After receiving numerous calls such as this over a long period of time, I decided
to do a little research into this and here is what I have found. YOUR TELEPHONE CARRIER
PAYS THESE PEOPLE TO CALL YOU! Yes....you read right. Your telephone company must pay
these people each time they call, EVEN IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO ANSWER. I will explain how this works. Each telephone company maintains a database of all
its customer's telephone numbers along with the CALLER ID information associated with that
number. When you receive a call from a number originating from another telephone company,
your carrier pays a "DIP" fee to dip into the originating telephone company's database to
get the caller ID info to display on your phone. OK so how does this benefit the evil
telemarketer? There are telephone companies that have set themselves up specifically to cater to
these telemarketers. They are not interested at all in having regular private subscribers
like you or I. They have a "revenue sharing agreement",(read kickback), whereby the
telephone company splits the dip fee with the telemarketer. They may even provide the
telemarketers with what they call "compliance assistance" i.e. "press 1 to be removed from
our calling list", but given that these telephone companys may have thousands of numbers in
many different area codes as well as hundreds of fly-by-night telemarketing subscribers who
are already operating outside the law, I seriously doubt that will have any effect at all. Being as the dip fee is only a fraction of a cent per call, and the fee is split
between an evil telco and evil telemarketer, you can see why hundreds of thousands of calls
would be needed to make any money at this! But, again, they are making money just by
calling your phone and annoying you. If they happen to actually sell something, well that
is just gravy. This will only continue until the FCC decides to regulate the dip fees practice of
The fellow who launched those threads has also contributed to countless number threads on this site and has amassed arguably the most intel on the problem for his own blog. If you'd like to independently corroborate or extend the colossal amount of detective work already done, knock yourself out. You don't get to shout "Eureka" on this one, however. "A little research" can be dangerously too little.
While what you say is essentially true, your headline borders on yellow journalism. A better headline might have been, "Hole-in-the-wall style telephony provider rips off traditional telcos, shares modest loot with phone scammers."
As you have stated, this practice is being engaged in by two apparently inter-related fringe providers, as discussed in the threads cited by Resident. It is not the practice of mainstream telcos and clecs. These outlaw providers are catering to tele-scammers, and they are among the few who see the unwanted callers as a desirable customer demographic.
It is also worth noting that the actual revenue generated by this scheme is modest. If you read the threads Res cited, you will find that I have done the math on dip fee revenues, and there is no staggering pot of gold at the end of this rather tawdry rainbow, just a bit of pocket change in the overall scheme of things. I'll leave it to you to find my numbers, as those threads are lengthy.
Now, for the oft launched, and oft subsequently served up for dinner, canard du jour. "This will only continue until the FCC decides to regulate the dip fees practice of the telephone carriers." Yes, government intervention in the fine details always makes things run more smoothly. The system in place has worked well for a long time as a way to appropriately share revenue and cost of operation. It is much reminiscent of the railroad scheme in which fees are paid based on how long company x has cars on the rails of company y. So yes, by all means, lets put a stop to it. No doubt that will stop the calls.
The thing is, as someone who researches these calls on a daily basis, as bad as CID4U and company may be, most of the scam calls I look up are with other carriers. So perhaps this offering of theirs is not the irresistible candle flame you believe it to be?
Don't get me wrong, I hate CID4U and their ilk, but the dip fee scheme, annoying though it may be, is a distracting sideshow, and not the main event. Most of these calls are being sourced through other providers, Rachel and friends notwithstanding.
So how do we solve this mess? Education is an important step. The fewer people falling for the scams, the more starving scammers there are. Eventually, they will find some other way to feed themselves. As strong an advocate for blocking technologies as I am, they are merely an anodyne, not a solution per se. It gets back to education, because only a tele-predator savvy person is likely to implement blocking.
Law enforcement is a partial answer, but there are limits to what government can or should do in a free society. And limits to resources for the pursuit of such things. Also, given the international nature of the predators, pursuit of the perpetrators can be labyrinthine in nature.
I have spoken in the past about the benefits of a trusted telephony platform, in which all parties are known parties. This would be doable in the context of domestic calls, but when we include the rest of the world, the challenge expands by orders of magnitude. Still, as POTS slowly fades into history, it is a concept which telephony implementers ought to be considering. It does have certain socio-political downsides, that also have to be considered.
Bottom line, dipping is not the causus belli of the scamming classes, nor should it be the primary focus of our response to them. Tinkering about the edges of dipping will have no discernible impact. Rogue providers such as CID4U do deserve some sort of comeuppance, but without casting aside the legal concept of common carriers, and absent a smoking gun of their collusion with spammers, this is a difficult goal. And I should mention that the legal principles which shelter this web site are derived from the legal precepts of common carrier, so we might think about which babies we are willing to sacrifice with the bathwater.
Technology and education seem to me to be the primary remedies. And after some years on this site, I sometimes despair at the apparent lack of efficacy in our educational endeavors.
[Please send me my winnings, my SSN is 999-99-9999 and my cell is 999-999-9999.]
0
Kev
The revenue from fraudulent dipping may be modest but they are costing me a bundle. I have 4 business toll free numbers and they are calling them on average 3-4 times a day at a minimum $.05/call. The nickle per call is annoying but the continuous interruptions are intolerable.
Right now they are wearing me out spoofing random numbers from California Area Codes. A month ago it was Alabama area codes. The calls are typically 10 seconds of silence interspersed with random calls of odd noises for about 2 minutes.
I have finally resorted to blocking California but can't block other states due to business interests in most other states.
I have been writing my state and fed representatives asking that the dipping fees be ended. Years ago when CID was first developing, I can see where the fee helped small telcos but today it is just a breeding ground for scammers. They may only make a couple hundred dollars per day but if you do it every day it adds up to substantial bucks.
Who exactly regulates the dipping fees? FCC, DoJ, individual state utility regulators, congress?
True, this isn't new info, but let's not discourage people who are willing to do some leg work and post what they find. We have plenty of people who want easy answers; we need more people willing to spend time digging to find those answers.
Where do we start digging? All of the numbers that I receive calls from are random residential numbers with no history of abuse... Or at least reported abuse.
I am sick and tired of answering silent calls.
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Ratt
| 4 replies
Does anyone know who administers the CID dipping fund? Who dispurses those funds? If we could get the fund abolished, a large percentage of the scam callers would stop because their "profit sharing" would end.
Yes there is. Go to CNAM.info It's 5.9 cents a hit. Judging from your previous posts, you thought Caller ID was free.
From the CNAM site:
What kind of Caller ID information are you providing? There are two types of Caller ID Name available. First, there is the database that traditional landline providers use - the LIDB/CNAM. This is the most accurate and up to date method available, however it is the most expensive. The telephone companies that run these databases charge up to 2 cents per query, plus connectivity and administration fees.
There are also companies out there that specialize in creating a 3rd party database that very closely resembles the same data. cnam.info is using a hybrid of these two sources to deliver exceptionally accurate data. You'll find high quality results for listings throughout Canada and the United States.
Please beware that no caching of data obtained through cnam.info is allowed due to contractual obligations with the supplier.
And I've already told you I'm not going to ANY link you post-plus, that's registered in Victoria, BC, CANADA: http://whois.domaintools.com/cnam.info What is in Canada doesn't necessarily transfer over to the US
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