¶ FCC’s ‘Just Hang Up’ Is The Worst Advice Ever
Look it’s not often that we criticize the people who are tasked with regulating the very system we’d all like reforms of; but it’s also ludicrous to continue to look at the FCC as a ‘guiding light’ in what to do about robocalls.
It seems weird, possibly odd for you to take the advice of a community of anonymous people who are slavishly-devoted to going after scammy robocallers over an established government agency, but while you’re here at least hear our pitch and maybe you might take our arguments to heart.
¶ The TL;DR Version
- The advice is, well… is just simply bad
- The FCC is not even the right agency for robocalls
- FCC is not structured to deal with telephony fraud, and they have no expertise in it
- The FCC doesn’t know how scammers and telemarketers operate or what motivates them
- The FCC’s own rules promote robocalling
¶ “Just Hang Up” is stupid
If “Just Hang Up” worked, everyone would be doing it; the scammers would believe your phone doesn’t work, and it would all end! Have you stopped laughing yet?
And here’s the fun part: you are already following that advice. Nearly everyone is.
From our observations by watching scammers’ own computers as they are setting up and launching a robodial campaign, at least 98% of dialed calls do not respond. Scammers use unconvincing recordings of threats and sometimes goofball-sounding pitches precisely to bring the response rate low. For some scams, such as Social Security Impersonators, the robotic-voice making the unconvincing legal threat is specifically meant to weed out most of us and get at the most vulnerable folks in society—the type of person the scammer actually wants to talk to.
Scammers use computer software we call a “phone dialer” and they deliver their calls over the Internet, which is how most telecom traffic that comes from businesses originates. Dialers can work off a pre-prepared list called a “lead list”, or they might be war-dialing–which is simply dialing random numbers looking for a mark, or target to try a sales pitch on.
We scambaiters are experts in VOIP technology. We can see whether your mobile handset is a valid telephone number or not before your telephone begins to ring. When you hit “decline” on your phone, that appears different than a SIP/500 error that indicates the line doesn’t work.
Dialers do not sleep, they do not need food and they don’t need a paycheck. The scammer also does not have to pay for the phone call if you refuse to answer it. By not answering, you just benefitted the scammer by increasing his productivity.
The plain fact is, you are already on the scammer’s dialer list. There is only one way to get off those lists: making each scammer who calls you wish they never did. And they only way you can do that is to actually answer the phone and then pretend to be interested, then fuck over the agent by wasting their time.
By making the scammer or telemarketer mad you stand a much better chance of not being dialed by that scammer again. By wasting 5-15 minutes, you also prevent that telephone agent at the scam shop from being able to screen other calls.
¶ The FCC are not experts on robocalling, the FTC is
People latch on to the Federal Communications Commission simply because it has the word “communications” in its name. So they believe that robocalls must be regulated by them.
In one sense they are, but robocalls are not effectively regulated by the FCC. The agency primarily deals with the telephone network itself, not the content of telephone calls that traverse the network.
If you think about it this way: your WiFi router in your house is chock full of FCC-regulated equipment. From the requirements to shield the device to keep it interfering with radio refrequencies it’s not supposed to transmit on, to the parts of the radio spectrum your WiFi router transmits and receives data on. All that is managed under the FCC, but the FCC doesn’t regulate your PornHub viewing habits that take place over that router. It’s not their concern.
Of course it does the FCC no great service to tell the American public that it’s “not our job” when it comes to robocalls; so they try to appear as helpful as they can within the limits of their resources.
Robocalls are the domain of the Federal Trade Commission and that includes all frauds and scams being pushed on people over the telephone. The FTC also goes after telephone carriers who collude with scammers to deliver their fraudulent robocalls.
And finally: the FTC is who maintains the National Do Not Call Registry, not the FCC.
¶ The FCC Doesn’t Know Anything About Scamming
For years agency officials have appeared flummoxed when quizzed by Congress-members trying to rally their constituents over the one issue 99% of the public hates: robocalls. It might even only been until four years ago that the agency even learned that IRS and SSA robocalls originate from India.
The FCC doesn’t possess a research team focused on telephony fraud in such depth. Most of that expertise is over at the FTC. Unfortunately because the problem is so large the FTC deal with it in the most basic way: go after the largest fish in the sea, get to the billions of minnows in the waters if ever there is time.
To that extent only the most flagrant violators of the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule ever get dealt with.
¶ The FCC Actually Loves Certain Robocalls and That’s Why Scam Robocalls Are Here to Stay
This is the Achillies-heel of the US telecom network: debt collectors.
Over the past twenty-five years the Federal Communications Commission has made sure never to make a regulatory recommendation or take an action that would in anyway inhibit the activity of one type of automated call: that of the debt-collector seeking to harass a debtor.
The reason is simple: FCC answers to Congress. Congress sets the law. And Congress has made certain whenever visiting this topic to never take a step that would limit the accounts receivables industry to 19th century methods of communication: namely the letter and a postage stamp.
Every time robocalls comes up in FCC rule-making, we see the same people from this industry with the loudest-whiniest voices; acting in unison to object to any measure going after robocalls. They always make sure the commissioners hear their voices.
The other looming political reason why robocalls will not stop is the political campaign contribution robocall and political polling robocall: obviously there’s a large crowd of politicians who feel these are invaluable tools and they are loved by both political parties.
It’s difficult for Congress to write a constitutional law that will ban one type of robocall but allow other ones. The First Amendment doesn’t allow the government the ability to prohibit speech based on the content of the speech. Either it blocks the whole medium from use or it doesn’t. Those are the only tools they get. And there is no member of Congress in either party who will ever support banning political campaign contribution calls. They feel it would be suicide.
In the most recent action taken when Ajit Pai was FCC Commissioner was the change to the telecom network to support digital certificates with phone calls: also known as the SHAKEN/STIR protocol. While this made the FCC appear that it was doing something about robocalls, all the technology actually does is certify that when a phone call is placed on the network, that the Caller ID presented on the call has not been altered by the one sending it.
If you’ve noticed the robocalls you’ve been getting since January 2020, most of the robocalls you get these days don’t have a fake Caller ID on them. The caller simply temporarily rents out numbers (called DID numbers) from their own telephone carrier for a limited amount of time and places them as the outbound Caller ID on the calls they make.
If you try and dial the number back, you usually get the scammer’s answering system which doesn’t allow you to leave a message.
¶ Does That Mean We Are Fucked?
Not if you pick up the phone when scammers call you and you bait them. If just 5% of the population who gets robocalled did this, the math works out that any robocall campaign would immediately logjam all the available operators the scammer can hire to answer the phone.
It doesn’t matter if the scammer hires cheap-labor Filippinos to phone-screen. If they’re all tied-up phone screening uninteresting marks, the USA-based phone operators who do the final-sale will be sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
So if you have time, when you get a “Scam Likely” phone call, pick it up. You drive the bus, you can set the amount of time you’ll spend on it. You can hang-up in mid-sentence if you want.
Just make sure the scammer knows every time they spend time with you, it’s time not making a sale. If you make this a habit, the number of robocalls you naturally get will begun to plummet.
The reason is simple: the scammer has no choice but to stop calling you, or else you will waste their time.