CallStop Just Blocked 168 Auto-Dialed Chinese Robocalls In 15 Minutes
Yesterday around 11AM, a Chinese robocaller sent out a deluge of calls. These calls came in a swarm in less than 15 minutes. They seemed to have been dialed almost simultaneously. For several minutes, CallStop blocked call after call from a Chinese number known for fake Chase bank impersonations and fake Fedex pickup messages.
BackStory
I’m an engineer for a Y Combinator startup that just launched, and CallStop has been my side project this year. I started CallStop out of frustration — my phone had become nothing but spam calls and spammy voicemails. Since all I could find were blacklisting apps that didn’t really work, I decided to build a whitelisting app allowing me to manage who could reach me, and when.
8 Months Later…
Just a few weeks ago I launched CallStop on the App Store. CallStop is an app that blocks 100% of robocalls and takes 30 seconds to install. Within 2 weeks of launching, the app reached #110 in Utilities. The servers became so expensive to run that I had to put a price to download the app. And yesterday, CallStop blocked the first deluge of auto-dialed robocalls.
The number that dialed these calls wasn’t American and had been flagged on anti-spam sites for shady behavior. It was an 800 number, or claimed to be. Caller ID can be spoofed effortlessly, so the Caller ID may not have been accurate. Either way, the robocaller was an anonymous, shady number.
But how did CallStop block every single one of these robocalls? CallStop works by rejecting non-whitelisted callers with the following message:
You have reached a phone number protected by CallStop. If you know this person, press 1 to send a whitelist request with a quick note. If you have a PIN to reach this person directly, press 2 and enter the PIN.
CallStop users can customize this message with their own voice recording when they protect their number. Customizing a voice message adds a personal touch to CallStop.
This Chinese robocaller wouldn’t have a PIN and no one would have this number whitelisted, so BAM — Rejected 168 times.
Scaling
How will these deluges of robocalls change as CallStop grows? This was the first wave of robocalls CallStop has ever blocked, but won’t be the last. If CallStop grows substantially, there will be waves of robocalls coming in at any time, all being rejected. This will slowly, but surely tip the economic scales out of robocallers’ favor, since they don’t have the ability to reach and pester people using CallStop.
It’s no small task that CallStop is up against. A single robocalling center can send out 16 million calls in a day, and might have lists of 100–200 million numbers to harass. Companies like VoiceOps are building AI salesmen, lifelike but lifeless voices that will call you and cajole you into buying things you don’t need. Imagine an automated salesmen that learns from 16 million other automated salesmen every day… that’s just dangerous! It’s a nightmare for seniors, trusting people, or anyone else easily tricked. And it’s probably only a few years away. Not to fear-monger too much here, but it sounds like a terrible misuse of AI that can be used to manipulate and control groups. CallStop stops their calls from reaching the recipient in the first place — no matter how sophisticated their AI.
Regulation won’t stop robocalls at all. This Chinese robocaller that called yesterday will probably never be identified. The Caller ID could be inaccurate, and the spammer could just buy a new number for a few more cents next week. Or they might not — they clearly aren’t worried about getting caught.
In the news, Senators and politicians are proudly announcing their support for anti-robocall bills that impose increased fines and punishments for violators… but these laws won’t change criminal activity. It’s just a facade that will waste millions of dollars in ineffective lawsuits. That’s your taxpayer money being wasted. The only real winner in the war against robocalls will be an engineering solution like CallSop.
CallStop has a few extra features to allow you to onboard new members to your whitelist. You can accept whitelist requests that contain personal notes from new people you meet, and you can give out PINs to groups you know. Whitelist requests are like Facebook friend requests between phone numbers. You can also toggle off filtering calls for pre-determined periods of time, after which filtering will automatically resume.
Check out CallStop on the App store here, and help stop the next big wave of robocalls.
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