FTC Offering $50,000 to Anyone Who Can Stop Robocalls

I do not fully comprehend the problem so please correct me if I am wrong. Every now and then I get a phone call from <a href="http://mrnumber.com/1-360-460-5964" rel="nofollow">http://mrnumber.com/1-360-460-5964</a> on my cell that blares a ship's horn into my ear, saying I can get a free cruise trip.<p>If I understand it correctly, someone out there is initiating the connection, be it using Twilio or any of the tons of other IP-to-PSTN gateways. While Caller ID can be spoofed, the call itself should be possible to trace back to the initiating gateway using warrants and assistance from the intermediary parties. Right? If so, then what's the problem following through on this and having the gateway ban the customer and file charges against them?<p>Is it because the spammers are fly-by-nighters using stolen CCs to make dummy Twilio accounts automatically? Is that what FCC's trying to catch?

I wish the prize were larger.<p>I live in New Hampshire, a "swing state." This means that, unlike for most of the U.S., my vote matters in presidential elections.[1]<p>I imagine this is why I get ~6 calls a day by numbers in Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Iowa, etc. All political as far as I can tell. I've given up on answering my phone until after the election.<p>---------------<p>[1] The electoral college bothers me. My presidential vote matters. If you're reading this from California or Texas, yours simply doesn't. You're a foregone conclusion.<p>I would imagine that if we abolished the electoral college we might see 80%+ turnout in smaller states, since the only way to be "represented" on the national scale would be to have as many of your people vote as possible.

This is exactly what I built SoundPatty for, but for (much) smaller scale. We needed to capture certain robo-calls incoming to our call-centre, via GSM. Link: <a href="https://github.com/Motiejus/SoundPatty" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Motiejus/SoundPatty</a><p>Of course, this program is only a small part of the solution. But it works very well for matching the patterns in a sound record.<p>Unfortunately, I am European, and cannot participate. Feel free to use it, though. License is MIT.

They could start by banning it for politicians. There goes 50% of them for me ...

Previous discussion from this morning:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4672068" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4672068</a>

I can't resist. David Vladeck is my dad, and I'm extremely proud of the job he's doing at the FTC.

Growing up in Australia, I was jealous of local, outgoing landline calls being free in North America.<p>Having said that, and living here now, I wonder how many of these ridiculous scam, spam and random calls I wouldn't get if the callers had at least a few cents per call tacked on to the price?<p>I mean, I have no doubt that they probably pay some provider for some access to the network, but if calls had essentially 'a few cents' at the bare minimum... I know normal people would have to pay the same thing, but still.<p>And who knows... having not been in Australia for so long, things may be just as awful there now too, but I do know that I never hear my mother complaining about all the calls.

I believe Google Voice has already solved this problem. Just as with email, click report spam and the whole user-base benefits. I suppose Google could share that phone number list with others providers.

Require all telcos to provide this service: After a robocaller hangs up, the complainee dials *555 (or something similar). The switch notes all the details of the previous inbound call to the complainee and the complainee's phone number. This information is sent to an FTC database. When an originating number gets a threshold of complaints, a sample of recent complainees is called by a human to get a quick interview as to what happened.<p>That's the end of the technical requirements. After that, policies and prosecution.

Probably not enough; the economic incentive to robocall is a couple orders of magnitude higher.

How about an audio captcha service? Seems simple enough with voice recognition so widely available? Might confuse my grandparents though..

I make sure to hold on the line for the entire call. If it says 'Press 4 to speak to a representative', I press 4. When they come on the line, I keep them occupied for as long as I possibly can. Every minute on the phone with me is a minute that they aren't trying to scam my grandmother.<p>If enough people would do this, I would hope that the ecomonics of it would shift.

Couldn't you apply some kind of hash function to the first few seconds of each phone conversation? Then when you get multiple matching hashes, you analyze where these calls are coming from, perform some kind of statistics magic, and determine what numbers to block?

E-mail spam is a problem because sending e-mail is basically free. It costs money to make a telephone call; why doesn't that wipe out the economic incentive? Are telephone calls too cheap? If so, why isn't a simple price increase the solution?

I didn't even know what Robocalls were until looking them up on Wikipedia just now. This is common in Canada it seems? And I assume it's a bad problem (worth 50 grand) because they're simply spam, only without available spamfilters?

That is easy. Just make the punishment high enough. It is an economic activity - nobody would do it if it was a capital offense.

Increase the fines. Where can I have my $50K?