Fcc Bars Providers for Non-Compliance with Robocall Protections

It's easy to say it's idiots who fall for this stuff when we're young enough to have grown up in this world or started using new technology at an early age. We will be the ones targeted someday and it will be a medium that didn't become available to us until later in life just like what the seniors are experiencing now.

Absolute scum of the earth.

Also, pragmatically, basically everywhere outside of China and Russia is subject to US "prosecution".

I don't understand why this doesn't happen EVERY DAY until the problem is resolved.

And before someone cite US code: it's virtually impossible for foreigners to seek justice in this context. Not only do these criminals lack the money, education, and access to legal representation to do so, but the DoJ has better things to do than spend their time looking into the veracity of an international claim of this kind.

I have no idea the reason.

It wouldn’t solve everything, but considering how many scammers rely on real-time urgency in their calls, shifting phone communication toward asynchronous messages could actually help. It would undercut that pressure tactic, and it would also make record-keeping much easier.

It could easily set up thousands of people as unknowing patsies to commit mass terrorist acts, just by giving the AI a small amount of crypto to use in "paying people for gig work" to do tasks. It could start people off with busywork like ferrying harmless packages back and forth, and the ones who proved reliable, eventually would get a much less harmless package to be delivered somewhere sensitive.

That could all be orchestrated by human terrorists of course, but it's so much more effective if they could do it in 100 cities at once without almost any (knowing) human labor, and without any detectable foreign involvement.

Wait, who covers the cost in the US?

My girlfriend on the other hand gets several a day with a Samsung on A&TT. And it's worse for her because she is a real estate agent and can't afford not to take calls.

Ideally anyone who owns numbers would stop letting literally anybody do anything with their numbers (the way they do today) because they don't want to lose the numbers or to get banned from operating a PSTN-connected system.

The outcome I'm going for is that if you're a spammer you can't find any US phone number owners who will let you use their numbers so you can only send "unsigned" calls that are obviously spam, or sign calls as originating from irresponsible countries, which are easily filtered out by those of us who don't have any friends in the Phillipines or whatever (I get a lot of "DMV" threat texts from +63)

Why? Probably because the PSTN as normal consumers can access it, is pretty non-anonymous. The best case for anonymity is a burner, but you have to buy those burners somewhere that probably has CCTV, or order them online with a paper trail, so it's pretty risky for someone who needs assurances of anonymity.

No whistleblowers are using SS7 trunks to place anonymous calls.

There's no free source of this information anywhere. The only affordable option is telcodata.us

There are other sites like this. And then you can use the carrier info, go to that platform‘s website, and submit an abuse complaint through their form. But all they will do is possibly block that one spammer from contacting your phone number while continuing to allow the spammer to operate. And of course they have other spammers as customers.

Better option is to skip their abuse form and send complaints to your state’s AG, to the FTC website, and FCC website. They’ll ask for a lot of info but I think it helps them identify the problematic companies.

You can also forward spam texts to 7726 (“SPAM”) in the US, and your carrier will use that info to take action.

Mainly I know that calling from a voip number was really expensive when I tried to set something up for a family member going on vacation to Europe. That probably cuts back on a lot of spam calls.

The downside is sometimes real people call (like a contractor your landlord hired), hear silence, and don't say anything themselves because they're waiting for a "hello?". Whereas ignoring the call would let them actually leave a voicemail which would be useful. As I learned recently: sometimes real people don't call back a 2nd time.

Comparing PSTN to instant messaging walled gardens is interesting, but I’d argue the real parallel is email: a federated, open standard that also suffers from spam and abuse, yet still manages to limp along thanks to heavy filtering and layered trust systems. The PSTN never evolved those trust layers; instead, it relied on scarcity (call cost, geographic constraints) to keep abuse in check. Once those costs collapsed, the trust model collapsed with them.

As for the FCC, sure, they can try to incentivize carriers. But the fact that we need constant regulatory intervention just to keep basic trust afloat suggests the system is no longer structurally sound. Band-aids like STIR/SHAKEN prove the point: we’re bolting authentication onto a protocol that never envisioned it. That might extend its life a little, but it doesn’t make the foundation any less fragile.

So the question isn’t whether the PSTN once had value (it did, massively), but whether preserving it now delivers more value than the cost of propping it up. If a good chunk of people already treat unknown calls as spam until proven otherwise, then the social contract around the PSTN has already been broken.

Of course they do, and they voted themselves an exception. Same reason some small business in Redmond, WA isn't allowed to put out a sandwich board sign, but 10 months before every election every g*ddamned piece of dirt in Redmond has a political sign stuck into it.