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Spam Apple IT Technology

FaceTime Users Bombarded With Group Call Spam (arstechnica.com) 49

FaceTime users are getting bombarded with group calls from numbers they've never seen before, often as many as 20 times in short succession during late hours of the night. From a report: Griefers behind the pranks call as many as 31 numbers at a time. When a person receiving one of the calls hangs up, a different number will immediately call back. FaceTime doesn't have the ability to accept only FaceTime calls coming from people in the user's address book. It also requires that all numbers in a group call must be manually blocked for the call to be stopped. "I got my first facetime spam starting 4 days ago," one user reported to an Apple support forum earlier this month. "It has been non-stop, over 300 numbers blocked so far. My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on." The high volume of callbacks appears to be the result of other people receiving the call dialing everyone back when the initial call fails shortly after answering. As more and more people receive follow-on calls, they too begin making callbacks. Apple provides surprisingly few ways for users to stop the nuisance calls. As noted earlier, users can block numbers, but this requires manually blocking each individual person on the group call. That's not an effective solution for people receiving dozens of group calls, often to a different group of people in a short period of time, often in the wee hours.
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FaceTime Users Bombarded With Group Call Spam

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  • Innurnet VoIP increasingly replacing telcos aren't regulated as regular telcos - who themselves couldn't prevent telemarketers and other nuisance actors from ruining everybody's life even if they wanted to anyway.

    • The only thing surprising to me about this is that this particular SPAM tactic is only now being used aggressively and in high volumes. Almost like they were waiting for something...

  • by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:09AM (#62462024) Homepage

    Without running your own PBX, there's really no good universal mechanism for handling phone spam. The idea that someone can invade my life by simply knowing 10 digits (3 of which are dictated by my geography) that I have no easy way to change is crazy. Phone numbers aren't compatible with modern technology in any useful way.

    Which is why no one can contact me by phone without some pre-existing relationship. If it's not in my address book, it's a giant nope.

    • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:18AM (#62462052)

      How do you propose to be reliably reachable if you don't have some fixed number, handle, nickname or address that legitimate correspondant may use to contact you?

      The solution is stricter laws on nuisance calls - be it over landlines, cellphones, internet or whatever - complete with jail time for execs of companies engaging in that sort of activity. It still hasn't happened for landlines or cellphones though, so don't hold your breath.

      • by v1 ( 525388 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:28AM (#62462098) Homepage Journal

        Problem is, the people doing it, and the people HELPING them do it, are making money and using some of that money to rent congressmen to insure they can continue to do it.

        it's not the people that are doing it
        it's not the people that are helping them do it
        it's not even the LAWS that are allowing it

        it's the congresscritters that are being bribed not to fix the laws. That's the only place where this problem can be fixed.

        Of course when the people receiving the bribes have written the laws so that bribing them is LEGAL, that makes the problem very difficult to solve. It all comes down to money being the best source of motivation. And that will always create problems that are difficult to fix.

      • I can be reliably reached via registered mail. There is no other way for strangers to reliably reach me.

        This is basically equivalent to the 90s idea of charging senders a penny to receive an email. Just make it expensive to contact you and no one will bother you.

        • by torkus ( 1133985 )

          I can be reliably reached via registered mail. There is no other way for strangers to reliably reach me.

          This is basically equivalent to the 90s idea of charging senders a penny to receive an email. Just make it expensive to contact you and no one will bother you.

          Given carte blanche to re-design communication one could envision a world with an arbitrary (but small...pennies) cost per incoming email/call charged to the sender. If you replied, you're then charged. If you have a conversation, it nets out to effectively zero over time and any minor 'who replied last' represents pocket change ... UNLESS you're a spammer. Sending out 100 million emails that no one wants or replies to costs real money. Sending out a few thousand emails to people who signed up (or white

      • How do you propose to be reliably reachable if you don't have some fixed number, handle, nickname or address that legitimate correspondant may use to contact you?

        There's absolutely nothing necessary about the point of contact you give out being fixed.

        Look at how the payments industry is handling this. Instead of old fashioned credit cards, which rely on trusting merchants to not misuse a credit card number to run unauthorized charges, modern systems like chip-and-PIN, Apple Pay, and the like instead rely on approaches such as generating single-use tokens that are only good for a single transaction with a single merchant for a specifically authorized amount. If the m

      • by Arethan ( 223197 )

        How do you propose to be reliably reachable if you don't have some fixed number, handle, nickname or address that legitimate correspondant may use to contact you?

        What makes you believe that situation is ever good for the recipient? There are very few categorical reasons for brand new correspondence to initiate, and almost all of them are a net negative for the recipient.
        - Marketing - ie want to sell you something (you probably didn't already want)
        - Recruiters - ie want to sell you a new job position (you probably didn't already want)
        - Bills - ie pay us owed monies
        - Government related workflow toil - most likely leads toward "pay us owed monies"
        - Personal corresponde

      • Spam -- whether phone or email -- is related to the idea in my sig about the misuse of technologies of abundance by people still thinking in terms of scarcity. Without cheap communications and cheap automation, spam would not be possible on a significant scale that disrupts people's lives and makes potentially-abundance-producing communication tools like email or the phone increasingly harder to use. But with cheap communications and cheap automation, it is fairly straightforward technicality to produce pl

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Bourdain ( 683477 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @01:04PM (#62462736)

      For those who are more interested in avoiding spam calls, there is a nearly 100% effective solution I implemented years ago...

      (1) get a new number from a place you don't know anyone in like a faraway state with potentially a single area code

      (2) install some app on your phone to block all numbers from that area code since 99.9% of the bogus calls are spoofed to the same area code as your own phone number

      problem solved - I get maybe 1 bogus call/text a month at most since doing this

      • Also fwiw, I use numbershield on iOS + also have a google voice number which, impressively, seems to have pretty good filtering from google so I get very few bogus calls via that route without any special filtering

      • That would be a very unusual app to block calls coming in over Facebook Messenger.
    • by xeoron ( 639412 )
      Best way to avoid all the spam calls is to auto block it. How? Google Fi has a feature, when used, will block all calls and texts from people NOT in your contact list or someone you called/texted within 30 days/
  • by Anonymous Coward

    "My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on"

    Yeah, it sucks...but working that into the conversation was such an obnoxiously calculated move. Nobody cares about your shirtless toddler.
    That's also implying the kid has a habit of "accidentally" answering calls...doubtful, but if so, maybe solve that problem.

    No, I'm not defending the spammers...Just move on with your life.

  • by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:47AM (#62462172)

    The amount of unblockable iMessages spam I get makes me think that Apple just doesn't care and is incapable of making a system that makes their users lives better rather than worse.

    Add to that the way they botched do-not-disturb/"focus", and something tells me they need a big shakeup.

  • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:52AM (#62462190) Homepage
    In the internet age of everything that is exploitable will be exploited, how can Apple not have a whitelist or simple block for group calls? Or even an off button?

    -It is like everyone has to reinvent the wheel and winds up getting it's users run over in the process.
  • Last year news? (Score:5, Informative)

    by korex ( 2467790 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:54AM (#62462202)
    Article is from March 2021, aren't we in 2022 already?
  • My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on

  • by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @11:50AM (#62462414) Journal

    there was some way to turn off Facetime. You know, like you can turn off a lightbulb by flipping a switch. Something simple.

    Are developers capable of creating something so simple? From what we see every day the answer appears to be no. Complexity and obfuscation are the words of the day.

  • ...with regular SMS yet? I remember iPhoners sending me SMS' from iMessage & what I got was unreadable. If I really wanted to know, I had to SMS them back to tell them I haven't got iMessage so can't read their messages. I mostly use non-SMS apps now so I have no idea, has that changed? Are iMessages still incompatible with regular SMS?
    • I've never had trouble with either SMS or MMS in iMessage.

      • The question isn't about if iMessage work with iMessage. Of course it does. The question is about whether iMessage is compatible with regular SMS outside of iMessage.
        • The question isn't about if iMessage work with iMessage. Of course it does. The question is about whether iMessage is compatible with regular SMS outside of iMessage.

          Yes, which is why I said I've never had trouble with either SMS or MMS in iMessage.

          Do you think people with Apple devices only communicate with other Apple device owners? My brother uses an Android phone, and we communicate all the time - one-to-one and as part of larger groups (which is where MMS comes in). It's never been problematic.

    • by anegg ( 1390659 )

      I've had an iPhone since 2013 and in that time iMessage has always been capable of sending/receiving using the cellular Short Message Service (SMS) instead of iMessage protocols when corresponding with non-iPhone users. iMessage is a superset of SMS/MMS plus Apple-specific, fully encrypted messaging between iMessage endpoints.

      SMS communications are shown in green, while iMessage-protocol communications are shown in blue. This visual identification of the endpoint type led to Google crying foul because te

  • Does that setting not work in Facetime?

  • Clearly these calls come from people desperate for scheisse videos. Take the phone to the toilet and give them what they "want" and it will stop.

  • Why not just say "Pranksters"?
  • More like Facepalm.
  • by XB-70 ( 812342 ) on Thursday April 21, 2022 @04:19AM (#62464586)
    Turn.

    The.

    Phone.

    Off.

    A proper night's sleep is far more valuable than some stupid message in the wee hours.

  • Just to send a message. If they don't get it, we should send more messages.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann

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