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And the typical American gets 200 or so every year.
Although, I feel like I get that many just about every week.
Why are robocalls so darn hard to stop?
Why are they such a big part of scams in America today?
And what can you do to protect yourself from them?
Well we have a special guest on today to help you with all of that.
[00:01:33] I’m Alex Quilici, and I’m the CEO of YouMail.
[00:01:36] Bob: And what is YouMail?
[00:01:32] Alex Quilici: So YouMail is a company that tries to prevent robocalls from bothering consumers.
[00:01:51] Bob: Somebody’s going to wonder why are you named YouMail then.
[00:01:54] Alex Quilici: So it’s a long story.
We started off as a voicemail service.
What’s this about?
And that one person’s like, oh, I was in a car crash.
They must, this must be legit.
[00:02:46] Bob: Okay, wait a minute.
[00:02:47] Alex Quilici: And so, all of these scams play on that.
[00:02:49] Bob: Wait a minute.
[00:03:01] Alex Quilici: That’s, that’s exactly right.
In fact, a lot of these, I like your phrase carpet bomb.
So that they call everybody.
So I mean there’s two classes of scams; some that are highly targeted.
It’s pretty straightforward.
So it’s very cheap.
You don’t need that many people if you’ve hit 5 or 10 million folks to respond.
I don’t, I don’t speak Chinese.
They were calling everybody in the hopes of finding someone who spoke Chinese.
It was that cheap.
[00:03:59] Bob: That is amazing.
It’s, it’s hard to get my head around, wow.
A billion calls, and it was two guys.
[00:04:35] Bob: That’s, I mean it’s basically calling half the people on earth.
[00:04:47] Bob: Staggering indeed.
So let’s back up.
They are really frustrating.
Everyone seems to hate them, including cell phone carriers, including Congress.
So I asked Alex, why are they so darn hard to stop?
[00:05:07] Bob: So, robocalls.
I doubt there are many words that would make people more angry than just the word “robocall.”
We all hate robocalls.
I, myself, have just stopped answering my phone as a result of robocalls.
People have been dealing with this for longer than that.
Why is it so darn hard to stop robocalls?
And so it’s also very cheap.
Why can’t they stop it?
So why can’t they stop it?
[00:06:09] Alex Quilici: It’s a really hard problem.
Um, you know, 15, 20 years ago, spam threatened to make email almost useless.
Is, is robocalling technically harder than spam for some reason?
[00:06:58] Alex Quilici: It, it is harder.
you might look at URLs and see if the URLs are behaving well.
There’s a whole host of techniques.
This stuff, you know, stuff still gets through.
With robocalling, you’ve got to call.
So it’s much, a much harder problem to solve to stop the robocalls.
[00:07:43] Bob: That’s interesting.
That, that makes um, good sense to me.
But boy, it still is, is really irritating.
[00:07:55] Bob: Carriers also have what you might think of as the opposite problem.
If an email company misidentifies a message of spam, it ends up in your spam folder.
[00:09:03] Bob: Alex just brought up spoofing there.
That’s a big part of this problem.
Criminals have technology that makes it pretty easy to disguise the number they’re calling from.
And worse than that, they can impersonate other people.
The Feds and the carriers are fighting this problem, however, with some recent success.
What’s going on there?
[00:09:40] Alex Quilici: So, remember I mentioned these robocallers are marketers.
They’re trying to find a way for you to pick up your phone.
And up until recently, it’s been very easy to simply spoof numbers.
That is starting to go away.
So what’s happened is there’s been a big technological improvement driven by a regulation called Stir/Shaken.
And what Stir/Shaken is, is authenticated caller ID.
They’re getting blocked in the connection, carriers arent, you know, aren’t letting them through.
That, that’s all good.
So we’ve traded one problem for another.
So I asked, just how many robocalls are there?
[00:11:12] Alex Quilici: So it’s roughly 50 billion a year.
And that’s an enormous number of calls.
[00:11:31] Bob: So roughly one every business day, something like that?
[00:11:34] Alex Quilici: A little bit less, but that’s, that’s right.
[00:12:04] Bob: Well let’s go through the three most common robocall scams.
What’s the first one?
And so this is where you get a call that’s an im–, an imposter call.
They took over my account.
I’ve got to deal with it.
And so we want to deal with it.
Good, I can take care of the problem.
And then it’s just downhill from there.
Or, you know, go, go call the number on your debit card.
So I think what consumers should do when they get one of these calls is simply ignore it.
[00:14:20] Bob: That’s one of the mantras of The Perfect Scam here.
Just hang up and call back using the number you know.
It’s the only way to avoid this.
Okay, so what’s the second most common uh robocall scam?
And, and they come from a whole host of different kinds of perspectives.
And these are really nasty because they feel like it’s another imposter scam.
[00:15:33] Alex Quilici: Exactly.
And they play on that.
People think of that two-factor authentication code as being something that’s really safe.
[00:16:00] Alex Quilici: Yeah, that, that’s right.
And in doing that action, you’re actually doing the bad thing.
But yeah, it’s the same general principle.
[00:16:20] Bob: Okay, so what’s the third most common robocall scam?
For example, we’ve all had the car warranty calls, right.
[00:17:39] Alex Quilici: That, they’re, they’re both.
you could’t tell necessarily right away, right.
But so the car warranty ones, we’ve seen both.
It never shows up.
Or it’s sold at a huge premium to, to what a similar product might be sold for.
So it really is, and it’s not fraud necessarily, but it’s certainly very sketchy advertising.
[00:18:13] Bob: Okay, so here’s the bonus question for our listeners.
For–, forget common robocall scams.
And there’s a whole bunch of variants of this.
It tends to be very targeted.
They have to have information about you to make it work, and it’s really devastating.
[00:19:34] Bob: Oh my God.
[00:19:35] Alex Quilici: So it’s an extremely effective scam.
There’s, there’s tons of variants of this, and it’s a really nasty scam.
[00:19:50] Bob: There are plenty more robo scams that Alex sees.
They might have called three or four times and hangs up after one ring.
So you call it back.
And these work because people often know somebody in Europe.
They think, oh, maybe my kid’s traveling, trying to get a hold of me.
And they’re really effective.
So what’s happening is you’re not getting a call from say a, a number in Europe.
They’re making up the number.
Does that sound familiar?
[00:21:39] Alex Quilici: Yeah, that’s an account takeover scam.
Very, very cool idea.
The scam works by basically taking the phone number away from you.
And so that’s, that’s just another form of account takeover.
[00:22:20] Bob: Got it.
Got it, and what about car crash scams?
[00:22:24] Alex Quilici: So there, there’s a whole bunch of those.
Actually oddly enough they, they happen much more in Australia than here.
We just need all this personal information to be able to make that happen.
And so, often then people give that information, they never hear from the, the scammer again.
So that’s, that’s a typical one.
[00:23:05] Bob: These crimes are just so terrible, and yet they keep happening.
Perhaps it’s because the criminals have very little to lose.
[00:23:17] Bob: Do any of these people ever go to jail for this?
[00:23:19] Alex Quilici: Uh, jail, I have not seen.
They’re really going after them.
The, the attorney generals are going after them.
They’re not, and maybe that’s part of the problem.
And that says you’re free to’t call people without their consent.
Right, you might’t automatically dial calls to people without their consent.
So that doesn’t have jail provisions.
And so the problem is, people can make a billion calls.
What’s the fine, like a trillion and a half dollars?
Nobody can pay that.
If they’re committing fraud, then it’s different.
[00:25:30] Alex Quilici: That’s, that’s right.
And there’s, there’s several reasons for that.
Somebody did that, oh, I’m sorry, I’ll give a shot to shut them off.
But that’s not going to happen overnight.
So what can consumers do right now to protect themselves?
[00:27:33] Alex Quilici: We, we recommend three things.
So number one is get a robocall blocking app on your, on your mobile phone.
Get something that will help stop these calls and, and messages from getting through.
None of them will get all of them, but they’ll get a lot of them.
And finally, don’t just call a number back.
Don’t just react.
Don’t just call whatever numbers calling you claiming to be Citibank.
[00:28:35] Bob: Much less of a problem.
Oof, well, we all dream of that.
I think it’s going to be like email.
It’s just a little more painful to have your phone ring than to have your gear beep.
[00:28:57] Bob: (chuckles) And hang up the phone.
It’s really hard to break that, but you cannot trust the phone connection anymore.
You cannot trust the phone calls coming in.
And once you realize that, it becomes okay to just hang up on phone numbers.
Don’t answer the phone numbers.
You know, force people to leave voicemails and then call them back.
That, that becomes the way to deal with the problem.
Call the AARP Fraud Watch data pipe Helpline at 877-908-3360.
Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next.
Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
For AARP’s The Perfect Scam, I’m Bob Sullivan.
These days, the typical American consumer gets around 200 robocalls a year.
