Anti-Fraud Tools Struggle to Keep Pace with AI-Driven Scammers
Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with scammers exploiting cheap internet calling
Industry experts warn that current defenses like STIR/SHAKEN cannot fully stop scammers exploiting cheap internet calling and AI. While authentication frameworks and traceback efforts help, criminals adapt faster by using legitimate numbers. A combined approach involving carriers, regulators, and vigilant consumers is essential to combat the rising global threat of fraud.
It's become cheap and easy for you and me to call anyone around the country and around the world. Well, guess what? It's also cheap and easy for the bad guys to blow up our phones, call us from anywhere in the world.
- DeepSeaTortoise
The solution is accessible law, not better anti-fraud tooling. Introduce a spam / fraud button, using it requires your pin and costs $10, but obliges your telecom provider to record the call (preferably including a few minutes before you hit the button), email you a signed recording and if found to be spam deposit $100 onto your account. Your provider may then hand the fee +10% for himself to whatever network the call in question entered his own network from. The last cooperative network in the chain gets stuck with the fee, forcing them to either reclaim the money from the malicious customer, the next network in the chain (in court) or pony up the money themselves.
Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.
- orev
One of the biggest concerns I have with phone scams is that the people most vulnerable are the elderly, and they don’t have the knowledge on how to block these calls (if a technical solution is the only option).
And further to that, the elderly are also the ones who cannot block unknown numbers, because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from (they may have a pool of numbers but it’s not reasonable to add all of them to contacts). Blocking all unknowns would block these important health related calls as well.
- otterpro
I no longer can answer my phone. I get at least 20-40 spam/scam calls per day, and many are legitimate companies calling for loans and refinancing offers, which started after I got a home loan. I cannot seem to stop them from calling, and even though my phone number is listed in National Do Not Call Registry for many years, it hasn't worked at all. The only relief is that on my iPhone, I was able to block all calls not found in my contacts (ie whitelist phone numbers only).
Now, my only worry is that I might get a call from someone who I need to talk to, but is blocked and I won't even know it. For example, what if I get an emergency call from police/fire/hospital and I won't even know it. I also tried using "Screen unknown caller" feature, but then, no one likes them and sometimes they think it is AI bot and they usually just hang up (which is great for spam caller but not for legitimate caller)
My only solution that I could think of is to have a dedicated phone line just for friends/family/work, and a second line for banking/shopping/utilities/everything else.
- bickfordb
Maybe this is a pipe dream, but wouldn't it be better to retire the legacy phone voice and messaging system altogether.
If 99.9% of us have internet phones, why aren't we using PKI, decentralized protocols, crowd sourced reputation to communicate instead of POTS phone numbers, SMS/iChat and relying on the carriers to police spam.
- timoth3y
This is actually an easily solvable problem. In fact, most of the world has already solved it by not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors similar to the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.
The US has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to have no financial are regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Rather then actually solve the problem, the US prefers to turn it into a business opportunity with the telcos selling subscriptions to blocking software and an entire ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
- sdenton4
I got an obviously-AI voice agent spam call yesterday. Had a bit of fun getting it to answer trivia questions (when was the treaty of westphalia ratified? answer in a rhyming couplet) as a precondition to handing over the keys to my bank accounts.
- ogou
My Google Voice number got 37 calls from the same region in the past 2 days. All day, about every 50 minutes, rotating different 404 based numbers. It happens about twice a year from this area code (404). I know exactly where it is from. I had to park in Atlanta once and it required me to create an account on an app for that parking lot to pay. Of course I used my Google number. That service must have transferred or sold my number. Now my account gets bombed by them on a regular basis.
- f1ay
dontscamgrandma.com is probably apropos to share here for the elderly / vulnerable affected by scam proliferation. It's a trainer that roleplays people through getting the confidence to hang up and call their loved ones back.
Full disclosure I'm the founder, and I've got a couple dogs in this fight