Spam calls. Is it possible to fight them? Tired of telephone spammers How to punish telephone spammers
Every day, lovers of easy money are inventing new ways to withdraw money from gullible citizens. We've become so accustomed to email spam that it seems like it's always been there. But technology does not stand still, and over the past couple of years, spam calls to mobile phones have been gaining momentum. A sort of telephone salesman calls you unexpectedly and tries to sell you something completely unnecessary. In most cases, like email spam, they offer get-rich-quick schemes.
In this article I will describe my positive experience of blocking spam calls, which I first encountered about two years ago.
How to block unwanted calls on your smartphone
Fortunately, a modern phone, or rather a smartphone, is a small computer and can analyze and control incoming calls using software. All we need is to know the caller's number. And knowing it, decide whether to accept the call or not.
It’s good that now there are no problems with identifying the caller’s number; all tariff plans of mobile operators include the service of automatic caller ID.
Where do spammers call from?
I collected statistics on outgoing spammer numbers. I received 95% of unwanted calls from spammers from Moscow, only a few from St. Petersburg and a couple of times from abroad. That is, most of the spam numbers are from Moscow.
1. Blocking spam calls not from your contact list
The easiest way to block unwanted calls is to limit incoming calls to contacts in your phone book. I described this method in detail in the article. That is, only those who are in your contact list will be able to reach you.
This method blocks spammers 100%, but it has drawbacks. You may miss an important call (from work, from college, from school) if the caller's number is not recorded in your phone.
The implementation of this locking method depends on the firmware. But fortunately it is present in many smartphones by default.
2. Block calls by area code
As I wrote above, most of the calls from spammers came from Moscow numbers. Therefore, it makes sense to block incoming calls starting with +7495 and +7499.
This method blocks spammers by 99%, but is not suitable for residents of the capital. After all, as I wrote above, someone can get a call from work, but the call will be blocked.
But if you do not live in Moscow and you do not have active contacts in the capital, then this method is ideal for you. I think spammers will not go to the regions any time soon and I will call residents of Saratov from city numbers in the same Saratov.
In the popular MIUI, a filter for incoming calls by prefix called “Black List” is included in the firmware. For others, you may need to install additional software.
3. Unwanted call blocking apps
If it is not possible to use the first two blocking methods, then you need to use additional programs. Which check the caller's number against known spam databases and block the call if necessary.
There are many programs for blocking unwanted calls for the Android operating system.
Android application "Don't pick up the phone"
My favorite was "Don't Pick Up the Phone." Here is her topic on w3bsit3-dns.com - http://4pda.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=784364. Over the year of using it, it missed only 2 calls from spammers, while more than 100 calls from 50 different numbers were blocked.
Android application “Kaspersky Who Calls”
In addition to the main function of blocking calls from spammers, this application contains a directory of numbers for businesses and organizations. And if the call is not from a spammer, but it is not in your address book, then it is quite possible that you will see not only the caller’s number, but also the name of the organization to which this number belongs.
Calls and messages to your mobile phone from beauty salons, banks and fitness clubs have become commonplace, and the latest “trend” among telephone spammers is a “missed call” from an unfamiliar number, when you call back and end up on an answering machine with advertising. Not only do “sales people” daily invite you to try a new procedure in a salon or call from a bank with an offer of a credit card, but your personal data ends up in open databases and can be used by scammers. Experts told RIAMO where mobile spam comes from and how to deal with telephone attacks.
Cold calls
“Cold calling” is a Western sales technique where potential clients are called without prior agreement. In Russia, this method is also widespread and is mainly used by unscrupulous companies that want to sell a product of dubious quality.
As Natalya Vyatkina, director of the psychological center “Atelier of Happiness,” notes, the main audience for “cold calls” are women and pensioners, since from a psychological point of view they are more vulnerable.
Salespeople use certain psychological techniques that are aimed at instilling trust, continuing the conversation as long as possible and ultimately forcing a person to purchase a product, even if it is not needed.
“The caller may even call you by name or say that one of your friends gave you your number. You need to clearly understand that if you did not give your contact information directly to the caller, the likelihood that you will be deceived or sold a low-quality product or service tends to 100%,” the expert warns.
The psychologist reminds that there can be nothing “free” in such “aggressive” marketing, be it a trial massage session or testing a device “for all diseases.”
Sales people know a number of psychological techniques for successfully persuading their interlocutor, confirms Alexey Petropolsky, general director of the law firm URVISTA.
“Often, representatives of this category of salespeople start a conversation in such a way that it is not immediately clear that they are trying to force you to buy something that you do not need. They strike up a conversation like good friends and offer to take part in a unique promotion that may seem very attractive to you,” explains the lawyer.
In his experience, the number of such cold calls to one subscriber can reach 10-12 per day.
Open data
According to lawyer Elena Yulova, the very fact of owning the subscriber’s personal data, which includes last name, first name, patronymic and telephone number, and using them without his consent is illegal.
“Article 7 of the Law “On Personal Data” indicates that operators and other persons who have access to personal data are obliged not to disclose to third parties or distribute personal data without the consent of the subject of personal data,” notes Yulova.
According to her, for violation of the confidentiality of personal data, fines are provided, which range from 300 to 500 rubles for individuals, from 500 to 1,000 rubles for officials, from 5,000 to 10,000 rubles for legal entities. For these violations, the law also provides for compensation for moral damage.
However, today it is not difficult to obtain this information. Moreover, there is no need to buy a contact database for calling - they can be obtained from open sources.
“The Tax Service began to place the telephone numbers of company directors in the public domain. Absolutely free of charge, anyone can go to the site and download data from companies that have recently registered, and get real phone numbers,” explains Alexey Petropolsky.
Appeal to the Federal Antimonopoly Service
In some countries, this sales technique is prohibited by law. Russian legislation also has provisions for unscrupulous salespeople, although their activities are not directly prohibited.
“To protect your interests, you need to competently use a set of tools that will allow you to punish the perpetrators within the framework of the current legislation,” says lawyer Gleb Plesovskikh.
According to the expert, according to Article 18 of the federal law “On Advertising”, the distribution of advertising over telecommunication networks, including telephone, is allowed only with the prior consent of the subscriber or addressee to receive it.
He advises contacting the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) by sending a written appeal to the local government. To do this, you need to request a statement from your telecom operator about incoming calls and messages.
“The appeal must indicate the date and time of receipt of unwanted calls, and also note the fact that you did not consent to receive advertising information from this service provider. The finished application with the application can be sent to the OFAS either through regular mail or directly on the service’s website,” Plesovskikh clarified.
Conversations are recorded
Also, to stop annoying advertising on your mobile phone, you can contact the police, the prosecutor’s office at your place of residence, or the Roskomnadzor department, providing as evidence a recorded telephone conversation and the number from which the call came.
At the same time, preparing appeals to the relevant authorities or the court, collecting evidence takes time, and calls from annoying salespeople may continue. At the same time, arguing with them and threatening to sue them is most often useless.
According to Yulova, the most effective thing is to immediately turn off the call and add the number to the “black list”.
Psychologist Natalya Vyatkina also advises stopping the conversation as early as possible and not “standing on ceremony.”
“Don’t be afraid to seem impolite: a person who calls you on your personal phone without your permission for the purpose of profit a priori violates the rules of decency and moral standards. We need to say: “I didn’t give you my phone number - I ask you not to call me anymore!”,” she concluded.
“As soon as you realize that they are trying to scam you, immediately say that you did not consent to the processing of personal data. Most likely, they will immediately hang up on the other end,” advises lawyer Alexey Petropolsky.
Then you can ask the mobile operator for information about where they called you from, and as soon as possible write a statement to the police about the illegal use of personal information, the expert concluded.
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The second method is very similar, only here no one will even give you a discount card. We are talking about purchases in online stores: when ordering, as a rule, you need to indicate a telephone number for contact, which the manager will call back to confirm all the details and so on. Of course, everyone indicates a mobile phone number. And, voila, according to the “Rules for ordering in an online store”, which you also, of course, have not read, the store has the right to send you mountains of spam about certain discounts and special offers.
The third method is generally the most vile. Its victims are those who have not yet set up automatic payment from a bank card, but go to the payment terminal with cash. We topped up the account - great, subscribed to spam. How can this be? Everything is simple and banal: in the “Terms of Service”, which you do not read (well, what could there be, the commission - here it is, on the screen, why these legal jungles?), it also says that when you use the terminal, you give consent to receive mailings to the entered number. Whether this is your number is not even checked, so you can make a dirty trick on an ill-wisher by depositing 10 rubles into his account through any terminal: let him then suffer with unsubscribes.
Long contracts have very specific clauses. For example, here is an offer from the UBANK service:
Here's what lawyers think about these rules:
Call me
Voice spam, which is gaining momentum, is not prohibited at all: from a legal point of view, it is a call from one subscriber to another, and not some kind of unauthorized mass mailing. In the simplest case, numbers are dialed “just like that”, in the form of a random set of numbers. But this is not so effective, so “specialists” prefer to work using databases. They are collected very simply: somewhere you left a private ad (and, hurray, they know not only your number, but also your name), somewhere an unscrupulous manager sold your client base for a jar of jam and a basket of cookies (for example, in a car showroom, fitness - club, bank, insurance company, etc.) - although this is illegal, who will catch him by the hand? The probability is low. And finally, you have probably seen databases of cell numbers on the Internet that were stolen by employees of cellular companies. As a rule, these databases are quite old, but many people do not change their numbers for years - if the number turns out to be “alive”, then the likelihood that the owner’s name is correct is very high.
Numbers are also “stolen” from address books by malicious Trojan programs, and your contacts can also be foolishly given by your friends, trusting in some promotion: for example, “we will sell you this filter with a discount of 100 rubles if you tell us the contacts of three your friends."
Voice spam began to spread after operators generally defeated unauthorized SMS messages. Thanks to the deputies who changed the law “On Communications”: if earlier the operator was obliged to deliver to the subscriber all SMS received at his address, now mass mailings are officially allowed to be filtered. Shortly before this, cell phones themselves began to block SMS from senders with “left” short and symbolic numbers, obviously sent through gateways, but this did not help: spam simply began to arrive from ordinary federal numbers.
Miraculous deliverance
“We launched the Cloudmark intelligent platform to block spam coming from external networks. The Cloudmark anti-spam platform was launched into test operation at the end of May 2014. It is an intelligent spam monitoring algorithm that includes modern and patented algorithms for grouping similar messages, an adaptive spam identification mechanism, and the ability to identify complex and distributed attacks. Intelligent traffic analysis algorithms allow you to block about 95% of spam messages", - commented Beeline press service.
In cases where spam does reach the subscriber, Beeline operates a hotline 007, to which the operator asks subscribers to send examples of spam messages that have broken through the barrier of the antispam platform. That is, the system is trainable, and a similar message will no longer be received by other subscribers.
For now, voice spam can only be combated locally by installing an application on your smartphone to block suspicious calls. For example, Mr.Number for Android has a useful feature of transferring all calls from unknown (i.e., those that are not in the address book) and hidden numbers to an answering machine. As a rule, spammers will hang up as soon as they hear a greeting, and in the end no message will be recorded, but the one who is calling you on business can tell you what he needs, and you will call back. True, in Russia there is no culture of using answering machines and even completely harmless people are usually afraid of greetings - they prefer to talk to a live person.
The iPhone has a standard “white list” in the “Do Not Disturb” function, but it is very inconvenient for our tasks: adding all contacts to the allowed list is not an option, and there is no way to find out what the person who couldn’t get through wanted. Well, someone has to suffer.
Eventually
As we found out, there are two types of mailings, legal and illegal, and the share of legal ones is much larger. In the case of illegal mailings, your number was stolen from some database, or it was included in the mailings using a random number method. In this case, you can safely complain to the FAS, but you will have to wait a long time for some kind of solution; it is easier to block numbers over and over again using the methods described above.
With legal mailings, everything is more complicated. You yourself, without reading the offer in all kinds of machines like Qiwi, paying in online stores, give your consent to mailings, and, as this very offer may indicate, not only the organization itself, but also many of its partners, the only condition here will be the presence formal agreement between them.
Neither operators nor the creators of operating systems and applications have yet come up with an effective method of combating spam through calls and SMS. Calling is not regulated in any way in the legal field - there is, of course, telephone hooliganism and telephone terrorism with very specific articles, but it is unlikely to attract them here. So for now there are few ways: a ban by technical means or through various applications.