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I mean, maybe we can try going after the scammers.. but we can’t even stop scam callers and junk mail

• account42 14d ago
  Who is we? Some countries do fairly well with both of these.
  • electriclove 14d ago
    The US
• mikestew 16d ago
  You can stop junk mail for $8: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619939 Sorry, no solution for spam calls/texts.
  • what 16d ago
    Sadly does not apply to political organizations, which is probably the largest source of spam “mail” (to mention nothing of text/sms spam). The amount of crap stuffed into my mailbox every election season is insane.
• koito17 16d ago
  In Japan, the identity verification is quite strict to subscribe to a voice/text capable phone line. Still yet to get robocalls or spam texts. I'm sure they exist, but despite handing out my phone number to city hall and countless private businesses, I have yet to receive one. On the other hand, enabling my Verizon eSIM is a surefire way to receive hourly "Potential Spam" calls, despite giving nobody outside of direct family my US phone number. Thankfully, I've convinced enough of my family to use Signal and we call/text through there instead. Nowadays, I only turn on the Verizon line if I have to receive an SMS one-time code or call my broker. Don't think the U.S. will ever solve this problem; people will just say something about privacy, the country's "too big" to combat spam at scale, etc. It's also too easy to get a phone number anonymously. A frequent phenomenon I've witnessed is that when someone blocks a phone number, the same caller contacts them again from a different number with the same area code.