<story><title>FCC imposes record penalty against transnational illegal robocalling operation</title><url>https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-395728A1.txt</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pindab0ter</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m genuinely curious as to why this isn&amp;#x27;t a problem in Europe. I live in the Netherlands and no one I know has ever received even a single call.&lt;p&gt;What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cge</author><text>In addition to the other comments here, there seems to be a significant difference in the ease of making calls from different numbers in the US vs EU, both in caller id and in the call source. I get constant spam calls to my US phone lines, never from the same numbers and now usually from geographically nearby area codes (same-area-code spam seems passé these days). I get a handful of spam calls a year to my EU phone lines, but they are usually from international, outside-EU numbers, seemingly in hard-to-pursue jurisdictions. (This ignores some of the impressive texts in the EU a few years ago that managed to come from short names of real banks; those seem to have been an unusual exception and I assume the exploit involved was fixed.)&lt;p&gt;Looking at VoIP sites, I can easily get a phone number in seconds, for cents, with almost no documentation, and any area code, in the US. Lines in the EU cost significantly more, take longer, and often require documentation, especially for geographic area codes.&lt;p&gt;I expect that the type of access used in the US for these calls simply isn&amp;#x27;t feasible in the EU, and so the calls there need to be from &amp;#x27;real&amp;#x27; numbers in countries where the scammers are safe, which then makes them easy to filter out and far less effective. The access in the US just seems weirdly open.</text></comment>
<story><title>FCC imposes record penalty against transnational illegal robocalling operation</title><url>https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-395728A1.txt</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pindab0ter</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m genuinely curious as to why this isn&amp;#x27;t a problem in Europe. I live in the Netherlands and no one I know has ever received even a single call.&lt;p&gt;What makes this a problem in the U.S., but not in Europe?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>njovin</author><text>My experience with Robocalls (I get 25-30 per day) has been that the overwhelming majority are trying to run a scam against Medicair (the US government&amp;#x27;s health program for older people) by fetching some personal information from the victim, which they then use to send fraudulent bills to Medicair.&lt;p&gt;So I assume that the ease of scamming the US government in this regard contributes to us being the victims here.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I hadn&amp;#x27;t RTFA and now I see this fine was about auto warranty scams.  Second theory: lots of Americans are living below the poverty line, public transit sucks here so most people need cars to get to work, and it can get risky&amp;#x2F;expensive relying on an older vehicle to be able to get to work, so it makes an easy target to offer somebody what looks like coverage for a likely expensive auto failure for a few hundred dollars.</text></comment>