Do Not Call But they Still Do While Some Don’t Answer The Call

The November 30th report from the Federal Trade Commission in the USA shows that the Do Not Call Registry registration and complaints continue to rise, despite enforcement.

Over the past month I've been noticing an increase in the number of calls from UNKNOWN, and have had friends tell me more and more about voice phishing (scams) that are occuring with inbound calls reportedly from financial institutions. This happens since it's very easy to spoof the caller ID. My advice to friends is to simply say thank you, and then call the number on the back of your credit card from a different phone.

Well before vishing (voice fishing) became a problem (this is going back a few years) I called the PR departments of Wells Fargo, Chase, Citibank and American Express. Only AMEX would talk about the issue, while the Wells PR person wouldn't go past the purfunctory screening of who I was and never got back to me on my request to talk with either the CTO or CISO (chief information security officer) remarking then "we never heard of this." Chase and Citibank simply ignored the request.

Sadly, the ostritch approach taken on by PR execs and a lack of blogger relations harms companies in the long run, because bloggers, who are subject matter experts likely know what's up before the companies PR teams usually do. PR is not a one way business. It's also a way to gain and gleen intelligence that often can prevent problems before they occur.

In the case of Do Not Call, AT&T has their Annonymous Call Bureau and they have helped in the past stop unwanted fax calls from coming to me, but my cable company, Cox, has yet to address a repeatedly three times a day, like clockwork, Unknown Hang Up that's occurring for the past few months. I think that's one of the difference between the old school AT&T and the new school telcos. AT&T and Verizon have been dealing with that stuff for years and have the infrastructure in place to support and assist the FTC in their efforts, but as we migrate over to newer telcos, the investment in what the old school companies used to make/we required to make, seems to have fallen off to the sidelines.

The Do Not Call registry is a great idea in theory, but without greater enforcement, and more pro activity by the telcos, new and old, to protect their customers, they're no different than the banks which avoided the question about Vishing three or four years ago when I first posed it. In that time the level of scams have increased, but the resistance to dealing with the problem head on is first and foremost the problem.

Let's take the banks and credit card companies. For years they have simply buried their heads in the sand when it comes to the idea of chip and PIN on credit cards. Protect your card. Put a chip in it. Tie it to a PIN and you have two stage authentication. Tell people not to share their PIN and well you cut down on credit card fraud. The banks and cards issuers excuse–"the merchants don't want to pay for new equipment." Well what do we have now? A lot of skimmers capturing ATM card data and in places where the equipment is being used everyday right here in California.

The two are tied together. Data is being mined, sifted and shared and we're all at risk. But the bad guys are not to blame. We are and our banks, credit cards and merchants are to blame because instead of taking on early warning system input they ignore the questions and figure someone else will deal with the problem. And they're right, the scammers are and costing people money, time and energy.