Stopping Spam Calls is Surprisingly Complicated (but There Are Still Things You Can Do)

Everybody knows the experience of looking at your ringing phone to see a caller ID that reads “scam likely,” or answering a call and finding a recorded voice on the other line. Robocalls are everywhere these days, and it seems like they’re only getting more frequent. If you’ve ever looked for an answer to the question of how to stop the spam calls, you know that it’s not easy. Whether you’re trying to protect yourself, your family, or your business, it’s a challenge to stop the calls you don’t want while letting through the ones you do. But you can take steps to make it more manageable.

See Stopping Robocalls with Aaron Foss for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.

Aaron Foss is a serial entrepreneur who has built five businesses, some of which were acquired by other companies and others that didn’t take off. He got his undergraduate degree in information technology and a Master’s in Business Administration, and he loves being at the intersection of tech and business. His most well-known company is Nomorobo, a robocall-prevention program that won the FTC’s Robocall Challenge in 2013. Since its founding, it’s stopped billions of unwanted robcalls and texts from reaching phones. It’s stopped a lot of crime and saved a lot of people from being taken advantage of.

The Story of Nomorobo

People often assume that Aaron started Nomorobo because he was looking for a way to stop the spam calls he was getting. But in reality, that wasn’t the story. In 2013, he had just sold his last company and was taking some planned time off. Aaron’s personality doesn’t let him not solve a problem. So when he heard about the FTC’s Robocall Challenge, which offered a $50,000 prize to anyone who could solve the robocall problem, he decided to try.

The telecommunications industry were the ones who were really supposed to solve the problem. Robocalls are still a problem now, but they were even more of a problem a decade ago. They wanted new eyes on the problem. Aaron had done some development work for telecommunications companies in the past, so he had experience. And with his business background, he could real between the lines of the competition. They didn’t just want a technical solution, they wanted something that phone carriers would be willing to participate in because they were just not cooperating.

Aaron’s unique combination of experience and expertise gave him an important perspective, and his solution won the challenge. After winning, he took his solution and built it into the company Nomorobo.

How (and Why) Robocalls Work

“Robocall” is a term that refers to any call done by an auto-dialer. An auto-dialer, as the name suggests, automatically dials phone numbers. Sometimes there is a recorded voice at the other end, other times it’s a real human being making calls with the help of an auto-dialer. Telemarketing for legitimate businesses are robocalls just as much as the scams people often think about.

Robocalls usually have a negative connotation, but they’re actually really good

Aaron Foss

Robocalls contain everything on the spectrum between good and bad. Legitimate telemarketers use auto-dialers. So do scammers. So do automated prescription and appointment reminders. Some of these uses are great – it’s convenient for the pharmacy to call you when your prescription is ready. It’s easy to lump all of these together because they are all robocalls. But when people are asking how to stop the spam calls, they don’t want to block their dentist’s automated appointment reminder call. They’re talking about illegal and/or unwanted calls.

There are technically a lot of laws around robocalls. But these are laws that started in the late 1980s and were implemented in the early 1990s. Back then, there was no internet. Auto-dialers were mechanical boxes that needed hardware, and that’s what the laws targeted. But with the internet, anybody can plug into a virtual auto-dialer and pump out calls for virtually nothing. Fraudsters and scammers are running rampant.

The Murky Line between Spam and Scam

When Aaron first started tackling the question of how to stop spam calls, the bulk of them were pseudo-legitimate business calls. You had the stereotypical scams pretending to be legitimate businesses. There were also dubious products, which Aaron considers more spam than scam. This includes things like debt consolidation and vehicle warranties. They might be scams, or they might be legitimate, it’s hard to tell.

The robocall industry is so interesting because you can slice and dice it into all sorts of categories. The calls making the biggest impact on people are scams. Nomorobo sees scams of all types come through – fake banking representatives, grandparent scams, funeral scams, and more. These callers scam a lot of people. Aaron has to wonder who the people are doing this, and how they live with themselves.

Hiding Behind Pseudo-Legitimacy

When people get spam calls, they often think the company has gone out and hired a robocaller to make those calls. But these callers are often what are known as “lead generators.” Lead generator companies put together a robocall about a particular product, such as solar panels. Then they make a bunch of spam calls to as many different phone numbers as they can. Once they find an interested person, they sell that person’s information to a company that makes that product.

They don’t just do this for the money, either. Having lead generator companies as the middleman gives both sides plausible deniability. If the company producing the protect gets in trouble, they can truthfully say that they’re just buying leads. The company doesn’t know where they came from! And if the lead generation company gets in trouble, they can truthfully claim that they just sell the leads to whatever interested company was willing to pay. They didn’t know the company wasn’t legitimate!

This happens with all sorts of products, including the vehicle warranty calls that got so common they became a joke. Middlemen are a huge problem in spam calls. But they’re not really a huge problem with scam calls. Most scammers create their own call center boiler rooms overseas and make their calls themselves. It’s a business, and they’re good at what they do. And once you’re scammed, you go on a list that they sell to other scammers to try to get more money from you, because it works.

When [scammers] get a fish on a hook, they reel it in, and they take that person for all that they’re worth.

Aaron Foss

Why Carriers Haven’t Already Stopped the Spam Calls

We stopped spam email with spam filters, why can’t we do it for phone calls, too? The key difference is that with email, you have the message text. Sending an email sends the entire message contents for a spam filter to go through. With a voice call, though, the message doesn’t get relayed until the call connects and someone picks up. The only information anyone can have before you start interacting with the caller is the sending phone number, and occasionally data like the carrier.

The key to understanding why stopping the robocall problem is so difficult is because you can’t analyze the content of the message.

Aaron Foss

Your phone carrier can’t – and shouldn’t – listen in on all your calls. But without doing that, they can’t analyze the content of a call to determine if it’s spam or not. And there’s also a risk to stopping something that looks like spam. The phone industry is heavily regulated. There can be consequences if they accidentally block legitimate calls. Think about what would happen if their blocking system blocked a call to 911 or kept your doctor’s office from calling to tell you to go to the ER immediately. It would be a huge problem.

And carriers aren’t set up to block calls well, either. Their job is to get your calls to your reliability and with good quality. All the sudden scammers show up and they have to do the opposite. They’re not set up to stop spam calls. And as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. You may not want the telemarketers trying to sell you their products, but someone else might. That’s why Nomorobo has been successful.

Why the Government Hasn’t Stopped the Spam Calls

People say all the time that the government should do something to stop the spam calls. But it’s a really complex problem. You can say whatever you want about politicians, but they are doing all they can. Aaron has spoken in front of Congress three times. Whatever your politics, everyone can agree that we don’t want spam calls.

I don’t care if you’re red, blue, left, right … or anything like that. One thing we can all agree on is nobody wants spam calls.

Aaron Foss

Politicians and regulators are doing everything they can. But it’s a hard problem to stop. Carriers have no incentive to stop calls. They’re going to do what they legally have to, but they don’t want the liability if they get something wrong. With email spam prevention, there’s no law that your email provider has to offer it. It’s just a selling point for that service. There are also third-party apps available.

Politicians need to make as many laws as possible about this in the right way. Aaron has advocated taking all the hodgepodge of small fixes that exist right now, throwing it out, and making everything opt-in – no robocalls are getting through unless you’ve opted in. Of course, that’s easy to say from his desk chair. Politicians are doing what they can. Carriers need to do what they can and give the tools to customers that they can. And there’s some responsibility on the personal side, too. Education yourself, or use services like Nomorobo. They’re available and affordable. You can’t sit back and do nothing.

How Nomorobo Identifies Spam

A big part of Nomorobo’s success is how it identifies which calls are spam and which are legitimate. And that difference is because the phone carriers don’t answer the phone. Carriers do it by looking at the phone number and trying to find patterns, like if it’s a new number or if it’s calling lots of people. Then it tries to label it.

Nomorobo’s secret weapon, in additional to analyzing the incoming data from hundreds of millions of phone calls, is that they build the world’s largest commercial honeypot. They went to phone carriers and bought a bunch of phone numbers that were so deluged by spam calls that the carriers couldn’t give them to customers. Then they set up bots that would be able to answer these calls and play along with whatever they said. This let them record, transcribe, and analyze millions of spam calls. When they catch even one spam call from a particular phone number, they can block all calls from that number from getting through to their customers.

The carriers have a little bit of data that is sometimes helpful. Their filters get it right sometimes, but they definitely aren’t perfect. Because Nomorobo is able to get their bots to engage with the callers, they can overcome that problem of not knowing the content of the calls. This gives them a big boost in the battle to stop the spam calls.

The Challenge of Spoofing Caller ID

Spam callers’ ability to spoof phone numbers on caller ID has made the process harder. Everyone thinks that caller ID is tied to an actual device, but that’s not true. When caller ID began, it was a walled garden. The carriers ran it, and basically just set the calling number for each number. It was completely unprotected. Aaron describes it like the return address on an envelope. If he wanted to write you a letter, put the return address as his neighbor, and drop it in the mail, you would get the letter and it would look like it was from his neighbor. That’s how caller ID was back then.

STIR/SHAKEN tried to be a way to stop the spam calls, but all it really is was certified caller ID. It just does a little check to confirm the person behind the caller ID and make them easier to trace. But it doesn’t say anything about the content of the call. It doesn’t mean they’re not still a scammer, it just means they’ve gone through the process to verify. They could be a legitimate originator of a spam call. It’s like the little SSL lock on websites. That used to mean that it was a trusted site. But now even scammers will buy them for their fake sites. Now all it means is that the connection between you an the website’s server is secure.

VoIP Makes Spam Calls Easier

Without Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, there wouldn’t be nearly as many robocalls because there would be a much higher barrier to entry. They would have to buy and maintain all the auto-dialer machines and keep them in a certain space. It would be easy for government to regulate them and law enforcement to find them.

But with the nature of VoIP, none of that is necessary. A scammer only needs a smartphone computer and headset to set up a VoIP connection and make hundreds our thousands of calls over their internet from an easily-accessible device. It’s cheap and it’s easy to set up and move around if law enforcement comes knocking.

A scammer can pick up a phone or a computer and call anyone, or hundreds of millions of people, for virtually nothing.

Aaron Foss

Scammed by a Thousand Cuts

Occasionally people ask Aaron if he sees a tidal wave of robocalls coming. And in some ways, he wishes it was a tidal wave or an asteroid or something big and dramatic. Then it would be much easier to stop. But instead it’s a steady stream. Figuring out how to stop the spam calls is a constant fight, and every one that gets through does a little bit of damage.

I wish [robocalls] were a tidal wave, honestly, because then we could stop it. … No, this is death by a thousand paper cuts. This is scammed by a thousand paper cuts.

Aaron Foss

Even if the scammers don’t take a lot, it can still be challenging. On the AI side, scammers have been doing pseudo-AI for years. They have soundboards of voices saying things, and can press buttons to respond to the person they got on the phone. It’s expensive, it’s not artificial, and it’s been around a long time. AI is really going to help scammers. But the people who should really be worried are the scammers overseas making these calls – they should worry that their job is going to be eliminated by AI. For us consumers, the fight against robocalls isn’t going to change all that much with AI.

Protect Yourself from Spam and Scam Calls

With many scams, there are steps you can take to make yourself a less attractive target. Unfortunately, with robocalls, that’s not an option. If you have a phone number, you’re going to be targeted.

Education is always the first step. If you took the time to read through this whole article, you’re probably not the type of person who will get scammed in general. It’s not impossible, and even smart, aware people can be tricked in a vulnerable moment. But our real concern should be our spouses, parents, and kids.

There are plenty of methods and steps we can use to protect ourselves and our families from the dangers of spam calls. Here are a few to get you started.

Use an App or Program to Stop the Spam Calls

A program like Nomorobo or its competitors is a huge boost to your security and protection. Not only do they stop a large number of the spam calls from ever reaching your phone, they’re often affordable. And many offer plans that will let you protect your entire family for a reasonable price.

“Don’t Answer Unknown Numbers” Doesn’t Work

People always say not to answer calls from unknown numbers, but as time goes on, you have to. As you get older, you get more of them because you go to the doctor more. If you have kids in school, or a pet-sitter, you never know if it might be important. Aaron’s uncle had some health issues, and he was calling from hospital phone numbers. In the modern world, that old advice isn’t particularly helpful. It’s more useful to stop spam calls.

When you do answer a call from an unknown number, have your guard up. It’s not necessarily a malicious call, but it’s good to be suspicious. Analyze what they’re saying, what they’re asking for, and what data you’re giving them. Just because they know your name or some of their information doesn’t mean they’re legitimate. If you aren’t comfortable, hang up and call them back on a number you know or look up.

Guard Your Phone Number

You’re probably pretty careful with your social security number. But if you’re like most people, you’re much less careful about your phone number. A good way to protect yourself is to be very hesitant to give out that information. Does this person need to have your phone number? If it’s your doctor’s office, they probably do. If it’s the clerk at the store asking for your number for their rewards program, probably not. Get into the habit of not giving out your information.

Did They Know It or Did You Tell Them?

In the grandparent scam, the scammer calls an older person pretending to be their grandchild who is in some sort of trouble and needs money. When Aaron talks to people who were victimized by this scam, they often say things like, “But they knew my grandchild’s name!” It makes the caller seem trustworthy.

But often, that’s not what really happened. The scammer probably said something like, “Hi, Grandma,” and grandma responds with, “Oh, is that you, Jimmy?” Now the scammer has a name and can run with it. It’s all social engineering, and the victims often don’t realize they gave the information away. It may seem legitimate and scary when someone seems to have a bunch of private, or at least not public, information. But think over the conversation. Did they actually know it, or did they trick you into revealing it?

Be Cautious and Be Aware

The problem of spam calls is rampant. It’s important to listen, educate yourself, and tell others. Take steps to protect yourself and those you care about. Use a program like Nomorobo or another company – many offer free trials – and get the word out.

Don’t panic. Panicking about the problem just makes it worse. Instead, take responsibility. Learn what to watch out for. Practice pausing in the middle of a call to see if it feels right or seems suspicious. If you’re the victim of a scam, use your story to help and educate others. Even smart people fall for scams, there’s no need to be ashamed.

Very smart people fall for the scams. … these scammers are so good. It’s not because they’re smart, they just have really good systems.

Aaron Foss

You don’t need to panic, and you don’t need to stop answering your phone. Just keep being educated, learn about what’s out there, and become a better consumer.

Aaron Foss no longer works with Nomorobo, but he still encourages you to check them out at nomorobo.com. You can also connect with him personally on LinkedIn. He loves helping people out in the entrepreneurship or startup journey, so if you would like guidance in that area, feel free to reach out.