMV now has a title page warning users about it and specifically including a statement that their department has absolutely nothing to do with collecting tolls.)
Well, it was rather nice to have the number of spammy-scammy calls and messages fall off, especially the ones which faked local numbers. I know that the Trump Administration has a lot on its governmental and law-enforcement plate at this moment, but I really do wish that someone high up in the Federal Communications Commission would eventually get around to turning loose the DOGEs of war on those parties enabling the whole ecosystem of domestic number-spoofing and scammy-spam-calling. At the very least, hit the spam-call boiler rooms with international law enforcement: being a consistent, ongoing annoyance ought to earn some serious penalties, in my opinion. Your thoughts and recommendations?
How about: a 1 cent tax on all phone calls and text messages?
I get a little protection because the scripts these people read out tend to be written in American English. So when I’m told that I’ll be summoned to the “Court House” I know it’s a scam.
But our young tend to speak a subAmerican English so that may confuse the picture in future.
A peculiarly inept scam starts with “Hi, this is bank security department”. Who on earth would take it seriously if it doesn’t specify the bank? I suppose it must be intended for old people in “cognitive decline”. So, beware President Vegetable, they are coming after you in your retirement.
The TelCos know who they are selling minutes to. They should be made to be concerned their product is so misused. If they are taxed, they will raise the rates, or have in the past. As I understand, the companies trade usage with their opposites overseas, and whoever provided more minutes of conversation gets reimbursed.
De-value their product or raise its rates based on usage patterns may get their attention.
Similar should hold true with email broadcasts that are basically no cost. Make the abusers pay for their traffic.
I doubt it will happen, and the customer will pay for whatever is forced on the providers. Being listed on the Do Not Call list seems to have helped, but it is not perfect. Can cell users be allowed to block international calls???
tom
I’m old enough to remember when most everybody had a land line and nobody, except in some sort of TV Fantasy had anything else. An there were these books that had nearly all the numbers arraigned by person, in alphabetical order, really.
The phone companies opened their systems up to the first set of scammer/solicitors to the extent that having a land line became a distinct liability. Now, nearly no one has a land line as a private person. The Gen Z practice of expecting a text before a call is looking more and more sensible, or dispensing with voice altogether or even public networks and only being available on chosen platforms to preapproved entities. The same, increasingly for email.
The world, it is achangin.
Dearie, the scripts they read don’t come off as American, either — there’s always something “off” about them which betrays the fact that they “Aren’t from around here…”
We have a couple of “tells” when they claim to be from the bank that we do business with. (Aside from the fact that that bank does not call clients…) We always ask where they are calling from – the customer service center in which city? Our bank is a state-based one, and they only have customer service centers in two locations. We can almost hear the wheels going around as they try and guess the answer, which is always wrong, anyway. For a while, if I was bored and annoyed by one of those calls which offered the option of speaking to “Officer So-and-So, who would be happy to help” – I would ring through, and tell them what scum I thought they were in trying to cheat people, were they proud of themselves for working such a scummy jobs and what did their families think of what they did … they usually would hang up after about three sentences, although once I did get a woman who yelled back at me.
The Do Not Call list is about as useful as screen door on a submarine, though. Blocking the numbers is a bit more effective – the scamsters often try calling back.
Here in TinyTown™ in NW Wyoming we can actually see the local cell tower on top of the mountain across the highway from our house. But we are in some kind of electronic shadow, since no one in the neighborhood can get consistently good cell service. It’s kind of fun to see people who use it everywhere else looking at their phones in confusion, and holding them up in the air to see if their antennae can maybe get a better signal if it’s three feet higher.
So we have a sorta-landline over the computer link. And as a result we still get plenty of spam. The scammers aren’t too bad, we just tell them to FOAD and hang up. The fund-raisers in obvious noisy boiler-rooms are sometimes fun to play with. If I’m not too cranky, I’ll answer the phone with grunt, and then go into a Peter Lorre imitation, “Oh, I so glad you called. They never let me see or talk to people anymore…They’re gone now, but I’m still so VERY hungry…”
Long ago my wife was annoyed by repeated calls from a sex pest. So she bought a boy scout whistle and the next time the pest phoned gave him a mighty blast. That stopped it.
Today, would she be charged with assault?
Gosh, if only the US had some sort of organization that existed to intercede on behalf of Americans when foreign criminals attempt to steal from us.
Alas, we do not.
If I’m expecting calls, I hang up without comment, but if I have a little time I ask them if they understand the damage this kind of dishonesty does to their souls. I don’t know how much the average hindu worries about karma, though.
Just FYI my $dayjob and various other groups are tracking the fake toll SMS messages and blocking, now almost immediately, the domains they point to. If you use 9.9.9.9 as your DNS you will generally be protected from accidentally visiting those sites if you get such a message and you mistakenly follow the link.
9.9.9.9 is free and has setup guides for most phones, PCs and network devices here – https://docs.quad9.net/
“international law”
That’s adorable.
I received that exact toll text (for like the third time in a year) this past Sunday. It’s a well-known scam. They love to do on Sunday when there’s really nothing you can do about it — you can’t talk with anyone at your bank for example.
The “Telcos who sell the minutes,” to paraphrase Tommy, show a singular lack of interest in putting a stop to this abuse. After all, they profit from it. Facebook is another glaring example. Ads for “genuine Forever stamps” and “solid silver US Eagle coins” have been advertised there for a fraction of what the real things are worth for years. The Facebook sleuths who were so good at sniffing out incorrect thought just play dumb and keep raking in the ad money.
‘Gobar khao, veshya bete, jeldi!”
“Eat dung, son of a whore, quickly!”
I get a whole flood of text messages from Republican candidates and organizations. Many/most of these are so sleazy that I call them Garbage Political Marketing. Here’s one example:
(from 205 973-9616) “PENDING TERMINATION: Your DOGE check support will be voided w/o action. Confirm support in 3 clicks”
If you click, you will find that the message is from the Tuberville Victory Fund, soliciting contributions via WinRed.
Another one today from 301 690-0679, headlined “Your DOGE check: $5000”
After you click, it says: “Before President Trump would send you the check, we need to ask you a few questions”
This one was intercepted by AVAST as containing possible malicious code.
The scary part is that we probably have the political class we deserve.