Starting about two weeks ago, some of the robo calls I receive are showing real, working numbers. As a routine matter, I submit these calls to nomorobo.com and they block any further calls from that number for people who have subscribed to nomorobo. Unfortunately, those working legitimate numbers are now blocked for anybody subscribing to nomorobo.
I'm not sure of the significance of this new practice by the scammers.
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I've seen that too: the numbers are always from radio station call-in lines.
I have been seeing this for quite a few months - chiefly on robocalls to my cell phone.
Seems like a logical and inevitable progression towards all of us needing some sort of challenge/response or, like the Euro systems, charging the caller instead of the call-ee.
The FCC and IETF are working on crypto signatures on SIP headers on VoIP calls which would make it much harder to fake the calling info. That, and new rules that allow telcos to block calls from known spammers, are likely to help without ruining phones even more than they are now.
"Please press 1 for Joe, 2 for Sue, 3 for Sam...... 9 to really talk to somebody" and take a predetermined action on the first wrong keypress?
I can imagine a scripting scenario using voice recognition, but it's pretty involved.
The one that really got to me was the recent effort (apparently approved by the RNC) to allow dropping spam advertisements into people's voicemail - without them even getting a "Call".
Sorry, that's not effective: there are only three or four major voice-mail providers, and the 80/20 rule applies, but the "80" is on the scripters' side.
That's less of a problem with "Millennial" customers, who tend to ignore their phone's voice-mail and rely on texts or caller ID to determine who gets a callback.
I has avoided texting - going so far as to remove the capability from my tMob account - for years since getting scammed via text.
Finally saw the light last year and find it extremely useful for quick communications.
And, now that you mention it, it does sort of embody a de-facto challenge-response.... so score one more for texting.
I have had pretty good luck with NoMoRobo and rejecting calls with no CallerID on my FIOS landline - and I have my land line set up so that the only voicemail that I actually use is the little hardware box that I have hung on the line.... so I guess I am more-or less immune on the landline.
But I *have* been getting voicemails on my cell phone that do not seem to correspond with any ring on the phone.
OTOH, I do not know enough to say for sure that they are ringless messages.
But just the idea that a major political party feels immune to backlash from essentially making everybody's voicemail useless by virtue of becoming a spam conduit is kind of shocking.
Those guys are not stupid and they are probably making an informed judgment of the tradeoffs.... and the tradeoffs apparently do not favor us peasants.
My son and his friends - all Millennials - haven't checked their voice mails for years. Every time I tried to leave a message for him, I got a "mailbox is full" message.
There is a good aspect to my discomfort: the millenialls have, by some process I don't undertstand but I do very much appluad - decided that other people should not be able to offload their call list onto those who don't choose to answer them when they call. I've always scoffed at the notion that some marketer was entitled to demand that everyone who uses a phone must arrange for others to be able to leave them messages that are, for the most part, an imposition of someone else's social, political, or moral agenda onto my to-do list.
I have voice mail now, because there is no cell-phone plan which does not include it. A smart move by the cell carriers, of course, since checking voice mail markes up their profits minute-by-minute: but they've not yet figured out how to deal with the collective sneer that the millennials have returned in response to their parents example of slavish acceptance of a social contract that was imposed without their consent.
Most (?) carriers will still allow you to configure busy/no-answer forwarding to another number. I have my cell set to forward to my home phone, so when I get a call I can't/don't want to deal with, they end up on the home answering machine. Most of the time they don't bother to leave a message anyway. (However, I also make a policy of not giving out my cell number to anyone who might be making a list, so I almost never get calls of any kind on my cell -- wrong numbers are more common than any kind of marketer.)
I only have a cell phone: I chose not to put in a POTS line when I moved to North Carolina, since my new job requried the cell phone and I didn't want to be encumbered with two separate voice-mail systems.
Since I've just left that job, I have considered going back to POTS and ditching the cell phone. There's zero chance I'd buy a traditional twisted-pair, which costs more than the cellular service, but I'd consider VoIP if my Internet usage remains high enough to justify the cable-based Internet connection I have now.
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