Endless phone spam extinguishes consumers: NPR

Spam calls continue to arrive, offering you loans or threatening you with jail time for IRS violations. According to some estimates, they account for at least a quarter of all calls to the United States.

And, as the problem grows, it creates a new set of related nuisances for people like Dakota Hill.

He estimates that he receives hundreds of unsolicited calls each month. But Hill says that he also gets calls from people who think he is spamming their.

People call and ask, "Do I know you?" or "Why did you wake up?"

In fact, Hill did not make any of these calls. He assumes that his number is "spoofed"; Fraudsters use software to deceive the caller ID system and make it feel like the calls come from his phone.

He explains it again and again to the people who call him.

There is an irony here. The mobile phone has become everything for us – our wallet, our photo archive, our computer and our music library. But it also becomes less attractive as a phone. Consumer Reports found that 70% of people no longer answer calls that they do not recognize. Regulators and the industry are fighting against unwanted calls. But at least until now, they have not succeeded.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the telephone companies, has itself been targeted.

"We have recently seen fraudsters using our number, spoofing our number, trying to convince consumers that they belonged to the FCC and, in a way, get some money out of it," said Patrick Webre, head of the consumer bureau of the agency.

He says that spam calls are the number one consumer complaint and a top priority for the agency. FCC President Ajit Pai has called on all US telephone operators to install new technology to authenticate real-world calls and report potential spam by the end of the year.

The fight against phone spam is so great that a sub-sector is fighting it.

At Hiya, a technology startup in Seattle that is designing ways to block spam calls, US calls are tracked on giant computer screens. Jonathan Nelson, director of product management, explains that consumers adapt – by not answering the phone and letting calls be routed to voicemail.

But spammers then imagine new clever ways to attack people. The latest example is the "ring" scam, which appeared on May 3rd. That day, Nelson's instructors turned red.

"C & # 39; was [an] explosion of calls, "he says. We had never seen this volume level before. "

This scam means that motorists hang up at the end of a ring, hoping to get the victim to call back an expensive international toll line, mainly in West Africa.

Scams are easy to commit and hard to stop, largely because technology allows calls to pass millions of people in one click. Many scams feed on fear – of an arrest or investigation by a government agency – and target immigrants, taxpayers, debtors or retirees.

And to be profitable, spammers only need a small fraction of their recipients. The scams would cost Americans about $ 10.5 billion a year, according to the spam blocker, Truecaller. But their success, says Nelson, has a high cost to consumers: "We are seeing the death of the phone call."

Most mobile operators recognize that they need to step up the fight.

Chris Oatway, deputy general counsel for Verizon Wireless, calls the fight against spammers "arms race". The company is investing more than ever in technologies to detect, identify and track unwanted calls. "The key here is to restore confidence in voice calls," he says.

But this is complicated because the telephone networks are very interconnected. If another mobile carrier does not report unsolicited calls, the Verizon network may not recognize that there is a problem and let it pass. Oatway says that it's only in a sense that spammers could still succeed.