I wonder how often legitimate investigators get trolled by people thinking they are just another scam call [LOL] If you had a heavy accent you just about couldn't work in that profession.
I wonder how often legitimate investigators get trolled by people thinking they are just another scam call [LOL] If you had a heavy accent you just about couldn't work in that profession.
Who doesn?t have unlimited calls these days?Quote:
Originally Posted by CHA-LEE
The days of using up minutes went away fifteen years ago. Unless you have some sort of pre-paid plan or something.
For the average Cellphone customer they do have Unlimited minutes, but there is also a HUGE customer base of "I am a broke ass paying by the minute cell phone plan" people out there.
Think of it this way. There are millions of Robocalls happening every day. This consumes a SHIT TON of cellular network bandwidth and infrastructure. All of that bandwidth and infrastructure costs the Cell Phone companies money to facilitate. If they were NOT making money on all of those robo calls do you think they would allow it to happen? Absolutely NOT. The phone companies are in it to make money and right now robocalls help them make money. Until robocalls stop helping the phone companies make money, they will absolutely allow it to continue to happen. Once profits can't be made on robocalls that shit will be shut down. I am not sure how that paradigm shift can happen, but its the only way that will fix this robocall craziness.
I'm so frigging tired of hearing from "Angela" from "The Warranty Desk" ... I don't have an expiring auto warranty, I don't need your "services", and I really don't want to get another spam phone call from you.
Quite a lot of people don't have unlimited plans. Anyone with Ting pays by number of calls made/received. Lots of plans at the big cell companies as well as smaller ones have service packages of X calls per month. I think with Ting, my first phone call bumps my monthly bill $3, my 101st bumps it up another $6, etc. That sounds bad until you realize the base rate is $6/month and aside from spam, I usually make/receive fewer than 100 calls per month.Quote:
Originally Posted by ray1970
On a related topic, my wife had me listen to one of her voice mails.
It was an obviously older woman who left a lengthy message for my wife to quit calling her and that she had contacted the authorities and given them her number. She was pretty upset that my wife was continuously calling her all the time. Obviously, my wife hadn?t placed a single call to this woman but I?m sure somebody?s auto generator had placed calls to this woman that looked like they were coming from my wife?s number.
I think as generations go by these types of calls will eventually go away. Baby boomers seem to answer calls from just about any number and aren?t very aware of the tactics that these scammers use. Gen X is more aware of this crap and has a general idea of how it works and likely is more used to dealing with it. Millennials are likely the most used to it and are probably very familiar with how it all works. I imagine when the next generation comes along the chances of any of these scams working will be about zero and they will move on to the next big scam.
I?ve always told myself if I fell upon hard times and was desperate to make money to take care of my family I would probably resort to scamming women and the elderly. I?ve seen too many stories where women or old people are scammed out of serious money by someone pretending to be someone they?re not.
Nope... the quality of the scam will get way, way, way worse as time goes on, to the point that it will even snare the best and brightest of us. Thanks to deep learning systems, "AI" is almost getting to the point of perfection in mimicking voices down to the enunciations, accents, etc. after hearing only a few samples.Quote:
Originally Posted by ray1970
So while Baby Boomers have to think about whether the nigerian prince is real (duuuuuuuh) catching only those with defective logical processing; all those that come after baby boomers will have to doubt every.single.call. to avoid being scammed. Granddaughter called, saying she was just roofied, raped and doesn't know where she is? Sure it sounds like her? Yeah, it might not be, pretty soon. The beginning of this evolution of scam is coming within the next five years, and inside of ten it can be done on a factory level - scrape social media, pull contacts, take samples, mimic relative's voice perfectly, say the script... as a robocaller hitting millions of phones in a day. (ETA: actually"robocaller" that can correctly respond to you)
And if they don't block spoofing of #'s soon, they will even spoof your relative's legit contact information. On a factory scale. So imagine getting a call, from your relative, it comes up as your relative on your phone, it sounds like your relative on your phone, but yeah, you're fucked if you don't have some other way to verify who someone is. This is technically possible today, but would require a lot of effort and would be targeted on an individual level.
Scammers evolve faster than their constraints do.
ETA: Best defense I can think of if this happens in the closer future (and it won't be far off) is if you ever get an out-of-the-blue, relative emergency call, subtly verify information [non public] that would only be known to them. "Hey honey, do you remember my nickname for you when you were little?" If they claim they don't remember or can't answer, hang up and call the relative back.
ETA2: And of course, whatever tactics we develop when that day comes, they will try to outsmart it, e.g. claim they lost their phone, or claim they are really drugged up and can't remember anything. We have to hope they adopt regulations and change the underlying telecom systems to make spoofing impossible... and even then, they will claim they lost their phone, someone lent them their phone, etc. There's nothing we can do to stop the upcoming voice mimicry, sadly.