Dealing with the menace of spam calls

Google and Microsoft have figured out ways to filter spam mails and reduce phishing attacks over email. Phone users, by contrast, are mostly left to their own devices. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Like most people, I get on average 10-12 spam calls every day. None of them is even remotely relevant. Some, in fact, are particularly obnoxious and even insulting. Take, for instance, the repeated call from a wide variety of numbers inviting me to buy a property that costs roughly twice my lifetime savings. According to Truecaller’s Global Scam Report 2021, India ranks fourth, after Brazil, Peru and Ukraine, in terms of the number of spam sales and telemarketing calls received.

Besides interrupting the flow of work or disturbing an afternoon siesta, such calls also do a disservice to many other callers trying to reach us for legitimate reasons. That includes delivery boys, utility and service providers like plumbers and electricians and even the odd school friends from outside the contact list. That’s because we are so suspicious of calls from numbers we don’t recognize that mostly we refuse to pick them and worse even block them. Over the years and after thousands of such calls, some patterns have emerged. Thus, calls from numbers starting with 129 or 731 instantly arouse suspicion since they are often used by property agents and banks to sell their wares. Of course, with spoofing, telemarketers now use bogus area codes designed to deceive us into answering the call.

At one time I would try to reason with some of the callers, explaining to them that obtaining my number and calling me without my express permission amounted to fraud and was an illegality. A handful would even accept the argument and apologize, which often left me feeling sorry for them. After all they were just doing their jobs and that too for a pittance. In any case, now there are mostly automated messages which means there is no scope left for any conversation.

The real culprits are those who share and sell the numbers, which is basically the banks and the credit card companies. Equally culpable are the buyers of the data. Finally, it is the telecom operators who have stubbornly refused to take any responsibility for this menace and do anything to stop such calls at the network level. The less said of the regulator, the better. The toothless Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) much-trumpeted do-not-disturb registry has been a complete washout.

In the face of such malignant neglect, the customer is left to her own devices to handle the rising tide of spam calls.

Is there a solution that technology offers? Both Gmail and Outlook, the two mail systems most regularly used, seem to have got a hang of the problem. The spam folder on any given day is filled with hundreds of mailers on very similar lines as spam calls. Rarely do they make their way into the inbox. Google and Microsoft have built several spam filter barriers and use machine learning and AI to decide whether to send an email to the spam folder or inbox. Every minute these mechanisms prevent millions of unsafe or unwanted emails from reaching users. Not that scams don’t happen using Gmail. While Gmail blocks more than 99.9 percent of spam, phishing attempts and malware from reaching users, malware and phishing attacks still continue. But as a percentage of usage, the numbers are relatively tiny. That contrasts sharply with phone users, almost none of whom is ever safe from spam calls.

In the US, with the passage of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the Federal Communications Commission can assess a penalty for intentional violations of up to $10,000 per call. In 2017, direct-broadcast satellite provider Dish Network had to pay $340 million in damages for violating the TCPA after it was charged with calling numbers on the Do Not Call registry. Domino’s Pizza too had to pay $10 million dollars to settle a similar class-action lawsuit after the court found that consumers had received unsolicited marketing calls from the pizza maker.

While there have been similar fines in India, the amounts are clearly now a deterrent. Last month, for instance, TRAI imposed a penalty of Rs 2.8 crore on Bharti Airtel for failure to comply with norms regarding the systematic prevention of unsolicited calls. More relief may come from the provisions of the new Digital India Act, 2023 whereby companies will be held accountable for unsolicited commercial email and other electronic messages with penalties for violations.