The Robocall Equivalent Of Unsubscribe

hey there it’s David H Lawrence the 17th
and I probably have a good idea how many
times a day you look at your phone and
you say what’s that number I mean it
looks like it’s in my neighborhood but I
don’t know well let me just fight let me
hold on what’s it and it’s a robo call
right or a number that like is coming
from Wyoming somewhere or even has odd
numbers of digits it turns out that
according to the FCC
we receive over five billion robo calls
a month and its projected to get worse
unless something’s done about it and I
wanted to talk to you about that today
because we’ve been through this once
before we’ve been through this with spam
we know how spammers operate and it
turns out that Robo callers are taking a
page from blackhat spammer and I all
spammers are to a degree blackhat but I
mean the really egregious ones they’re
taking a page from their playbook so I
wanted to share with you some advice
that I learned from reading a couple of
articles and also talking to a
representative from the FTC the FTC and
the FCC both share sort of overview over
this problem because the FCC handles the
technical standards and the legal
requirements of the the phone system and
the FTC the Federal Trade Commission as
opposed to the Federal Communications
Commission the Federal Trade
Commission’s here this all in the United
States and a lot of this stuff comes
from overseas so but the FTC is in
charge of consumer protection so they
are working together
oddly enough what to government agencies
actually working together yeah so
remember when we all started getting
spam and there were these unsubscribe
buttons and we would unsubscribe from
the spam unsubscribe from the spam I’m
using air quotes and then we found out
oddly enough that did nothing it
actually made things worse because when
you clicked on that unsubscribe button
that would tell the spammer that you
were alive human being and that you
actually were getting the emails and so
they would send you more spam so think
about what happens when you get a
robocall either from a live person or
from like there’s there’s a there’s a
overseas concern that represents
themselves as US pharmacy they’re live
callers live people in a boiler room
somewhere in in a foreign country and
you know I’ve asked them a million times
like literally a hundred 150 times
they’ve called since the beginning of
the year so that means like several
times a day and occasionally I’ll pick
up the phone and I’ll and and they’ll be
this pause and you’ll hear the
boiler-room in the background they’re
waiting for you to talk or to see if
you’re a recorded message and before
they even get a chance to say anything
I’ll say is this us pharmacy yes great
could you take me off your list and then
I’ll hang up because I know they won’t
they won’t they don’t have to they’re
outside the bounds of our country but
for robocallers that operate within the
united states they give you sometimes
the opportunity to press one button to
be connected with an operator to talk
about you know getting your credit card
and interest down or getting erectile
dysfunction pills or whatever they’re
selling you and another button if you
wait long enough usually through the
entire message you know press the two
key to be placed on our Do Not Call list
and you think oh great and you press the
two key yeah so about that it doesn’t
put you on their Do Not Call list
because most of the people operating
robocall most of the organizations
operating robocall ventures pay no
attention to what you tell them even
though they’re supposed to it’s federal
law and if you go to a website called do
not call dot gov you can place both your
landline if you still have one
and certainly your mobile phone on the
National do-not-call list which all you
know marketing firms are supposed to
respect in terms of not calling the
numbers on that list do we think they do
know most of them ignore it completely
so you can do it and the people that do
abide by the laws you won’t hear from
them but it’s always the people that
don’t abide by the law that make these
controls useless right so but I would
again let me just summarize by saying I
would not press that button because that
in turn tells them you’re a live person
and they’ll call back again if they’re
nefarious
however there is technology on the way
both from the FTC and the FCC and it’s
it’s kind of interesting it’s called
stir / shake it and for those of you
that are James Bond fans you know that’s
what they’re that’s what they’re
wrapping that acronym around and it’s a
set of technologies that does two things
number one it helps to confirm that the
number that shows up on your screen
isn’t being spoofed as another number
it’s actually the number of the party
that’s calling and also creating a list
of known Robo call spammers that you can
subscribe to and prevent those calls
from coming to your phone in the first
place so it’s both a carrot and a stick
approach and it’s supposed to be rolled
out in the next couple of years we’ll
see what happens the FTC and the FCC you
very excited about it
and so is so are the carriers the
problem is the carriers are all
disparate they all have to work together
if it was just old Ma Bell you know the
old Bell system they could flip a switch
and take care of this right but because
it’s all these different companies that
have to cooperate and there’s law
involved there’s federal regulations
involved so my advice to you is number
one if you don’t recognize the number
resist the urge to answer the phone
and number two don’t respond to their
offer of removing you from their list by
pressing a particular key on your phone
because chances are it won’t work it’ll
just make things worse so have any
horror stories you’d like to share with
me in terms of getting Robo called on an
excessive level I sometimes like to have
fun with maybe I’ll do another video on
what I do sometimes when I have the time
when somebody calls but I wonder what
you do about robo calls and if there is
frustrating to you as they are to me go
ahead and let me know in the comments
below I’d really appreciate it if you’d
like to join my channel it’s not a
robocall channel but on youtube to be
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video for you I’m David H Lawrence the
17th I sure hope you’re having fun with
these videos I am and I thank you for
watching and I’ll talk to you tomorrow