ACMA has registered new rules that require telcos to publish information to help Australians manage and report scam calls, share information about those calls with other telcos and also report identified scam calls to authorities.
The rules are part of a ‘Combating Scams Action Plan’ that has been in place for over a year, and Mr Fletcher said under that plan, the major telcos had so far blocked over 30 million scam calls.
Minister Fletcher said this with a straight face.
Think about that number. Let us say there are about ten million households in Oz. So they have stopped some three a year from reaching us - wow! Just wow!
They come and go in waves but in a busy period I can get more than three a week, rarely three a day. I have a landline in the white pages, many don’t have a landline at all and a good number don’t make it public. But still you would have to say the darkside is winning.
I think we all agree that scams are a genuine problem but it is easy to make cynical comments from the sidelines (and believe me I understand anyone’s cynicism), much harder to make constructive suggestions.
Probably “share information about those calls with other telcos” is a positive step, so if a scam caller is detected and blocked in one telco, it can very quickly and efficiently get blocked in all other telcos - whereas in the past the scam caller would have to be detected and independently blocked in each telco.
I don’t get a huge number of scam calls each year - and yes they do come in waves - but a reduction of 3 for me, could be, say, a 25% reduction, and I am happy about that. There’s just more to do.
Only yesterday the wise ones mobile rang and the robot announced our internet service was about to be disconnected. Call ended. The landline seems to mostly get calls from someone rousing at me in Mandarin, although I’ve also had several recent offers from Telstra to help reset my ADSL modem by remote. Ahhhh!
Epic fail so far Mr Fletcher. More so in that this is the first time the 12 month old program has come to our attention. It needs some decent promotion, assuming it will be effective in blocking or subverting the Scams.
The present rate of scam calls is drowning the few real calls that might need attention.
This is an area well outside my expertise so I cannot imagine how I would ever make a constructive suggestion about the mechanism of the solution. Does this mean I ought to be silent?
If the matter is such a technically difficult problem, and we presume the Minister is being briefed by those who understand this, then perhaps he ought to say so. Instead of making a dubious statistic his sound bite - not claiming a great outcome but allowing the innocent to draw that conclusion - maybe he should say it is very hard and despite the pitiful result so far they will keep trying. Or maybe it is impossible, just suck it up people. Whether the success is within grasp or not vaguely laying claim to such a success doesn’t help.
Fiona Cameron on the latest measures. (Scroll down to News Video) She says they have been playing whackamole so far blocking individual scam phone numbers but the telcos will now be using technology to identify callers with common features and blocking them in bulk.
Do any of the technophiles know what she is talking about? Will it work? What is the tech media saying about it?
Something new (to me) is happening on my iPhone: the phone doesn’t ring but there’s a text message of a missed call. The phone numbers are similar, just different last two numbers.
Calls from numbers in my phone book come through as normal, some “unknown” numbers also come through, giving me the choice to pick up or not.
Those ‘silenced’ numbers must be very well known by the phone service as they get blocked automatically. I’m grateful for the service and it also gives me hope that the spammers will be caught out by technology in the near future.
Just sounds like flubot. Your phone doesn’t ring because there was no call. Just a fake text trying to lure you into finding out what the call was, and then the pain starts if you have an Apple phone.
I like how my phone allows the number to be reported as, spam jsas much as emails even of an, email is not necessarily spam. Ot could be just something i am not interested in looking at. It seems the way we live now. I still say our privacy issues hare lousy. Ill say no more about it.
I wonder: if there was no call how is it that my phone App shows that I’ve missed a call and gives the number
(I understand it’s most probably an artificial one).
And then the text comes in, as it’s usual with a missed call, showing that same number to ring back.
Update on the strange phone calls I’ve been getting since the start of this year: as I posted a couple of weeks ago (when I got seven ‘missed call’ notifications in one day) although my iPhone App shows the number and the country, (I understand that could be a set-up information) my phone doesn’t ring.
What alerts me is the little number on the phone icon plus the phone and the text notifications of a missed call.
I got one call again on the 20th, from Thailand, and one yesterday from the Phillipines.
Baffles me how my phone registers a call, but there’s no ringing alert
Apple ios introduced a feature not that long ago called silence unknown callers according to some posts I have seen on the web.
Check your phone settings. It may be turned on.
Most (?) Android ‘phone’ apps have options to set different ring tones (or no ring) for defined groups. You can assign a label to each number in your phone book and a specific ring tone to that group. It can be tedious to set up, and if one uses multiple ring tones it is easy to forget which is which.
That happens to me regularly for any incoming call, not just spam/scam. Nothing on the phone but I get a texted missed call message (part of ‘the service’).
