Voice mail I just got. Be a buddy and call this scammer’s number and press 1. 
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You need to give it to one of those scammer scammers on youtube or whatever. I get a kick out of watching some of those scammer baiters mess with the scammers.
I just saw a cool update from Jeff Jackson that they are going to start targeting Telecom companies that keep allowing all these robocalls:
It’s nice someone is doing something about all these scammer calls.
Thankfully I rarely get any such calls. I think my google scam detection stuff works pretty well.
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Do you have a good ‘curt’ voice? Is it easy for you to hang up on an unwanted caller?
I do and it is. I know many don’t and so starts the trouble.
Also completely comfortable saying ‘no.’ Some in my family aren’t.
Is this mostly a ‘senior’ thing or can ‘kids’ be strung along, too?
Are they less gullible, more abrupt? I wonder. 
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Part of the problem is that if you answer at all they put you on a list for being a confirmed person, especially one who will answer the call. Some of them will even sell that to others trying to make lists, so even saying “no” or asking to be removed from some list, or hanging up, actually gives lots of them all the data they need to ensure you get called more often and that they can profit off the fact that now they know a valid number that will answer and talk to people even if they will say no. Your number becomes high value for all the other scammers who want to know numbers that will answer. Some of them will then do various kinds of background checks on the confirmed number to find out more information about you first. They will then use AI to help them come up with more targeted scams that are closer to your interests, or that you might be more likely to believe. In some cases, if they do a thorough background check deep enough they can find out information on all your family members or extended relatives or friends or whatever and download all of their social media data, including lots of videos and places where they’re speaking and then deep fake that so that they sound exactly like your family member or friend and then do something like spoof your family member’s number when they call you. So now you get an inbound phone call that LOOKS like it’s coming from your family member, SOUNDS exactly like your family member, knows a lot of stuff that your family member knows and you think that it’s them. Even if you don’t use social media and never posted any of your stuff up on social media, that doesn’t mean they can’t find out stuff about you from all the social media for all of your relatives. You’d be surprised how advanced some of these scammers can get using targeted or social engineering to figure out how to best scam you or convince you or what you’re most likely to believe or want to believe.
And the main problem is if you answer at all, you get put on a list and sold to more advanced scammers and now you’re harassed more often. And what happens if some of them turn out to not just be scammers but blackmailers to some degree? Maybe they start doing things like “swatting” you (e.g. call 911 and tell them you just committed a violent crime in your house and are holding people hostage so SWAT breaks in your door, shoots your dog, if you react and come up armed thinking it’s a burglar then maybe they shoot you too, etc) or other kinds of escalating horrible things to you and your relatives to get you to comply with their demands.
Also talking to them at all is dangerous in another way now: a lot of scammers don’t even care about anything other than getting you to talk long enough that they can train a deep fake of your voice or just convince you to say the word “yes” anywhere in the conversation. If you say hello and some unknown caller keeps asking you repeatedly something like “can you hear me?”, do NOT say “Yes [I can hear you]”. Just say hello again or something else (maybe “I Hear”) and do not give them full sentences. In a lot of cases, the scammers are simply trying to get you to say the word “yes” or say enough sentences to gather enough syllables to voice print you so that they can make a fake recording of you saying yes. Then they can charge you for whatever they want and when you try to dispute it they then send proof to a credit card company or the bank or anybody else that they have a recording where you verified that yes you wanted to make the payment etc. There are a lot of people getting scammed with fake order confirmations being proved to Banks and other payment providers and then the victim just gets screwed. That has been going on for some time. So you might think you’re saying no or that you said no. But if you said the word “yes” anywhere in the conversation because you chose to talk to them, you might have gotten scammed (even though you don’t know it and even if you never said the word “yes”) if you used enough sounds in sentences with them. They can voice print you and make you say anything they want and still scam you without your permission. So keep that in mind when you think you can say no. That doesn’t mean you’re actually saying no definitively like you think when it comes to some of these scammers.
Naw, I just don’t talk to them in the first place if I can help it. First, I use filters and machine learning programs that try to verify if there are patterns of calling blasts going on, as well as caller ID spoofing, and other things to prevent those calls coming into me at all in the first place. If one does randomly get through like I had one come in yesterday, then often I won’t even answer it so that I don’t get on their call lists that I’m a real person to call more often, but in the few cases where I’m kind of expecting a call from someone I may not know then if I do answer the only thing I will say to an unknown number at first is “hello”. If they try to ask me something like “can you hear me?”, I will never use the word “Yes”, and I avoid giving more words. I will just say hello again and keep new syllables as minimal as possible. If they keep trying to get me to say the word “Yes” or they don’t tell me who they are, I just hang up on them.
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I don’t have to hang up, I don’t answer any calls unless I know the calling number or person. That’s what voicemail is for.
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Hey carver, thanks for the rundown! Your are the rundown king!
Isn’t he the rundown king, @Antonius? – and he looks good! 
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Now that I’m up to speed I’ll pass this on to a family member who got scammed last year.
Thanks again! 
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I thought he was the 
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He is many.
Thanks for putting this in writing. I have been telling my elderly parents this forever but they insist on answering the call. They think they will miss a call from a doctor. I tell them they will leave a message if they need to talk to you. They still answer. I am copying and pasting this in an email to my parents so they read and better comprehend why they should not answer the phone and talk to unknown people. Thanks again!
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I agree, and I’m really impressed with the Call Screen feature in the Phone app on a Pixel device. Often I don’t even know about the calls unless I check the log later, and it’s cool that the Call Screen saves a transcript and recording.
Thanks for the video share, too. I like seeing stuff like this.
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Honestly, I think Jeff is being too nice about it. Telecomm companies are strictly regulated. If they’re not following the rules because they want revenue from all the scammer callers, they should just be driven out of business like Articul8 and let someone else following the rules fill in the gap.
And yes, I’m being fair…I’m even involved with a startup cell phone company, and I also used to work for 2 major cell phone companies…so yes, I am somewhat familiar (I say somewhat because I don’t pretend to know ALL regulations about everything) with some Telecomm rules. I think if they are skipping these rules to make more profits then at the very least they need a strict compliance audit. Jeff should share his list and findings with all the other state AG’s too. Let’s see how long it takes before these scam robocall enabling rule breakers decide that breaking the rules isn’t so profitable anymore (my opinion).
I’m excited someone is actually doing something.
I just got a message from an unknown number less than a minute before reading this, and was surprised Google didn’t intercept it as spam (it just asked how I was feeling today, I thought it was my daughter’s ortho checking up on her since I took her in to get wisdom teeth out and gave them my number). I started to type a reply to ask something short like “Who this” when in the middle of me typing, Google interrupted me and said this text was now classified as suspicious and likely spam/scam. I guess they had blasted several similar manual messages and others reported them. So I must have been early in the list before the pattern was recognized. It was kind of cool that it stopped me to let me know it was spam/scam before I sent it.
I see the point about being nice. He looks serious, though, and I appreciate that. I noticed in the comments at least one person said that other AGs should do this.
I completely agree about putting these companies out of business to create space for those who are willing to follow the rules. Your mention of a compliance audit reminded me of examinations we’d have when I worked in banking. I don’t know much about telecommunications or whether their regulatory agencies have much in the way of teeth, but if the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finds enough problems during a routine examination of your national bank, then you (the bank) can’t do business anymore. That’s the kind of thing I think should be happening with these telecommunications companies. It shouldn’t be necessary for individual states to take action, though I’m glad that some are, and I don’t actually know in this particular case if the telecoms are violating state or federal law (or both), so I’m not sure what this particular AG is trying to enforce, but good on him anyway.
I believe I’ve had a similar experience with spam/scam SMS. I have a vague recollection of seeing something that seemed like smishing but let it sit in my messages list without responding and then later saw that it had been moved to the “Spam & blocked” section. Even when I see stuff show up there, I still forward it to 7726 (SPAM), because my understanding is that it’s a short code used by the major carriers to improve their services, and I would expect some information sharing in that regard to take place (if I’m being optimistic), though I don’t know how much of that actually happens (I imagine there’s a lot of protection of individual companies’ practices that takes place).
Yeah, that’s good. All major carriers support this. From the FCC website on the Robotexts tab:
- Do not respond to unwanted texts from questionable sources. Several mobile service providers allow you to block the sender by forwarding unwanted texts to 7726 (or “SPAM”). Check with your provider about options.
Speaking of the official FCC guidelines on how to deal with spammers, @drinkcoke you could consider copying the FCC recommendations to your elderly parents from an official authoritative government website on the matter. Copy the info on this FCC page:
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts
They even mention several tips I explained above. 
Though they didn’t go into detail about WHY you should avoid saying things like “Yes” like I did, they still give good advice and they aren’t just some internet rando like me.
Same with a lot of spam/phishing e-mail and clicking the “unsubscribe” link: Congratulations! You’ve just been added to a list of live e-mail addresses read by a human! Thanks for playing, target!
I realize that some “unsubscribe” links are legitimate (I’ve unsubscribed from companies’ marketing when they’ve had a legitimate cause to e-mail me in the first place) and that some e-mail services (e.g., Gmail) can also take care of unsubscribing safely, which is why I qualified my comment above. Another thing I really like about Gmail (compared to other services) is that they give the user the ability to report messages as phishing and not merely spam.
I didn’t know this was still being done. Eep!
Good list. Thanks for sharing!
This reminds me of a couple of old loopholes I reported up Sprint back when I worked for them.
Back in these days, everyone has limited “anytime” minutes k minutes that were used during business hours on weekdays) instead of unlimited calling time like it’s common now.
Calling your voicemail counted as free unlimited “mobile to mobile minutes” within the same company. That way calling your voicemail didn’t count against your limited anytime/daytime minutes.
The problem is that they also had a sort of secret option within the voicemail where you could call back whoever left a voicemail or to instead just call any another number from the voicemail menu. Therefore you could call your voicemail them call anyone you want and get unlimited minutes to anyone and everyone 24/7.
You should’ve seen their faces when I reported this exploit. Classic. They thought I was a genius.
There were 2 other extreme loopholes like that which I got them to fix. I used to always have supervisors and managers come ask me to execute various loopholes or figure out how someone else was pulling off something. They’d come tell me corporate was denying someone’s PTO request and they heard I knew a loophole to trick the system into approving it anyway and needed me to help them do it for someone else. 
Another loophole I got Sprint to fix was exactly this issue you quoted from the FCC webpage. Basically, I showed them that anybody can spoof anyone else’s phone number and instantly log in to their voicemail and gain full access because they were only checking the caller id and that could be spoofed for like 1-3 cents per call. I then demonstrated how I call then but only listen to anyone’s voicemail, etc but track up thousands of dollars in charges by calling out to certain toll numbers on someone else’s account.
There were also ways to skip ringing a person’s phone and purposely go to voicemail. I did this to an ex I didn’t actually want to talk to. I would purposely send myself straight to their voicemail and return a call/message as a voicemail with no rush of them actually answering. Basically just pretend you tried to call them but their signal was bad and so they didn’t hear it and thus didn’t answer. Avoid the drama from having to talk to them and also avoid the drama from not responding 
That was another loophole, call someone else on Sprint (unlimited calling) but then do the Oregon to go straight to their voicemail, then from that menu you could switch to yours and do an outbound call and the company records look like you just called your friend/family for the entire time instead of the real number.
Honestly, I thought all companies resolved these security issues since like 2003. I’m surprised to hear the FCC still reporting the issue.
Maybe because you’re living in the future and they’re not? 
Haha, thanks, I meant to type a zero there and apparently I fat-fingered a nine on The top row of my phone keyboard instead.
I kind of wish I could see 2093! That’s pretty unlikely though.
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