NoMoRobo

I'm a semi-optimistic realistically pessimistic cynic, and I fear that Sir Belvedere is right. I was a scam baiter back in the day, long before Craigslist was mainstream and free texting and nearly free VOIP made it so easy for scammers to reach out and touch someone in a much more personal way. My longest bait ran nearly a year, but now that's rare because the Lads won't waste time with long, drawn-out email correspondence when they get better and faster results with Craigslist and romance scams and the like. That's why I hang out here now, because I feel like I accomplish more helping to out shills than trying to waste scammers' time with old-fashioned baiting.

With all that said, I'm not going to get my hopes up for NoMoRobo. I hope it works, I really do, but until then I'm sticking to Google Voice, Pinger, and my Panasonic phone as my front line defenses.

I’ve also used many of the lessons learned from scambaiting. One of the fake “Publishers Clearing House” mugu gave up as much bait as he fell for. That’s why Nomorobo can be useful just for existing. We’ve already confounded a couple of idiot non-compliant shills with slightly different versions. Audacity 2.0.4 has a vocorder that can make robotic voice effects. Also can record & edit the incoming moron callers voice.

Nomorobo is supposed to roll out today.

Here is to hoping the number of calls are severely reduced. But I am not holding my breath.

NoMoRobo has started providing its service and you can sign up for it on their website here: http://live.nomorobo.com/signup  It has been embraced by customer conscious Telco’s that want to provide a better service to their users. Unfortunately, my Telco AT&T is not one of them.

I went to signup for NoMoRobo service today and found that my land line carrier AT&T does not support it. AT&T does not currently have Simultaneous Ringing enabled. This is required for NoMoRobo to pick up our incoming calls in the Cloud and screen out the robocallers before they reach us.

I called AT&T’s customer service line and went through about 7 minutes of auto-attendant nonsense, and then they hung up on me at the end because I needed to talk to a live person who only works 9 to 4 and they don’t take messages.

I’ll keep hounding them until I get an intelligible response that describes their corporate landline position on NoMoRobo and the timing, if any, of implementation. If AT&T will not commit, I will cancel AT&T and change my service to one that supports NoMoRobo.

I went back on NoMoRobo and tried to signup under a few other services. Well, I discovered AT&T U-verse supports it. The problem here is that AT&T U-verse charges more for phone service than AT&T ... unless you buy a “bundle” (TV, Internet, and Phone). Plus the U-verse phone service appears to be all wireless. I do not want more wireless, especially from AT&T! But those of you using a U-verse phone may be happy to learn you can signup for NoMoRobo.

I suspect many other popular Telco’s are not going to leap right onto the NoMoRobo bandwagon without some urging from their customer base. Those of you who would like to give the service a chance should start making some customer service calls to put a little more pressure on the Telco’s like AT&T and Verizon who do not support NoMoRobo on their landline services, yet.

NoMoRobo will also block calls from:

The school your kids attend telling you about the latest emergency
Reverse 911 (in areas that have it) telling you about an emergency in your neighborhood
WalMart pharmacy telling you that your prescription is ready
Amber alerts
The Red Cross reminding you about your donation appointment

"I suspect many other popular Telco’s are not going to leap right onto the NoMoRobo bandwagon without some urging from their customer base."

Good thing I didn't hold my breath.

Yup!

My question is why wouldn't ALL Telco's not want to join this? They have known about this long before it rolled out I am sure.

I am not about to sit and beg a phone company to get in on this to help stop these nuisance, spoofed, scam calls. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Speak of the devil.  Just got 2 calls back to back just now and you guessed it, they are spoofed. I blocked them, but that is NOT the point. The point is what company in their right mind would not want to help its customers reduce these calls?

You answered your own question when you pointed out that the numbers that called you were spoofed. When the scammers are spoofing real bank/credit card/business phone numbers NoMoRobo will have a choice between blocking real, legitimate calls and not blocking the scam calls. What telco would want to put itself in the middle of that mess?

Oh I see. Makes me wonder if my number is being spoofed to call people.

I guess Nomorobo is a bust.

This all arose from what amounts to a PR campaign being conducted by the so-called regulators over at the FTC. The technology is laughably weak and will be/continue to be defeated.

Telcos could stop the robocalling disease in a matter of days if they wanted to. They don't. They are complicit in that they share the illicit profits of the scammers while feigning plausible deniability.

According to an email I just received from NoMoRobo: "School closings, doctor's appointments, prescription reminders, weather advisories, and other legal robocalls aren't blocked"

So they have contacted and identified every school, doctor's office, pharmacy, and weather forecast office in the US and left them unblocked?  Or do they expect you to plug in the numbers you expect robocalls from?  

I didn't know the number WalMart pharmacy calls from until I got my first call from them.  I don't know the numbers the local schools call from.  There are hundreds of doctors in my area who might robo-call to confirm appointments.

My question is why wouldn't ALL Telco's not want to join this?

Part of the answer is that the Telco's use robocalls to promote their own sales.  Unlike scammers, they scrub their call lists against the DNC before making the robocalls.  However, if you are their customer, they can still call you even though you are registered with the DNC.

Telco's also make money from illegal robocallers through residuals and other forms of charges.  

Corporate greed often blinds Telco management teams as to what their real priorities should be.  They are quick to see a loss of revenue through the immediate reduction of residuals inflows.  The bigger revenue risk, loss of subscriber revenues, is not always viewed as an immediate problem.  

Once the AT&T’s & Verizon’s of the world recognize their revenues, both landline (including DSL) and mobile, are in decline from subscribers moving to other Telco’s that support NoMoRobo, they will begin to loosen their resistance to NoMoRobo and begin to support it.  

Question is: how long will it take them to realize this and at what loss of revenue?  Investor beware, I would not want to own any of these Telco stocks in the meantime!