we do have that info (perhaps presentation of such depends on phone software of course).
almost all my inbound calls are spam, in the united states. when i've listened to voicemails left, they even have native north american accented people reading the prerecorded scripts, so there's deep roots to the depravity that cross country borders.
Time for my usual comment. No, it's not difficult. Every Telco knows where the call comes from and where it's routed to. Sure, the end-user doesn't necessarily know the origin, but there's regulation that would trivially solve this. "For each spam report, you're responsible unless you point out where you got the call from" if enforced would sort out the problem almost immediately.
Telco can't say how the call happened? Fine them. Telco can't sort out their spammy customer? Fine them. "Oh, but international calls!" - they can drop the spammy international peer - the US is large enough that nobody serious would risk getting disconnected.
International carriers still interconnect with a us carrier to deliver the calls. Spam is really easy to detect. Short call durations and lots of different call to numbers.
I live in Germany and for whatever reason I have literally never received a spam call here. I can go months without receiving a single call these days. I'm not exactly sure if spam calls are not a thing here or if I've just been lucky. But yeah I see how that can lead to different preferences when it comes to voice mail.
Honest question: are spam calls common in the US? I don't remember when / if I got any in Spain, Netherlands or UK (places I've lived and had cellphones for a prolonged time), I do remember, however, that when I managed to score a US number with Google Voice I'd regularly get weird spammy voicemails.
It's different if the caller is also based in Europe but the worst offenders are not. I rarely get spam calls since I rarely pick up unless I know who the caller is and the odd times I get caught I just hang up.
MY dad went through a phase of being plagued because he is from a time when it would be considered rude not to engage in the conversation. As a consequence I suspect he was on some kind of suckers list?
It took a while to train him off this habit, then he discovered email...
I'm not saying I never get spam calls, but I certainly have to scroll back quite a bit in my phone call history to see the last one.
Also, on the rare occasion I do get a spam call it's always from some random international country like South Sudan or Oman that I would never expect a phone call from.
What makes this problem uniquely hard to solve for the USA as opposed to anywhere else?
> This thread makes me wonder if Americans have such info (whether a call is a likely spam) automatically pop up when receiving text or calls.
Yes, of course we do. Verizon and T-Mobile, at the very least, mark calls as "likely spam" reliably. Can't speak for any carriers as I've not been a customer of theirs for some time.
Some of the spam calls I received were from US phone numbers (I'm in the UK), but when I answered I ended up connected with someone with a Southern Asian accent speaking rather bad English.
Could you point to relevant research anyway? I'd be interested and maybe it's possible to "find" it somewhere.
This doesn't reflect my personal experience (anecdata I know) or those of any of the people I know.
I'll think I'll ask around because now I'm curious about the distribution. If a few people here are bombarded with spam calls it would average out the 1-2 a year me and my family/friends get on average on their mobile numbers.
Maybe a standarized national system to report spam, or maybe even as part of the cellular protocol? I never heard of such a system deployed nationally, but I'm wondering if it could help.
Most of the time when a spam number calls me, I can find it through spam reports on 3rd party websites by googling it.
We don't have spam calls over here in Germany. I _never_ received one. There were 3 calls I remember that were doing research stuff, but that's all. And telling them to not call again would have solved it, btw.
It seems to be related to other stuff the US is behind on, but I've given up on finding out how it could be fixed in the general (last 20 years) political climate.
almost all my inbound calls are spam, in the united states. when i've listened to voicemails left, they even have native north american accented people reading the prerecorded scripts, so there's deep roots to the depravity that cross country borders.
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