When you get a robocall, hang up. Don’t say anything, don’t press buttons and don’t call back.
As The Wall Street Journal reports in a new feature that lays out exactly why you’re getting so many robocalls lately (it’s not in your head, there really has been a surge) and what you can do about it, scammers can sell your number if they know it works—which could lead to even more robocalls.
So why are you getting so many robocalls? Well, when phone calls were transmitted over copper wires, businesses paid a lot of money for phone systems that allowed 1,000 employees to make calls without needing 1,000 phone lines. These systems inserted caller ID so, for instance, customers all saw the same business number, regardless of which employee made the call.
But with the internet, businesses don’t need expensive hardware. Anyone can start a mini call center with software that auto-dials numbers and spoofs caller ID, which is part of why robocalls have proliferated.
With caller ID basically broken, developers have proposed a call-certifying protocol and guidelines for implementing it. With it, an originating phone carrier could check that a caller has the right to use a number and create a digital fingerprint for the call. The carrier on the receiving end could verify that nothing was messed with in transit.
“They’re actually not saying that the call comes from the phone number. What they’re saying is this user is entitled to use this phone number,” says Jim McEachern, a principal technologist with the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, a technical working group that helped develop guidelines for this call-certification protocol.
Eventually, users would see a check mark or other indicator for verified calls.
McEachern likens the current state of robocalls to the days before email spam filters.
“I think something similar will happen with this,” he says. “Suddenly people will say, ‘Remember how bad that used to be?’”
For now, about the best you can do to battle robocalls is block numbers after you get one and add yourself to the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call Registry. You can also try apps made by outside developers, some for as little as $2.
