r/technology • u/Pemulis • Feb 06 '23
Robocallers are preying on the elderly with fake Medicare calls. It's a no-brainer to stop it, but nobody has. Business
https://www.businessinsider.com/robocalls-medicare-fraud-how-to-stop-2023-286
u/Scr0bD0b Feb 06 '23
One U.S. company, Connexion Point, is behind some of the calls but feel like no one wants to do anything about it.
It's mind boggling how scam calls are not amongst top priorities of telecon companies and government agencies. Not enough is being done to punish India's financial and tele/digital terrorism.
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u/drbwaa Feb 07 '23
It's not mind boggling at all. The telecom companies profit from them, and the politicians receive "campaign donations" to avoid the issue.
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u/tragicallyohio Feb 07 '23
Yes it is "mind boggling" and we shouldn't stop being appalled by it just because it is rampant and we understand what the cause is.
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Feb 07 '23
Telco's don't seem to have realised that this will kill off what little is left of the voice market.
It's a global problem, people were already getting rid of the home phones due to the rise of broadband and mobile anyway... and now the elderly are starting to realise that a solution to this daily nuisance is to simply unplug.
I can't think of a better solution to tell people who are suffering from this barrage other than to disconnect. More could and should be done to block it, users should have much greater control on who can access them over the phone but telcos around the world have resisted and pretend the technology is just fundamentally broken as far as trust and unable to accommodate changes which is very obviously untrue.
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u/Scr0bD0b Feb 07 '23
Thanks. Figured I wasn't the only one imagining this is coming...
Like home phones, like cable TV ads and prices, I imagine at some point people will certainly want to drop their voice telephone line entirely for another solution... Whether it's Voip, Messenger calls, etc.
If telecoms can't fix this issue and it's primarily a channel for scammers, it's not worth having. I've already asked myself what my other options are for family calls to avoid the 5-10 average scam calls I get per day. Other day I received 17 scam calls, in a single day.
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u/youngmoneymarvin Feb 07 '23
It’s not really mind boggling. The phone companies are a monopoly. Not stopping the spam calls will not put them out of business. We need them more than they need us.
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u/Wobbling Feb 07 '23
India's financial and tele/digital terrorism
What are their political goals?
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u/RequirementInitial72 Feb 07 '23
Local scam call centers bring in foreign currency to the country.
Bribery stops local politicians from stopping these call centers using cops.
National level politicians are somehow not pressured enough by western countries to stop this.
I would say it's more of a culture of apathy than malice by national level politicians but in a way the end result is the same for western countries citizens.
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u/2SK170A Feb 06 '23
The phone companies know how to track phone fraud, and they could easily help law enforcement find and shut down the perpetrators, but they don't. Because they make money from all sides of it - callers AND targets.
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u/0ogaBooga Feb 07 '23
The phone companies know how to track phone fraud, and they could easily help law enforcement find and shut down the perpetrators, but they don't
Exactly. It would be trivial to scan customers outgoing calls for telltale signals - like if a number is sending thousands of calls a minute to numbers on the federal DNC list you shut down their service until they can provide you with the written proof of acceptance by that numbers owner that the dialer is required to keep under federal law.
Crazy concept though...
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u/2SK170A Feb 07 '23
Here's another crazy concept: any time a caller receives what they think is a fraudulent call, after they hang up, they dial *77 (or something), and the phone system logs the call data and its source. This system alone is not to have each and every report investigated, but to gather data.
There will of course be human reporting errors, malice, etc. but with enough data and some AI-assisted processing, system-wide patterns will emerge quickly (a few sources contacting MANY recipients), and this aggregated and processed data will point to probable sources.
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u/jojonyc99 Feb 07 '23
Explain to me how telecom companies make money from spam calls? Everyone in this post keeps saying it… but no one explains it and that’s why I don’t believe it.
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u/lycheedorito Feb 07 '23 edited Feb 07 '23
Telecom companies do not make money directly from spam calls. However they indirectly benefit from the increase in phone usage (some people are on limited minutes for example) and data consumption as a result of these calls. They also charge customers for services such as call blocking or call identification, which can help reduce the impact of spam calls, and when it's so prolific, it's more likely a customer will pay for it.
As for making revenue from the callers? I'm not sure what OP means by that.
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u/0ogaBooga Feb 07 '23
They absolutely do. Scammers go through numbers FAST as carriers mark their outgoing lines as spam. Telecoms make money off of selling blocks of numbers to these shitheels
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u/lycheedorito Feb 07 '23
I would imagine they would just be spoofing numbers or using services like Skype.
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u/2SK170A Feb 07 '23
Think of the phone system as a toll road. No matter who drives on it, the road owners still get paid for every trip.
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u/Musikaravaa Feb 06 '23
It's crazy they're falling for it, everyone knows medicare doesn't answer the phone or make calls.
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u/DinobotsGacha Feb 06 '23
Its sad, elderly become more trusting of society as their own capabilities diminish. Even with family support they still respond to spam, buy from TV ads, and fall victim to numerous scams. Sometimes they just need a friend to talk to
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u/anti-torque Feb 06 '23
One of our elders recently got ADT for health alerts.
Now she gets calls from people demanding she pay her ADT bill, as if she's already in collections, after one month of having a service.
Thankfully, she's learned to answer such queries/demands with, "Oh, well I don't handle my bills. Let me get your number, and I'll have my accountant call you back."
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u/DinobotsGacha Feb 06 '23
No surprise. It took me years to get my mom to say "let me check with my son." She was logical/skeptical in my younger years. Getting old is tough
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u/DTFH_ Feb 07 '23
I could be wrong but I think that third parties can buy lists from medical device companies or 3rd party insurers and thus the calls start.
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u/im_a_dr_not_ Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 07 '23
The bullshit stranger danger they started preaching (all strangers are out to get you, be careful) in the 70’s and 80’s finally has a use.
Phone rings with unknown number: “well this person is out to get me.”
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u/Art-Zuron Feb 07 '23
Oh that's a neat way of looking at it!
It was bogus in the 70s and 80s, but very good advice for those in THEIR 70s or 80s.
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u/9-11GaveMe5G Feb 07 '23
Its sad, elderly become more trusting of society as their own capabilities diminish. Even with family support they still respond to spam, *buy from TV ads"
MyPillowing intensifies
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u/YouJabroni44 Feb 06 '23
People with dementia or just poor memory might forget that.
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u/asimplerandom Feb 07 '23
They absolutely do. We’ve had to clean up the shit from these telemarketers 3x now with an elderly father in law who’s headed towards dementia.
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u/virginiarph Feb 07 '23
So I work for a company that does make medical cold calls for Medicare lol. It actually exists and makes it really hard to do my job lol.
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u/Musikaravaa Feb 07 '23
It's a joke.
My husband is on state Medicaid and I literally can't get a person on the phone to get his medical card.
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u/drsimonz Feb 06 '23
The solution is simple - stop answering the phone. Literally the only time I answer is when the caller ID is something recognizable, e.g. a doctor's office I've already called previously. If someone wants to waste my time, they can send an email.
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u/Galvanized-Sorbet Feb 07 '23
I feel like misrepresenting a federal program should be… you know… a federal crime
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u/Zoolot Feb 07 '23
It is, but you can’t really report a spoofed number, it won’t lead anywhere most of the time.
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u/johnjohn4011 Feb 06 '23
If only it were that easy to stop - they would have already...https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stop-robocalls/
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u/wwwhistler Feb 06 '23
Why can't they make spuffing another number..... Illegal?
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u/blahblah98 Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
This worked well for alcohol, drugs & prostitution.
Ed: Is it Monday-spell-shit-out day? Making shit illegal does nothing eliminate it; ref. alcohol, drugs, prostitution. It does create an enforcement need, and in the case of many vice economies, enforcement & prosecution can be economically outstripped by the benefit of violating the law.
So no, making spoofing illegal will not fix this problem, at all.
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u/whymustinotforget Feb 06 '23
That is so hilariously unrelated I'm borderline worried you may have had a stroke while typing that. Are you feeling any numbness?
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u/blahblah98 Feb 06 '23
Is it? Making alcohol, drugs & prostitution illegal did absolutely nothing to prevent any of them. It's profitable to violate the law, and illegality has zero deterrent effect. Similarly, making it illegal to spoof a phone number does nothing to reduce the profitability of fraud. So this is hilariously unrelated, how?
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u/hOprah_Winfree-carr Feb 07 '23
the problem is that you're over-generalizing. Prostitution is really something that any two people can decide to engage in. Ethanol fermentation and even basic stilling require minimal effort and can be accomplished by anyone anywhere. Drugs, depending on the drug, are similarly entrenched in society and impossible to stamp out. These are all things that human nature itself creates ceaseless demand for, and they've all existed since, at least, the dawn of civilization. Spoofing telephone numbers isn't like that at all. There are only a handful of telecom companies and forcing them to comply with a new regulation would be trivially easy to enforce.
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u/American_Stereotypes Feb 07 '23
Drugs, alcohol, and prostitution are all the result of natural processes that cannot be eliminated, because no central authority has the ability to realistically stop fermentation, growing and processing plants, or sex.
Spoofing a phone number and using it for fraud is the result of people abusing processes service providers have in place to change the display of a phone number. That is easily stopped by a central authority, since all they have to do is just make service providers stop allowing that functionality (at least for organizations without a demonstrable business need for it).
Will that stop fraud? No, of course not. But when it comes to fraud prevention, the name of the game is risk mitigation, which involves creating barriers to easy fraud and eliminating methods fraudsters use to commit their crimes. And restricting phone spoofing to legitimate businesses only? Well that's almost an absurdly easy way to remove one of the most common tools in a fraudster's kit.
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u/holenek Feb 07 '23
This is technical problem and can be easily solved. There are absolutely zero robocalls in Europe and close to zero scams involving human caller.
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u/autotldr Feb 06 '23
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 90%. (I'm a bot)
Every day, the honeypot numbers get inundated with calls from scammers purporting to be from Medicare.
The providers, knowing these numbers are for inbound calls only, will then drop any call that has a caller ID of one of the numbers on the DNO registry.
Swindlers will still have access to an abundance of other phone lines to use, but would no longer be able to claim they're from Medicare by encouraging the target to check their caller ID. The biggest hurdle with this is that it appears the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services use the phone line for both inbound and outbound calls, according to one representative.
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: call#1 Medicare#2 number#3 scam#4 phone#5
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u/AnnatoniaMac Feb 07 '23
My phone tells me “scam likely”. I never never never answer a call I don’t have a contact in my phone for. If it is important they will leave me a msg. That being said I understand how elderly are suckered in, it’s sad.
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Feb 07 '23
That is it exactly. We don't treat the phone as something people would randomly use to contact us and that seems to be key to killing off this scam route.
Unfortunately many previous generations implicitly trust the phone and the idea of an unexpected phone call isn't weird.
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u/MaxWebxperience Feb 07 '23
Our elected officials could stop identity theft, could stop robo calls, but in decades they have not. they are worthless pieces of shit
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak Feb 06 '23
Isn't that the FTCs job? They only have so many employees, fund them better to help stop all the robocalls
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u/HackSlashBurn Feb 06 '23
Nah. Have the state department cut off some foreign aid and arms sales. Watch how fast the shit stops
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak Feb 06 '23
We hardly send any aid or weapons to India compared to other countries we send things to. That's where a lot of Robo callers are from.
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u/iordseyton Feb 06 '23
Should be threatening to ban American telecos from connecting calls from / to India, destroying their call center industry
(Or just prevent American companies from hiring those types of services there)
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u/forksporkspoon Feb 07 '23
They use VPNs and VOIP rental services to bypass country blocks.
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u/SgtDoughnut Feb 07 '23
They also just outright hijack voip from unsecured netowrks.
Was just hired onto a firm to replace their only IT guy. One day after he left their entire phone system was hacked and being used to scam people.
I tried to warn them that I needed to install security before the other admin left, but the boss wouldn't listen to me. Bankrupted the company.
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u/The_Golgothan Feb 07 '23
Yes and if authorities in India suddenly had a reason to actually crack down these scams it would drastically reduce these scams.
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u/forksporkspoon Feb 07 '23
But the average lifestyle of Kolkata cops would also be drastically reduced.
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u/WhatTheZuck420 Feb 06 '23
quality technology services, llc. they send a ton o' medicare crap to me.
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u/rushpeiris Feb 06 '23
Yes , even I get few robocalls stating they are from tax department asking for money,try to scare I will be in jail if I don't respond to this fake robocall!
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u/SolidNumbers Feb 06 '23
Neither side! This is why it is important to realize why people become politicians, not to change shit but to MAKE MONEY. If you think otherwise go turn on blue clues because you clearly missed some of the basic critical thinking skills needed to be an adult, let alone a voter.
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u/FatStupidOldMan Feb 06 '23
This is one of those “side things” I really fucking wish legislation would catch up with. I would support any candidate that crusades against using technology to steal from the elderly. I’m so tired of progress meaning the elderly getting their lives destroyed because they aren’t up to date on the newest tech.
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u/Aromatic_Society4302 Feb 07 '23
I'm not saying it's right, but if a missle struck a scam calling center, I probably wouldn't lose any sleep, just saying.
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u/SmashTagLives Feb 07 '23
Why is it a surprise this isn’t being stopped? We just let a generation of old people get wiped out because wearing face masks made everyone’s dick feel small.
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u/howtodothis1now Feb 07 '23
The biggest culprits in all robo calls are the providers themselves. They have the ability to block spoofed calls if they want, but money comes in the way.
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u/insertbrackets Feb 07 '23
They also love targeting immigrants with IRS/deportation scams. Happened to my husband more than once. They even spoofed an FBI number. Damn leeches.
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u/Holdmybeerwatchthis Feb 07 '23
Right now I’m get 5-9 a day. Today I had 5 before 11am. No answer when I got sick of it and tried to answer and see what scam it was, just a click. They also pirate local numbers to try and get me to answer, the area code and first 3 numbers usually match my number. They never leave voice mails it’s infuriating.
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u/Zoolot Feb 07 '23
Yeah, those are robocalls to check to see if the number is active so they can sell it.
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u/Accomplished_Eye9769 Feb 06 '23
Most of these are commissioned by insurance companies to transfer them over. Not really a scam, but a sales call.
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u/catladyorbust Feb 06 '23
I think that’s small potatoes. Most of the ones I answer are clearly scam callers from India. In my house (with elderly) it’s 90% of the calls all day long. I would have thought the same thing before experiencing this. These are scams, not sales, and medical stuff is the main cover but I’ve had fake power company, fake direct tv (that one actually had me until they wanted money), fake credit card, scammers pretending to be grandkids, and on and on. It’s despicable.
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u/SuperToxin Feb 06 '23
It’s impossible to stop people from scaming the elderly it’s an education gap.
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u/dariusz2k Feb 07 '23
I work in Telephony and can say there is no good way to solve this problem without forcing customers and companies to completely remove their old phone systems and meet industry standards and enforce service providers to standardize. There is a severe lack of standardization in SIP.
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u/monkeywelder Feb 06 '23
And two new area codes were started recently so recent there could be no or very few actual numbers. But I am getting slammed by them the last few weeks.
866 and 833 10-15 a day.
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Feb 06 '23
My grandmother purchased some wired external device for her phone and made it block all local area codes since most of robocalled spoof local numbers.
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u/DebtPlenty2383 Feb 07 '23
set your phone so that only folks in your contact list get through. my phone immediately extinguishes suspect calls
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u/JWrundle Feb 07 '23
When they call me asking about joint pain I like to tell them I don't have legs and keep them on the line for a bit
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u/Romanator17 Feb 07 '23
This is my current gripe with phone numbers. I’ve had the same one my whole life and it would be very inconvenient to change it now. I also have no idea who knows my number and who sold my number to someone else. This is the opposite for my email address. I had my own domain and give out a new email address to every service I use. If someone sells my email I know exactly who sold it.
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u/hawkwings Feb 07 '23
I bought a switch so I could turn my landline off. It is off most of the time. Scammers know that my landline connects to an elderly person, but they don't seem to know that my cell phone also connects to an elderly person.
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u/weizXR Feb 07 '23 edited Feb 07 '23
Thankfully my parents in the 70-80 range are wise enough to know better about this stuff and block that crap. For them, it's a 'no brainier' because they know better.
Scamming will always take place in some form or another; The best way to stop it IMO is educating/teaching people about it and what to look for. This isn't anything new whatsoever, and likely to stop.
I know here in MA there are a decent amount of radio/tv advertisements and mail sent out from the state/local governments warning about such scams. Especially in some 'hot spots' where they happen more often like Cape Cod where the median age is nearly 60, there seems to be more awareness of it.
Even if these companies were completely dissolved, someone else is bound to pop up in it's place, so these are temporary solutions, but education and some critical thinking will help people from falling for any of them using any method of contact. Another thing that seems to help make things clearer/safer, is when government agencies specifically mention that they won't contact you in specific ways or ask for specific info, as generally the scammers are the ones using these methods.
If people knew better and knew what to look for, it can make a huge difference. Where I am at least, the messaging seems to have gotten through to most.
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u/InGordWeTrust Feb 07 '23
I thought the title said Rollarcoasters and I was confused and excited for a moment.
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u/0ogaBooga Feb 07 '23
Super easy fix. Expand private right of action under the tcpa to individual consumers against telecoms who allow this.
Watch how fast it ends when the carrier may be on the hook for allowing abuse.
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u/Freedom2064 Feb 07 '23
Seize assets of foreign countries 1:1 with scam losses. Before too long, foreign governments will crack down on this type of pond scum
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u/MyGovExpert 11d ago
New FREE resource available for all things SSA from a former SSA District Manager: https://www.youtube.com/@MyGovExpert
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u/booney64 Feb 06 '23
I had ATT ask me to pay 5$ a month to block robo calls from them. I told them that was extortion.