Forgive me for being out of the loop here, but why is it so hard to make this business unprofitable and easily trackable? For any kind of contracted relations as mentioned in the article (automatic call centers etc), the law enforcement can get a trace. For off-the-shelf temporary SIM cards, make them rate limited and block them when a complaint is filed. Is there something I'm missing here? Given the numbers, this seems like a huge problem, is there simply no incentive to solve it?
The patlive.com service does seem to be the obvious place to track down who their lawbreaking client is. It's a US company, which was probably a mistake. I assume "Will" could have contracted with a service outside the US.
On the plus side, patlive.com charges $1/minute as their cheapest plan. Robodialing them back, with a sufficiently clever script, would be costly for "Will".
I looked at PatLive's FAQ and there's no contract required. You pay by Visa, MC, or AMEX. If you can use a reloadable card then they probably don't know who you are.
Since the patlive service and all those 'answering services' that you get are basically faciliating a scam, I'm sure a serious prosecutor could get a court order telling them to pass the information on that they had about the underlying person.
If it was a reloadable card, you can still figure it out with more effort. You threaten to sue them into oblivion as facilitating criminal actions, and you get them to get you on a real phone number with the scammer, and then you track them down that way. You just have to try harder.
A reporter could pursue this by getting a job with that firm and tracking backwards.
Foreign telecoms make good money looking the other way on spam. They mix in enough legitimate users that the rest of the world can't just block them without, e.g., also blocking the entire Indian subcontinent.
We may get there. It'll probably take the form of deploying STIR/SHAKEN on the US side and making engagement with anyone who doesn't implement it purely opt-in.
I hope telecoms die a slow death like cable (TV) companies. with 5G coming soon, plus this robo-call epidemic of late, maybe that will push a critical mass of people to VOIP and leave this sorry industry (with their silly litany of technical-sounding acronyms) in the dust.
I'm not a facebook fan, but I wouldn't be entirely against "Facebook Phone" (as in, a drop-in replacement for dialing numbers now that works as an appliance, not a shitty "add-on" for fb messenger) if they moved in to disrupt the industry. Of course privacy-be-damned at that point, but it's the lesser of two evils IMO.
> maybe that will push a critical mass of people to VOIP and leave this sorry industry
You realize that the vast majority of "robo-calls" are originated from Class 2 Interconnectwd VoIP providers, aka SIP companies like Twilio, Flowroute, SIPSTATION, SIP.US, voip.ms, and the like.
VoIP is the problem, because you can put an extraordinary amount of of volume down a very narrow pipe, with almost zero verification or validation on the technical if you are an active customer with a SIP provider. Becoming an active customer is not very difficult, either.
true, VoIP allowed this mess to happen, but only because it's one-sided, VoIP vs POTS. My POTS-side doesn't allow me to configure anything. Give the receivers full software control and they could block specifc or all Class 2 providers. "Old people" could set up their system to only accept calls from POTS lines, "hackers" could route "robo-callers" to "robo-answerers" that feigned voice responses like real people, etc.
I suggested FB only because it has fairly strong identity verification and (arguably) spam control. Plus they have the infrastructure to handle the bandwidth of a massive VoIP network.
