How many of you hesitate to answer when the phone rings, taking a good look at the calling number to see if it's recognisable? Or don't answer when it's someone unfamiliar, or worse, when there's no caller ID?
Reading about Telstra's latest anti-scam measures for phone calls, lots of people do that nowadays. Market analysts YouGov polled a representative sample of Australians last year, and the proportion of call recipients that look at their smartphones going "hmm..." before answering is getting up there, nearing 50 per cent in some cases.
Telstra is now rolling out the free Scam Protect feature for smartphones, using its network intelligence to work out which calls are potential scams, and warning users accordingly.
It looks like a useful feature and a necessary one too, as phone-borne scams are very common. There seem to be any number of of "scam farms" in countries like Myanmar/Burma where people are held captive and brutalised and coerced into conning those at the other end of phone calls.
Phone scamming is pretty lucrative for criminals, and it's not going to go away. Telstra said it blocks over 11 million calls every month; artificial intelligence is likely to make that situation worse, particularly as the technology only needs a few seconds of a friend or family member's voice to create a very plausible imitation of it, as security vendor F-Secure noted.
Telcos are caught between a rock and a hard place here because the whole point of phone communications is that it's an open medium and blocking legit calls accidentally will backfire on them. Ergo, some scam calls will be missed and get through.
Scam calls have happened since forever, but nobody could imagine the scale of the problem once the phone network became connected to the Internet.
If you use a third-party app that provides voice calling facility, be aware scammers will go hunting for victims on those as well. WhatsApp is popular - and this piece from Gen's Norton covers some of the more popular fraud attempts and what to do about them. They're difficult for telcos and authorities to deal with too, as they have no visibility into the third-party apps networks.
It's worth going through the settings on third-party apps, and block calls from unknown parties if possible. That could lead to pain when you want legit parties to be able to contact you, so be aware of that. Leaking your real phone number to the world via a third-party app is generally a bad idea too; Signal lets you use a moniker instead, without advertising your phone number.
So yes, screen calls, be careful with the numbers you're given as they could be spoofed (faked) and deliver you to scammers. That's necessary as phone calling has become "enshittified", to borrow and perhaps extend Cory Doctorow's excellent term. Nowadays you have to weigh up how contactable you are, and by whom, to stay safe.
1 Comments
There are some interesting side effects of setting up number blocking.
In particular, I discovered that the Disputes Tribunal, and I think other government departments, call from numbers that the monitoring software sees as undefined and therefore suspicious.
I only discovered this when I was taking an engineering firm to the Tribunal and wondered why the conference call didn't happen until I dialled in via another line.
It's kind of a call to the government IT services to get their act together and use identifiable phone numbers to avoid being swept up as looking too like spam/scam. Surely that can't be beyond them.
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