robocall is a phone call that uses a computerized autodialer to send pre-recorded messages, as if from a robot. Robocalls are often associated with political telephone and telemarketing campaigns, but can also be used for public services or emergency announcements. Some robocalls use personalized audio messages to simulate actual personal phone calls.
Video Robocall
Kanada
Robocalls can and legitimately be used by mainstream political parties in Canada to reach out to voters. The controversy surrounded the use of robocalls during Canada's federal election, 2011, led the Canadian and Canadian Royal Police Mounted Election to investigate claims that robocalls were used in an attempt to deter voters from voting by telling false that their polls have changed locations. Canadian election tracks the origin of automatic calls to disposable mobile phones registered to the fictitious name "Pierre Poutine" at the fake address of 450 Joliette area code, Quebec, and issues a subpoena to a mobile provider that generates a list of outgoing calls from the same number. One call is a toll-free number used by customers of 2call.ca, a subsidiary of Edmonton-based RackNine Internet Service Provider, to call and record their outbound messages. The cell phone burner belonging to "Pierre Poutine" is used to contact the owner of Racknine in his private unlisted number and gives the name "Pierre Jones". This burner phone initiated a series of automated robocalls mostly in Guelph but with a few dozen on other hooks, which targeted most non-Conservative voters with fake voting location changes. Some voters attend what they believe to be the location of their vote, and sometimes destroy their voter registration cards in anger.
In November 2011, investigators presented RackNine with production orders for records and had account holders associated with falsely identified calls quickly. Investigators have also examined the CIMS Conservative voter database and pointed out that "Pierre Poutine" uses the Conservative voter database to choose who to contact. The researcher has an empty entry for one particular login, leading to speculation that the proof has been removed. PayPal also submitted their records to investigators because "Pierre Poutine" has used a PayPal account to pay bills for automatic calls. The fee for May 2, 2011, the call is $ 162.10, Canada's election said in court files. This expenditure has not been reported to the Canadian election, as required for legitimate political expenditures.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada have denied any knowledge or involvement. Conservative party staff resigned immediately after the scandal was reported but has since declared that he was not involved. The Canadian election has made a statement and reported to Parliament that the fraud was extensive, affecting 200 riders in all ten provinces plus the Yukon Territory. The Council of Canadians, left of the central activist group, has asserted that robocall may be enough to swing the result by 4%, enough to win a number of riders in a very close race. The court challenge has been initiated by this group to cancel the election results in seven appointments, and initiate an intermediate election for each of the seven seats of the House of Representatives.
After reviewing the Pierre Poutine "scandal investigation" in 2013, Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley discovered that electoral cheating had occurred in six riders across the country but found no evidence that the Conservative or candidate party was involved. He also found no sufficient evidence to support the allegations on motorists other than Guelph. In addition, he pointed out that "robocalls" did not affect the outcome of the 2011 election in any rise.
After a lengthy investigation into the scandal, Michael Sona, former communications director for the Conservative candidate in Guelph (Ontario), was charged on June 2, 2014 with "deliberately preventing or trying to prevent voters from voting". Sona was found guilty on November 14, 2014 and sentenced to nine months in prison plus twelve months of probation. Sona was released from prison on bail after twelve days, pending an appeal against her sentence. However, Sona did not appeal the belief. During the trial, Justice Hearn agreed with the Crown's accusation that Sona did not seem to be acting alone.
Maps Robocall
United States
Political call
Robocalls are made by many political parties in the United States, including but not limited to Republicans and Democrats and unaffiliated campaigns, 527 organizations, trade unions, and citizens. Political robocalls are excluded from the US National Do Not Call Registry. The Consumer Protection Software Act of 1991 (TCPA) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prohibits anyone (including charities, politicians and political parties) from making robocalls to cell phone numbers without the consent of the recipient. The FCC allows non-commercial robocalls to the majority of residential (non-cellular) phone lines.
The Federal Phone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) governs automatic calls. All robocall, regardless of whether they are political, must do two things to be legal. Federal law requires all phone calls using pre-recorded messages to identify who initiates the call and enter the phone number or address where the initiator can be contacted.
Some states (23 according to DMNews) have laws that govern or prohibit political robocalls. Indiana and North Dakota banned automatic political calls. In New Hampshire, political robocalls are allowed, except when the recipient is in the National Do Not Call Registry. Many states require disclosure of who pays the call, often requiring such notifications to be recorded in the candidate's own voice. The state legal patch that governs political robocalls has created problems for national campaigns.
California
California prohibits any robocall unless there is an existing relationship. The California Public Utilities Code Ã,§Ã,§ 2871 et seq. holds political campaigns with the same rules as other organizations make calls with automated call-announcing devices. The guidelines are:
- Someone must come in line before recording to identify the nature of the call and the organization behind it.
- The call recipient must approve the recording being played.
- Calls must be disconnected from the phone line as soon as the message is over or the recipient closes the call, whichever comes first.
Indiana
Indiana requires the introduction of messages previously recorded by the live operator; messages can only be played if the so called party gives permission.
Missouri
In September 2008, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon warned a political campaign in Missouri that his office would aggressively enforce the federal rule (Consumer Protection Phone Act of 1991) requiring calls to include identification and contact information.
North Carolina
Robocall created during the 2008 North Carolina primary Democrat, targeting African-American voters in the days leading up to the end of April 2008, which basically told the registered voters that they were not registered. According to NPR and Southern Facing, this call was made by the organization "Voices Women Vote Women." The electorate and watchdog group complained that it was a voter blackout, and state Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered them to stop making calls. The group terminated the call and no further legal action was taken.
South Carolina
South Carolina has laws that prohibit most unsolicited consumers and political robocalls, but in 2010, campaign consultant Robert Cahaly was captured by the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division, alleged to have made illegal robocalls into six district state homes. The opinion polling system automatically asks whether US Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be invited to campaign with six Democratic candidates for the South Carolina Legislature. Cahaly was arrested despite having a written opinion from the state attorney general who declared that he had acted according to the law. The allegations were later dismissed in October 2012. After the allegations were dropped, Cahaly filed a lawsuit against state officials, claiming his constitutional right to free speech had been violated. US District Court Judge Michelle Childs ruled that South Carolina's anti-robocall law was content-based restrictions on speech and therefore unconstitutional.
Propose additional rules
California Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced the Robocall Federal Privacy Act in February 2008 in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration of hearings. The law proposes to: 1) limit the robocalls to no more than two days by one candidate, 2) mandate that the candidate has an accurate caller ID number displayed; 3) mandate that disclosure of who pays for the call occurs at the beginning of the call, at the end of the call, and 4) mandates that the call time occurs not before 8 Ã, or after 9 pm The bill was read twice, and for not accepting any further action during the session, it did not become law. Similar bills have been filed in subsequent years with no results.
Shaun Dakin, Citizen's CEO for Civil Discourse, testified at the trial and explained how robocalls affect voter life across the nation. He also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post calling for a Voters Privacy Act of Voters in which all voters will have the right to vote out of political robocalls if they do not wish to accept it.
Dakin, a former campaign worker for John Kerry, created a website called Stoppoliticalcalls.org and claimed to allow citizens to opt out of receiving robocalls. However, there is no guarantee that the registry will stop the calls and since there is no law supporting the database, basically this is an Internet petition. As mentioned above, the Robocall Privacy Act fails to legislate and there is no bill that has a provision for not making a registry call to stop robocall.
Despite the massive media publicity of the database, only seven politicians in the United States voluntarily promised to honor the list during the 2008 election cycle. Of the three, only three managed to reach the election and only Virginia Foxx (R) was reelected in November 2008.
On September 1, 2009, new regulations from the Federal Trade Commission came into force, banning most robocalls without the written participation of the recipients. Political campaigns, surveys, charities, debt collectors, and health care providers are free, as are calls to businesses. Calls from banks, insurance companies, and telephone companies are outside the FTC jurisdiction. In situations under federal jurisdiction, federal law will replace the slightly less restrictive law in the state of California.
Reversing the hack
In December 2011, the reporting described "robocall revenge" in which voters can change tables and send robocalls to politicians and others using online website tools.
Suppressing unwanted and illegal robocalls
Many robocalls are undesirable, and several methods have been developed to prevent unwanted robocalls. Many countries operate not to list, but the list is ineffective and legally problematic in some cases. As a result, the market has been developed for products that allow consumers to block robocall. Most products use methods similar to those used to mitigate SPIT (spam over Internet telephony) and can be broadly categorized using the main method used. However, due to the complexity of the problem, no single method is reliable enough.
Solutions are available for both hardware and software products. Mobile apps are very prevalent because they use techniques that do not require modified infrastructure. Many products are limited to only use on one medium, such as traditional copper telephone lines, or mobile phone contracts from a particular mobile carrier.
Blacklist and whitelist
In its simplest form, this method offers the ability to prevent further calls from phone numbers, once they are known as robocall sources. Many mobile apps can prevent robocalls with user-generated blacklists.
For landlines there is a stand-alone call barrier connected to the phone. Various models work on the principles of black lists and white lists. Call blockers receive attention from publications including Which one? and Consumer Reports in the UK and USA.
In the UK BT operates a service for landlines called Select to Reject which allows customers to block up to 10 phone numbers of their choice for a monthly fee.
A number of physical products have been developed for use with landlines. These are usually installed in homes and use blacklisted hard coded or irregularly. Some models also have a function to create user-generated whitelists.
Crowdsourcing
More sophisticated models use crowdsourcing to build a more comprehensive blacklist of robocall numbers. An important example of this is the Truecaller app, which requires users to grant access to their original contact whitelist instead of access to the larger crowdsourced database. In 2013, hackers gain access to the Truecaller database of known original numbers, highlighting the dangers of centralizing this information.
In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission launched a competition at DEF CON, with a $ 50,000 prize for the winner, to help develop the best concept for handling robocall. The winner, NoMoRoBo, was taken from 798 entries and utilized the simultaneous ringing function to change the robocall potential route, based on data from other users.
CAPTCHA
By building a crowdsourcing model, Primus Canada launched a patented product called Telemarketing Guard for a 2007 telephone line. This improves on the previous model by including a CAPTCHA style challenge-response test.
Based on a database developed from customer feedback, it filters suspected telemarketing calls to systems that challenge callers to record their name after pressing a button. If the name is registered, the customer's phone rings with Caller ID from the Telemarketing Guard. If they answer the phone, they play the recording, at which point they can receive a call or refuse and report it.
Real time analysis
The main problem for using blacklisting and whitelisting techniques is the practice of spoofing caller ID, which is prevalent as a result of low barriers to entry in the VoIP service market.
By 2015 the Federal Communications Commission proposes a framework for the telecommunications industry in the United States, which includes a network-level validation system for robocalls from SIP sources by 2017. The ultimate authentication task within the framework is the signing of all VoIP calls, which will allow operators to identify robocalls reliably.
Until these objectives are achieved, more advanced methods for blocking robocalls use real-time business intelligence techniques to address the continuous change of robocalls. With access to a large sample of data, it is possible to create algorithms that detect call patterns without requiring user reporting.
By 2016, both Verizon and Sprint each launch their own services based on Enhanced Caller ID, developed by Cequint and incorporate whitelisting techniques, blacklisting and crowdsourcing. For improved accuracy, it is equipped with a technology called Call Guardian developed by TNS, which performs caller behavior analysis on the 25 billion public calls they handle annually in real time.
Enforcement
In August 2016, a "Robocall Attack Power" of thirty companies said they would help solve the problem.
2015 Federal Communications Commission Declaration of Decision
After receiving more than 215,000 consumer complaints in 2014 alone, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) strengthens and clarifies its rules protecting consumers from robocalls and unwanted e-mail and spam emails. The Commission issued a declarative decree package in June 2015 clarifying the provisions of the Telephone Consumer Protection Law (TCPA) that deal with pre-recorded and artificial voice calls received by residential cable telephones and wireless numbers.
Federal Trade Commission Act 2009 against illegal robocall provider
In May 2009, in response to numerous complaints, the Federal Trade Commission asked a federal court to close a telemarketing campaign that had bombarded US consumers with hundreds of millions of robocalls allegedly deceived in an attempt to sell their service vehicle contract under the guise that they were an extension of the vehicle's guarantee original. The FTC takes action against both promoters of extended fake car warranties, as well as telemarketing companies hired to carry out its illegal fraud campaigns. The FTC believes that the company operates a large telemarketing scheme that uses random phone calls, pre-recorded to deceive consumers into thinking that their vehicle warranty is coming to an end. Consumers who respond to robocall are pressured to purchase an extended service contract for their vehicle, which telemarketers incorrectly falsify as an extension of the original manufacturer's warranty. According to the FTC newspaper submitted to the court, however, robocalls have pushed tens of thousands of complaints from good consumers in the United States National Do Not Call Registry or asked not to be called. Five phone numbers associated with the defendant have resulted in a total of 30,000 Do Not Call complaints. Consumers receive robocalls in their homes, offices, and on their phones, sometimes several times a day. Businesses, government offices, and even 911 dispatchers have been called.
Those who answer pre-recorded calls hear a message telling them that their vehicle's warranty is coming to an end and that they must "extend coverage before it's too late." They are told to "press one" to talk to "warranty specialists." The "specialists" then mislead consumers into believing that their company is affiliated with a consumer vehicle dealer or manufacturer. They try to sell to consumers a service contract between $ 2,000 and $ 3,000, which is falsely described as an extension of the vehicle's original warranty. The extended auto warranty seller demanded by the FTC allegedly took over $ 10 million in sales of deceptively marketed service contracts. In their robocalls, companies dial every phone number in a particular area code and prefix sequentially, without knowing whether the consumer is called a motorist or motor vehicle owned, or whether the consumer numbers are in the Do Not Call Registry. Consumers who call for terminated calls are often filled with "rude behavior" or simply hanged, according to letters filed to court. Some of the defendants used offshore company shells to try to avoid surveillance, and a top official at the telemarketing company boasted to prospective clients that he could operate outside the law without the possibility of being caught by the FTC, the newspaper said. The defendant also claims that he made 1.8 million calls per day and that he has committed more than $ 40 million calls for an extended warranty company, including one billion calls on behalf of his biggest client, according to court letters filed by the FTC. In addition to robocall, the FTC alleges that companies that sell bail letters send deceptive postcards to consumers, warning them of the termination of their automatic warranties. Postcards are designed to mislead consumers into believing they are contacted by their dealers or manufacturers, and postcards offer consumers the opportunity to "renew" their original warranty. On May 15, 2009, US District Judge John F. Grady issued a temporary restraining order against the defendants Transcontinental Warranty Inc. and Voice Touch Inc. Grady's orders also apply to CEO of Transcontinental and President Christopher Cowart, Voice Touch executives, James and Maureen Dunne, Voice Touch business partners of Networks LLC Foundation and Foundation Network executive Damian Kohlfeld. In addition to ordering the automatic phone call termination, Grady's orders freeze the assets of both companies. The FTC alleges in its complaints that the call is part of a fraudulent scheme and asks the courts to ensure assets will not be lost if they may be needed to pay for consumers who have been victimized. The FTC does not immediately seek civil penalties against the company, but will probably do it later, the agency official said. Public attorneys in Arkansas, Indiana, and Missouri have taken similar action on calls that offer extended warranties on cars.
See also
- Autodialer
- Telemarketing
- Voice broadcasting
- Message without ringing
References
External links
- Protecting Consumers and Business from Robocalls, Research Service of Fraud Congress
- Stopping Fraud Robocall Fraud: Can Be Done?: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Security and Insurance Trade, Science and Transport Committee, United States Senate, One Hundred Seventeen Congress, First Session, July 10, 2013
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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