Your best protection against robocalls? What's going on? I'm rich Demiro, This is rich on Tech. Daily robocalls. We can't live with them, We can't live well, yeah, we can live without them, but it's kind of tough to imagine a world without robocalls because they're so prevalent these days. The worst part the calls are getting more frequent and scammers are getting better and better at trying to make us pick up the phone. So how can we stop this madness?
Recently I had a fascinating conversation with Jonathan Nelson. He's the director of product management at Haya. This is a technology company that creates software and solutions to help us combat robocalls.
So we have our own algorithms, the machine learning algorithms that look at call patterns that we see and can pick out when particular scammer numbers come online. We also get reports from users and work with the FCC and the FTC.
HYA used to be whitepages dot com, one of my favorite Android apps which would id all callers on my phone. So why does it seem like we're getting so many robo calls these days?
For robo calls to be successful, they really need three things. They need to be able to make calls an extreme high volume for cheap, which you can do now thanks to voiceover IP or VOIPE technology. They need to be able to do so without getting caught, which is easy to do with the way the phone industry works these days. And then they need victims who will fall for it, which unfortunately.
We still have now. There are several reasons for these robo calls. Many of them are selling products and services. Others are just outright scams, but mainly they just want us to pick up the phone so they can hook us in some way. And one of the newest tactics is called the neighbor scam. This is where the phone number displayed on your caller ID looks a lot like your phone number.
This voiceover IP software that they have makes it very easy for them to impersonate a phone number that's similar to yours automatically, so it's not done manually at all. They're able to just do.
It in bulk. Nelson showed me a demo tool high A built that does basically what the robo callers do. I made up a phone number, he typed it into the website in seconds, My phone rang and the number that popped up on my caller ID was the number I just made up. While robo callers use tools like this in bulk, he says, there are lots of websites available to even the everyday person where they can do the same thing.
The way the phone system works makes it very difficult for the government agencies to track down who created the calls. It's a very, very long process. It has been ruled that all robo calls are illegal unless you specifically requested it, like a prescription reminder. So if you answer it no, you were talking to someone committing a crime. So do not trust anything you hear. If it's intimidating or encouraging, you should not take it seriously.
So how do you stop the calls? Well, you can grab an app like Hyas of course, to help you identify and block these spam calls. AT and T has their own app called call Protect, which you can download for free, and that's basically a white label version of highest software. And T Mobile offers free spam call protection. Sometimes it's already activated on your account depending on your plan. Others you might have to just tell them you want it.
Other carriers might charge you a small monthly fee for the protection, but your absolute best defense just don't pick up the phone.
If you've phoned your phone number for a long time, if you'll applied for a lot of mortgages or payday loans, that gets your number out into databases that these scammers can buy. But a lot of it is just simply they are trying numbers to see if anyone picks up, and if you do answer the phone, you are known to be a valid number and you will get more calls. Answering the phone tells the scammer that the phone number is active and so they will more than likely call more frequently.
You can watch my video on how easy it is for robo callers to spoof your caller ID. That's on my website. Just go to richon tech dot tv to watch it. And thanks for listening. If you like what I'm doing here with the daily podcast, please rate and review it in the Apple podcast app. Just hit that link where it says write a review. I'm Rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you real soon.