Robocalling and Phone Spam Explained
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
881 words · ~4 min read
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thanks for watching Techquickie click the subscribe button and enable
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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos if you're
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like me one of the first things you do when you wake up is check your phone and
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see if you've missed anything exciting and ooh what's this a flashing
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notification light oh wait bloody hell it's a missed call from
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some number in some far-flung area code or even another country altogether and
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they didn't even leave a voicemail how
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rude well assuming it wasn't a wrong
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number or another angry call from some debt collection vulture there's a good
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chance that you've been Robo called this
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is essentially the telephone equivalent to email spam which you can learn more
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about here but unlike the messages that
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inhabit your email accounts junk folder robo calls and other kinds of phone spam
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can be far more intrusive and because
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they don't have subject lines it can also be much more difficult to know
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whether a call from a random number is from a scammer or an annoying political
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campaign before you pick up so why is
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Robo calling so pervasive and what can
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you do about it well although telemarketing was obviously around way
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before the internet era modern voice over IP or VoIP services like Google
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Hangouts or Skype have made it much easier to call tons of different phone
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numbers at once many times unscrupulous
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callers that use automatic dialer x' don't even bother working off of a
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database they just call tons of random combinations hoping that if they throw
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enough darts some of them will hit a target VoIP has also made it extremely
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easy for Robo callers and scammers to
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use a trick called caller ID spoofing where a phone call will show up as being
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from a different number than it actually is and although this isn't a rock-solid
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way for callers to mask their true identities it is very effective at
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defeating spam detection systems wait a
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minute spam detection systems so we have
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solutions in place they just don't work well sort of many modern smartphones can
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connect to databases that check incoming calls against known spam numbers and
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provide a visual warning if there's a match letting you know that you may not
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want to answer and there are third-party apps that provide similar functionality
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but as I mentioned before these aren't
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perfect solutions due to the caller ID spoofing and the fact that some of the
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data is crowd-sourced and inherently
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error-prone data collection method furthermore if you're on a more
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traditional landline these spam spotting features may be completely unavailable
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to you so unsurprisingly governments
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have tried to legislate the problem out of existence
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with mixed success who didn't see that one coming right the United States has
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had a Do Not Call Registry for 14 years where you can sign up to tell
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telemarketers not to contact you but this doesn't cover completely automated
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calls just ones with a human on the other end trying to sell you the world's
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most powerful toilet plunger or whatever so the FCC in the u.s. is currently
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attempting to work with major carriers to block spoofed numbers that aren't
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assigned to anyone on record so as to reduce scam robo calls many of which
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have actually ripped people off or stolen their personal data by pretending
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to be tax collectors or other government officials however robocopy
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however robocalling is still allowed
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under a number of circumstances for example you may still get calls from
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polling firms taking surveys or more irritatingly from political campaigns
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and committees during election season which makes me wonder if I should start
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my own single issue political party focused on reading the country of phone
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spam completely then again we need to
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find some way to get the word out hmm do
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