I live in the US and we’ve got elections coming up. Every day for the past several months, I get 3-8 text messages from political campaigns per day. I block them every time, yet they keep coming in.
My question is NOT how to stop them, but what happens to those numbers that I, and surely hundreds and maybe thousands of other people have blocked? What if an actual person gets that phone number and needs to call people? What happens then?
Because on a long enough time line, all numbers will have been used for spam.
Hi! Spammers often dupe a real number for a bit, then change it up. My wife’s office was the spammer’s number for a day. They got a day of getting hundreds of “I’m reporting you to the police” and “go eff yourselves” calls, and then the spammer’s moved on. The receptionist got a gift card from management for dealing with it.
I work in a 911 dispatch center. A lot of non-emergency lines for different police/fire/EMS departments in our county, as well as some lines for different county agencies like the department of children & youth, the coroner’s office, etc. come into our dispatch center at least some of the time (after office hours, over the weekend, if their office is short staffed and no ones available to answer the phone, etc.)
One day, the scammers were using one of those 10-digit lines that came into us
And it was mind boggling how many people don’t understand that they use spoofed numbers and tried to call them back
Got a whole lot of people wanting to report “me” to the police, which, i suppose, was actually kind of in my wheelhouse. Most of them were from way out of state though so not our jurisdiction.
How do you like the job? I was considering it as a career change. I like the idea of helping people and I’m used to fast-paced environments. At least where I live, it pays really well (at least compared to what I’m making now), and while I’ve never worked in an office-like setting before it seems nice to be able to sit down rather than being on my feet 9-12 hours a day.
As much as I’m capable of liking any job, I do like this one.
Funny enough, a big part of the reason I took the job was the same reason you cited, I was working in a warehouse, on my feet, carrying boxes around all day, and being able to sit down in the air conditioning sounded really nice.
Every dispatch center does things a little differently, but where I am we work 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation, which is fairly common
So this week I’m off Monday and Tuesday, work Wednesday and Thursday, then off Friday-Sunday
Then the next week it’s the opposite, and Wednesday and Thursday will be my days off.
I love that schedule, I never have to work more than 3 days in a row without a 2 day break, , I have days off during the week to get stuff done, and every other weekend I have a 3 day weekend, if I plan my vacations right I only need to take 2 days off to get a whole week
The one I work at isn’t union, which has its pros and cons. Pretty much all the surrounding counties are union though, which helps keeps our wages competitive. I think most of the others around me make slightly more than we do, but one of the first concessions that tends to get made in contract negotiations is mandatory overtime, so since we aren’t union we don’t have that. If you do end up somewhere with mandatory OT, usually that means staying for a few hours after your shift ends as needed, not coming in on your days off. I don’t mind working 12 hours, but anything beyond that feels like too much, so I’m kind of glad that’s not something we need to do.
It can of course be mentally/emotionally draining for all of the reasons you’re probably thinking. I don’t think I need to list all of the horrible things I’ve gotten calls about, or the kinds of unpleasant people I’ve had to try my damnedest to help. People do of course get burnt out on it.
And it does feel good to be helping people, but if you’re on Lemmy I’m sure you’re not totally ignorant of all the issues that exist with policing, mental healthcare, etc. so you do also sometimes find yourself wondering if what you’re doing actually is helping.
Overall, it’s a good job, I do like it a lot, I recommend it semi frequently to people who are looking for a new career, and basically every dispatch center in the country is always a little short staffed and almost always hiring, so there’s plenty of opportunities for it. And usually the requirements are pretty minimal - clean background check, high school or GED, basic computer literacy, good typing skills, ability to speak clearly, etc.
Hey thanks for the write up, I really appreciate it. I think I’m going to apply to my local office. From a quick search it looks like my local police force hires in bulk, so you apply whenever and when they do a round of hiring they just go through all the resumes at once and go from there. Not sure when the next hiring spree is, but it doesn’t hurt to apply now and just let it sit. There’s also an online test and an in person test you have to complete before your interview so I guess I’ll have to do that too, but that’s not too bad I don’t think. It probably helps weed out people who aren’t taking it seriously, which could go in my favour maybe. Either way, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain it to me.
Yeah, that’s roughly how my center does it, definitely go ahead and get your application in if you can, I know my center keeps them on file for a while and even if you don’t get picked for the next upcoming round of hiring you might potentially get an offer for 2 or 3 classes down the line. I think we usually do about 3 rounds of hiring a year, so it may be a little while before you hear back. There was one guy who took the test at the same time I did and ended up being in the next class, so it was probably about 6 months between him putting his application in and when he started.
When I started (about 8 years ago now) I went to a hiring event where we took the aptitude tests and got an interview on the spot. After that, we scheduled a job shadow to come in for an hour or two listening to calls being answered dispatched to see what the job is actually like.
To give you an idea of the timeline, I think the hiring event was around August, I got my conditional offer in September, and class started late October.
After getting the offer, I had to do a hearing/vision/drug test, and sort of a psych eval with the county psychologist. Some other agencies have more requirements, I’ve heard a lot of places have you do a polygraph test.
In addition to 911, in a similar vein there might be some similar dispatch jobs you can look into as well. Some police/fire/EMS departments s might have their own dispatcher in-house, some agencies like state police, park rangers, game wardens, animal control, etc. might have their own dispatch separate from 911 as well. Public transit and railroad companies often have their own police, so do some bigger colleges.
Or if you’re not bothered by the ethics, some bigger security/private investigation companies like the pinkertons have their own sort of dispatch roles.
And if there’s no residency requirements and you don’t mind the commute, you can look into your surrounding cities/counties to see if they’re hiring. We have a couple people who work at my center who actually live pretty far out of the county.
After doing a bit of research it looks like my local police force only hires once per year, in the fall. They don’t specify a cutoff date. Hopefully I haven’t missed it yet, I’m going to apply tonight once the little one is in bed and my wife comes home from work. I guess worst case scenario I’ve applied for next year and am stuck at this job for another year. I didn’t really have any other plans anyway.
Since you keep talking about your local police, I’d also double check that that’s who handles 911 in your area. That might be a role just for police dispatch for that one department.
There’s a lot of different situations, and in some cases it is run by the local police, but very often 911 is part of either the county sheriff’s department or department of public safety, and will handle police, fire and EMS dispatch for a larger area than just one town.
Not that being the station dispatcher is a bad job, I think most of them around me make more than we do at county, but it may not be the job you’re thinking of.
Were the managers in on some of the spamming?
What if an actual person gets that number?
They probably already have it? They just spoof, spam call, then leave. Or… in some cases, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a mystery rental agreement or something.
Often those numbers are simply recycled. Telecom companies don’t care if you blocked that number, they get paid the same for it.
Keep in mind that a lot of those numbers you see in spam calls are spoofed and not their real number either. Spammers often fake a number that’s in your area code to look local, when in reality they could be on the other side of the world.
That’s even more disturbing, because it means I don’t have to wait for a new number to be living this nightmare; some spammer might be using my phone number right now.
I guess I’m just wondering if anyone’s considered this might become a problem in the future and if they’ve done anything to address it proactively… but, right, when the fuck has anyone ever done that?
I once received a spam call from my own number. They spoofed my own phone number to call me.
Soon with AI it could be your voice on the other end of the line too. Or Grandma’s. Or your Proctologist.
Or my grandma’s proctologist!
I’d recognize that voice anywhere!
Imagine if your email client let you just free-form type in the “From:” field. (off-topic knowledge: There used to be email clients that would do that)
That’s sort of how caller ID works if you control the call.
In fact, just like an email is just a text file that you don’t see (unless you view the source), caller ID is similar. It’s all based on trust. There’s no good current way to verify that stuff, so… some spammers, instead of spoofing some random number for a while, will spoof each number they call as also the caller.
The most annoying version of this I’ve seen is calls coming in purporting to be from the number “1”. Just one. lol.
There still are email clients that allow setting the from: field, in fact there’s nothing in the base mailing protocol stopping you from doing so. However there are validation layers on top now that block such shenanigans.
It’s happened. I’ve known a person who had gotten chewed out in some random phone call over a spam call they didn’t even make. Some spammer was faking local numbers and one of them was his. One of the people who got spammed phoned the number assuming it was the spammer’s and chewed him out for it… took a few minutes of screaming at each other before they realized what was going on.
here in Canada there’s been some legislative steps to combat spam calls, and they have been reduced but as long as there’s money to be made spammers and scammers will keep trying.
Dang, that sounds like a fun conversation.
Reminds of a prank call connecting two Chinese restaurants to each other and them trying to figure out who is ordering what in their limited English before they switch to Chinese and start laughing.
Had that happen to me once in the 90s - worked at Domino’s and someone called a Pizza Hut and added me to the call. Har har. I’m sure it was amusing to the person that did it, but it wasn’t to me. Although I can appreciate the humour. Still wasn’t funny to me. heh
You’re correct but it’s unlikely. Assuming there is no protection for this from the phone companies, there are 10 digits in a phone number which is 10 billion numbers. Making some assumptions, you have about 1 in 1.2 million chance to be struck by lightning each year. Round that down to 1 in 1 million, you’re 10,000x more likely to be struck by lightning than have a spammer spoof your number. You don’t worry THAT much about being hit by lightning. You’ll be fine.
Caveats - lots of averaging going on.
Phone numbers aren’t random, though. In the US there are fixed area codes and within that fixed exchanges, so the pool of available numbers i going to be short of 9999999999.
But, yes, those are some big numbers. But now with AI, who knows if spamming will increase to match.
What is this technique? I could perhaps send real looking messages from a bank and gets tons of money. Or somebody I’ll intended could spoof my number to create issues between me and my family. How could telecom companies keep it happening?
STIR and SHAKEN are two tools to authenticate calls originate from the telecom they are officially registered with. The adoption of these attestation systems has been quite slow though.
It’s frustrating that most cell phones don’t have a way of blocking calls that don’t have this attestation built in. But after adding a spam filter to my android that does, the number of spam calls that make it through are much, much lower.
Occasionally, I get a small business that doesn’t have their PBX configured correctly and they can blocked. But it’s few and far between.
It’s possible, but not always that easy to do. Banks and Telecom companies do put some systems in place to try and prevent bad things from happening but it’s a game of cat and mouse… Whatever you do, scammers will try and find tricks and other ways around it.
Do bear in mind that a LOT of people think, “Oh, I know, I’ll scam to make money.” And a LOT of people put in a LOT of time and effort to do so. I’m not saying you won’t outsmart them if you try, but consider that you’re going up against a shitload of experience in scamming. If they’re not doing something, it probably isn’t workable. Probably. Not necessarily. People do come up with new stuff to try all the time.
Exactly what you think, they are blocked if they call you. The block list is saved locally on your device, no matter who acquires the number.
Don’t Android and iOS put blocked numbers into your account so those numbers are still blocked on a new phone when you log into it?
Na, iPhone stores them in Settings > Apps > Phone > Blocked contacts, android is similar. That information doesn’t go to the carrier, though it will transfer if you put your new phone next to it and migrate all the data
(On android if you block someone, the texts still come to the phone, just in a folder that you have to go look for, like a filter basically)
Ah, that’s not so bad, then, especially thing I think phone-to-phone transfer is getting more rare as everything is being sent to the server.
Still considered locally, you just sync it over the cloud. It would be an issue if those blcok lists get shared by everyone. I guess some android version like mine has a report for spam feature, so that could be a shared list.
Like others, my phone number was targeted and spoofed. I got 7-10 callbacks that day. Hasn’t happened since.
