Increase in SPAM calls

[Nickihaluka]

50 overseas call a day on mine and my daughters phone HELP. Since Saturday my daughters phone and mine have been receiving hundreds of calls we have silenced them so we don't hear them but it's becoming rediculous my husband can't reach my phone and my daughter is in school with these constant calls.  Any help would be greatly appreciated. Is my phone hacked or are these scams I block them one by one but they keep calling from a different number.  Albania, Congo, Central Africa, North Macedonia,Montenegro, Guatemala, El salvador are the countries and once blocked they call from another phone number it's like they know I am on my phone and that I am blocking them.

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[Filet123]

Hi nick
I’m getting the same as you
Done the same as you
I’ve chatted with a Rogers tech and all I got from him was to do what we’ve already did
Don’t know where to go from here

[RogersAndy]

Hey @Nickihaluka and @Filet123!

These types of calls are indeed very annoying and I can appreciate wanting to do as much as you can to ensure that they stop. We do apologize for the inconvenience and would clarify that telecom regulations do not allow Rogers to block calls that have a legitimate calling format. Under new telecom rules, Rogers will be allowed to block certain non-dialable and malformed incoming calls i.e. 00000, 111-111-111. These new rules came into effect early November I believe.

If you have not done so you can add your number to the national do not call list, though it's important to note that this would only impact incoming calls from Canada.

Thank you for your understanding and your patience.

@RogersAndy

[-G-]

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@RogersAndy wrote:

We do apologize for the inconvenience and would clarify that telecom regulations do not allow Rogers to block calls that have a legitimate calling format. Under new telecom rules, Rogers will be allowed to block certain non-dialable and malformed incoming calls i.e. 00000, 111-111-111. These new rules came into effect early November I believe.

If you have not done so you can add your number to the national do not call list, though it's important to note that this would only impact incoming calls from Canada.

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To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing that prevents blocking nuisance robocalls at the network level.  In fact, https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2018/2018-484.htm lists various strategies that were discussed for blocking these calls.    Regrettably, the carriers also expressed their underwhelming elthusiasm for any action that would be required of them to fix this problem.

Also, even though the CRTC has mandated blocking calls from invalid phone numbers, as soon as you block numbers that are obvious spoofs, the robocallers will counter this by using what looks like a valid number instead as a way of getting around the block.  

As for the National Do Not Call List, I tried that a few years ago and the problem actually became much worse.  Sure, legitimate companies will stop calling you.  However, I also saw an increase in the number of calls soliciting newspaper subscriptions, and the number of illegal nuisance calls went through the roof.  The DNCL was simply used as a vetted list of phone numbers by unscrupulous organizations.  I also made the mistake of adding my cell phone, which never got spam calls until it got added to the DNCL.  So... the number of calls went up and (even worse) the only people that  called me are organizations that I would never want to do business with.

As documented in 2018-484  ,  what we really need are a number of technical solutions, and they need to be implemented by the carriers at the network level.

Part of the overall solution is widespread implementation of caller ID authentication (e.g. SHAKEN/STIR) and other technical measures to prevent caller ID spoofing.

Another technical measure is to detect robocall patterns at the network level and allow the end-customer to opt into having those calls blocked.  Such a thing was hard to do with legacy TDM switches but is now totally feasible with today's technology.