9 ms·

Why? They get paid $10 every time spam is reported regardless of the outcome. Trained staff listening at 3x speed with AI assistance could classify 3 obvious sp

Why? They get paid $10 every time spam is reported regardless of the outcome. Trained staff listening at 3x speed with AI assistance could classify 3 obvious spam calls in a minute. If you can't turn $1800/hr per employee into a profit center I don't know what to tell you. That's a lot of money to cover for extreme outliers. Eventually the obvious spam callers would all quit and the volume would reduce to a handful of borderline cases. So the spam department wouldn't make a lot of money anymore, but the volume would be so low it would barely register.

Kon5ole 1mo ago
But your idea is basically that the telco pays anyone 90 dollars per spam call they receive, how does that become a profit center? They can't get the money from the spammers, if they could this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
- infogulch 1mo ago
  They get the money from the peer networks that are the source of the spammers. If they don't cough up then you void your peering agreement. If they try to route around through a different trusted peer then that peer takes the hit. If its your own customers then you can do something about it. VOIP peers would quickly run into trouble and they'd probably require new customers to keep a spam deposit, carefully monitor their calls, and have a ramp up period that limits their outbound call rate and lifts it over time. I don't see a downside yet.
  - Kon5ole 1mo ago
    >They get the money from the peer networks that are the source of the spammers. What peer networks? Vodaphone, AT&T or whatever the largest operator in India is? You're going to cut off India because someone there calls people claiming to be Microsoft selling antivirus protection? Refuse calls from AT&T? Nah man, you're not. Also not from a customer that ordered 100 numbers last month and is defunct this month, leaving you with 100 000 confirmed spam calls to pay for. If it was possible to simply charge the spammers money, this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
- dredmorbius 1mo ago
  Peers, with a bonding obligation, and no transit offered to unbonded (never bothered, bond rejected/expired) carriers. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129679> from a few days back.
dredmorbius 1mo ago
Volume and calling patterns alone should be sufficient to identify spam calls in most cases. Audio analysis (probably AI/LLM-based) might be invoked on some, but even that is probably overkill. Better: an appeals / review process which more-or-less automatically grants an initial reverse judgement, though if complaints continue from additional sources, that decision is reversed. The real goal of my variant of this proposal isn't to nail the call originators but the networks (carriers) which either serve as origin or transit this traffic.

Kon5ole 1mo ago

But your idea is basically that the telco pays anyone 90 dollars per spam call they receive, how does that become a profit center? They can't get the money from the spammers, if they could this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

infogulch 1mo ago
They get the money from the peer networks that are the source of the spammers. If they don't cough up then you void your peering agreement. If they try to route around through a different trusted peer then that peer takes the hit. If its your own customers then you can do something about it. VOIP peers would quickly run into trouble and they'd probably require new customers to keep a spam deposit, carefully monitor their calls, and have a ramp up period that limits their outbound call rate and lifts it over time. I don't see a downside yet.
- Kon5ole 1mo ago
  >They get the money from the peer networks that are the source of the spammers. What peer networks? Vodaphone, AT&T or whatever the largest operator in India is? You're going to cut off India because someone there calls people claiming to be Microsoft selling antivirus protection? Refuse calls from AT&T? Nah man, you're not. Also not from a customer that ordered 100 numbers last month and is defunct this month, leaving you with 100 000 confirmed spam calls to pay for. If it was possible to simply charge the spammers money, this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
dredmorbius 1mo ago
Peers, with a bonding obligation, and no transit offered to unbonded (never bothered, bond rejected/expired) carriers. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129679> from a few days back.

dredmorbius 1mo ago

Volume and calling patterns alone should be sufficient to identify spam calls in most cases. Audio analysis (probably AI/LLM-based) might be invoked on some, but even that is probably overkill. Better: an appeals / review process which more-or-less automatically grants an initial reverse judgement, though if complaints continue from additional sources, that decision is reversed. The real goal of my variant of this proposal isn't to nail the call originators but the networks (carriers) which either serve as origin or transit this traffic.