Robocall Madness

DW and I just spoke about the reduction in robocalls. They do seem to be down. Just afterwards, our landline rang and the message was from a company who wanted us to return the call to arrange a time for them to come out and inspect our home. It really wasn't clear what they'd inspect for.

I hate these folks with a passion. They are truly evil yet generally ignored by our gov't as they threaten the well being of citizens.
 
I've noticed the drop off as well. Hopefully the callers all got COVID-19 and died. Slowly and painfully.
 
Just a couple of days ago, DW and I were also talking about how the scam calls are way down.
Turns out all the call centers are being closed by gov'ts around the world, really impacting criminal income. :D

Here in Chicago, many crimes are down as well, hard to rob people on the street when they are at home :)
 
aja8888 said:
The robo callers are probably out looking for toilet paper and not bothering us! :D
Click to expand...

That's a good one! :LOL: ... Might be more accurate than one may think.
 
scrabbler1 said:
Is it just me or have any of you noticed a drop in the junk robocalls the last week or two? Or has there been some new laws which just went into effect cutting down or eliminating lots of robocalls? I haven't gotten one on either my cell phone or land line in over a week. For the cell phone, that has never happened.
Click to expand...


We've experienced a significant drop in robocalls. We were receiving as many as 5 - 10 per day as recently as a few weeks ago. About the same time COVID-19 reared its head the calls nearly stopped. Coincidence? New law? Regardless, it's a welcome relief.
 
nvestysly said:
We've experienced a significant drop in robocalls. We were receiving as many as 5 - 10 per day as recently as a few weeks ago. About the same time COVID-19 reared its head the calls nearly stopped. Coincidence? New law? Regardless, it's a welcome relief.
Click to expand...

And just when we are ALL home to answer the phone :facepalm::facepalm:
 
Calls are way down for us. I imagine all those political polls phone calls have stopped as has the campaigning.
 
Hmmm... Not Definitive

I don't see it. We did have a lull (three days of zero calls), which might indicate a trend, and nothing above 8 since March 2nd. But I'm not calling it a trend on my "land line" (ooma).
 

Attachments

  • notreally.jpg
    notreally.jpg
    31 KB · Views: 23
Calls are way down. But get this! We got a call 2 nights ago at exactly 8:59. DW picked it up assuming it was a family emergency. It was a live person on the other end asking for money for a political party. They were met with fire and brimstone.
 
For some reason our calls are on the rise again. After two weeks of nearly no calls (trust me, we've been home - probably just like you) we are receiving as many as 4 a day but that's still down from the sometimes 6 - 8 a day.

For clarification, when I say robocalls, I mean unwanted solicitations of any sort - regardless of whether it's a "machine" or a real person on the line.

I used one of my screening practices today and was surprised by the response. When someone calls and asks for my by my first name it's almost always unwanted as I use my middle name on a day-to-day basis. So this person calls and asks for me by my first name. I asked who was calling so I could tell the other me who was calling. The caller picked up on my tactics and told me I was a piece of sh!t and hung up.
 
Have any of you seen a rise in junk emails, or spam emails, too? I have been getting deluged with junk emails in the last few weeks compared to a month or two ago. Maybe the spammers can't make their junk robocalls so they are turning to junk emails in their place?
 
I've seen the drop-off, too. But every few days, a couple of times a week, I'll get a series of calls which show up as "missed call" but leave no message. Odd thing is the phone never rang. Wondering if it got intercepted by some new spam blocking my provider (Google Fi) put into effect.

The spam e-mails are up a bit. But it's the same outfit which sends almost all of them. I know because each time I get two identical e-mails to two different addresses which both forward to my "main" account. The return address is a series of random letters and digits, at some new top-level domain which nobody else uses. So I know they're using the same software and the same mailing list.

I was able to automatically direct all the mail from these domains to the trash folder on the server, so I just log on about once a week to see how many I got and to purge the folder. Then never show up on the mail client I use daily.
 
CaptTom said:
The spam e-mails are up a bit. But it's the same outfit which sends almost all of them. I know because each time I get two identical e-mails to two different addresses which both forward to my "main" account. The return address is a series of random letters and digits, at some new top-level domain which nobody else uses. So I know they're using the same software and the same mailing list.
Click to expand...

I have the reverse problem. I get the same email from multiple garbage email addresses, always gobbledygook@weird-domain-name.com , sent to a single email address. This tells me that the spammers have sold my email address to other spammers who all hit me with the same spam. Just yesterday, I got the same email 4 times from different "senders."
 
scrabbler1 said:
I have the reverse problem. I get the same email from multiple garbage email addresses, always gobbledygook@weird-domain-name.com , sent to a single email address. This tells me that the spammers have sold my email address to other spammers who all hit me with the same spam. Just yesterday, I got the same email 4 times from different "senders."
Click to expand...

This is the new tactic. Long, randomly-generated "from" addresses. I think many e-mail systems nowadays verify the validity of the sending domain, so that means someone is registering these bogus domains. I've found the vast majority are from the set of newly-implemented top-level domains (TLDs) like .men or .loans. There are hundreds of these, and the bar for getting one registered is pretty low.

This is a real problem for spam filters. Many e-mail clients simply add the fully qualified "from" address to a blocked list when you click on the "mark as spam" button. That's worse than useless when each new spam message comes not only from a new address, but a whole new domain.

They're also getting clever about subtly mis-spelling words which might trigger a more in-depth spam filter. So even "learning" spam filter tools are being fooled. For now, blocking unusual TLDs seems to be the most effective way to limit the amount of spam which makes it through to me.

Oh, and once your address is on one spammer's list, it's on them all. They sell and share these lists. It costs them nothing to send out millions of e-mails, and there's no reason to ever purge or "unsubscribe" anyone from the list. Asking them to do so only proves you're receiving the spam, which makes your address even more valuable.
 
CaptTom said:
This is the new tactic. Long, randomly-generated "from" addresses. I think many e-mail systems nowadays verify the validity of the sending domain, so that means someone is registering these bogus domains. I've found the vast majority are from the set of newly-implemented top-level domains (TLDs) like .men or .loans. There are hundreds of these, and the bar for getting one registered is pretty low.

This is a real problem for spam filters. Many e-mail clients simply add the fully qualified "from" address to a blocked list when you click on the "mark as spam" button. That's worse than useless when each new spam message comes not only from a new address, but a whole new domain.

They're also getting clever about subtly mis-spelling words which might trigger a more in-depth spam filter. So even "learning" spam filter tools are being fooled. For now, blocking unusual TLDs seems to be the most effective way to limit the amount of spam which makes it through to me.

Oh, and once your address is on one spammer's list, it's on them all. They sell and share these lists. It costs them nothing to send out millions of e-mails, and there's no reason to ever purge or "unsubscribe" anyone from the list. Asking them to do so only proves you're receiving the spam, which makes your address even more valuable.
Click to expand...

My spam filter allows me to block entire domain names, which is helpful against the garbage part of the email address before the @-sign. But the spammers slightly vary the domain name so my filter rarely screens out any junk.

I have repeatedly asked my email provider to allow the use of wildcards in domain names so I more easily screen out similar ones which don't vary by much. For example, *.junk.com would exclude a.junk.com, bb.junk.com, a.b.junk.com, etc. They never respond.

Some spammers simply sign up for junk email accounts under a legit domain name such as gmail. I can't screen out the entire domain name of gmail.com, so the filter is useless even with wildcards.
 
scrabbler1 said:
I have the reverse problem. I get the same email from multiple garbage email addresses, always gobbledygook@weird-domain-name.com , sent to a single email address. This tells me that the spammers have sold my email address to other spammers who all hit me with the same spam. Just yesterday, I got the same email 4 times from different "senders."
Click to expand...


How are you reading your email? Web based sign on or an email reader program?

I prefer an email reader program and spam really isn't much of an issue. The key is getting one with a spam filter that learns what you consider junk mail. After some training (marking emails by you what is spam), the program gets better and better at identifying what is and what is not junk.

The reader I use is Sylpheed which has a built the filter built-in. Every once in awhile, junk mail and slip through but I just then mark that as junk to teach the reader for the next time. As I said, junk mail really isn't much of an issue for me anymore. Unlike the old days when email readers weren't as smart.
 
easysurfer said:
How are you reading your email? Web based sign on or an email reader program?

I prefer an email reader program and spam really isn't much of an issue. The key is getting one with a spam filter that learns what you consider junk mail. After some training (marking emails by you what is spam), the program gets better and better at identifying what is and what is not junk.

The reader I use is Sylpheed which has a built the filter built-in. Every once in awhile, junk mail and slip through but I just then mark that as junk to teach the reader for the next time. As I said, junk mail really isn't much of an issue for me anymore. Unlike the old days when email readers weren't as smart.
Click to expand...

My email is a combination PC-based and web-based system. After my email address got picked up by the spammers as part of a bigger (but otherwise solvable) problem back in 2016, I began getting lots of junk emails, and they got through to my home, PC-based system, making me more and more annoyed.

It took me a few months how to adjust the web-based system to properly filter out the junk emails while allowing only the legit ones to get passed the gatekeeper's spam filter and make it to my home, PC-based system.

I still have to check my web's junk mail folder to make sure any legit emails aren't trapped there. It's rare that that happens these days but it does happen. (Junk emails stay for a week.) Meanwhile, I block the junk emails which adds the junky email addresses to the block list. To broaden the block list, I block only domain names although that rarely, but not never, is effective. I only read the emails if there either some doubt about its being a junk email, or I am a little curious about what it says (just for laughs).
 
scrabbler1 said:
...

It took me a few months how to adjust the web-based system to properly filter out the junk emails while allowing only the legit ones to get passed the gatekeeper's spam filter and make it to my home, PC-based system.

...
Click to expand...


I'm not sure how easy it is to select emails on a web based system. That is, can you do a select all from a folder? That's really helpful with my email reader. There has been times when I've needed to reinstall my computer. The email reader would fetch all the old emails from years ago that were still on the email server (I've since not kept that many years). With the reader, I could highlight hundreds, if not thousands of old emails to mark them as spam (to give the email reader a crash course :) in learning what is/is not spam). Then within about a week or so, the email reader would again be doing a really good job with the filtering.
 
With some states relaxing their lockdowns, have any of you seen an uptick in the junk calls? I have. I have gotten 6 in the last week on the cell phone, and a few more on the land line (which always gets less because I have nomorobo on it). With all the number spoofing, nobody really knows where the calls are actually coming from, so even local neighbor spoofing ain't really local.
 
I had a fun one the other day. It was a spam call that went to voicemail, and they left a message that started in English and then switched: "Here is a message from Verizon in Chinese: ni hao ma <more Chinese for rest of message>" I was amused, as I am not fluent in Mandarin and thus I was not in the target market for this message.

Overall, mine had tapered off after turning on the Do Not Disturb on my old iPhone 4 as a poor man's call blocker. I did answer one phone call once a few weeks ago when I was expecting an incoming call from a non-acquaintance, and that seemed to trigger a trickle of additional spam calls. I'm back to my policy of not answering calls from non-contacts and am hopeful that will work.
 
I haven't had any spam calls recently, but I still get a daily text message to "Brendan" that wants me click on some link. Usually it's about an Amazon shipment or credit card payment. My name is not Brendan. But every message calls me that by name. Delete.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

V
Did you have a financial cheating attempt from your Banks or Financial institutions ?
2
Replies
32
Views
4K
Koolau
Koolau
Amethyst
Strange, unpleasant CC application - Capital One
2
Replies
47
Views
4K
rodi
rodi
R
FYI, Google Voice Issues.
Replies
4
Views
943
Sunset
Sunset
C
ATT email Issue / lack of customer service.
Replies
14
Views
882
target2019
target2019
Reach
Recurring charge fraud on CapitalOne MasterCard
Replies
9
Views
2K
Reach
Reach

Latest posts

Back
Top Bottom