RoboKiller and the junk call nightmare

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

“I am in the middle of a cell phone nightmare,” France, who lives in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, told Ars in an e-mail after three days worth of the calls. “My phone started ringing three days ago and has continued to ring every few minutes since then. Each time it is from a different number… I can’t conduct a client call, can’t text because calls coming in interrupt the process, can’t even take photos for the same reason.”

On the first night, France went to bed, slept for 7.5 hours, and woke up to 225 missed calls, she said. The calls continued at roughly the same pace for the rest of the five-day stretch, putting the number of calls at somewhere around 700 a day.

The first half of this well written Ars Technica piece delves into spam calling and the futility of trying to block those calls. The second half is about solutions, solutions like RoboKiller:

Instead of merely relying on a blocklist, RoboKiller’s technology analyzes the audio fingerprints of calls and can thus block many robocalls from spoofed numbers. Robokiller took first place in a contest the Federal Trade Commission held in 2015 to find the most promising new anti-robocall technologies, and the company has been busy improving its technology ever since.

My understanding is that many of the robocalls we receive are simply attempts to verify that there is a human at the other end of the line. If there is, your number is added to a list, and that list is sold to another tier of more precisely targeted robocallers.

Like many people I know, I’ve stopped answering the phone if I do not recognize the phone number. Seems to me part of the solution would be technology that prevented spoofing in the first place. Yeesh.