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- Hacker News
- Related: https://saracroche.org/
- This app has saved my mental healthby Vosporos
- Alternative for the power-users: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlockerby sambf
- I was about to talk about it for my fellow citizens ; clearly an awesome app!
Fun fact, Bloctel, the service that was supposed to allow us to ask not to be harassed, leaked last week... https://www.universfreebox.com/article/596529/piratage-de-bl...
by wiether - "God! I only asked her to be a hooker. It's not like I wanted her to work in telesales".
I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.
by suslik - It's funny and sad to see polite people run into scammers. I witnessed to a young man being almost unable to keep saying "no" for the 20th time to an insistent seller on a beach.
When it happens to me, they're met with silence or "GTFO" after the 3rd question. I am impolite.
by flyingshelf - > It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'.
Assuming you can get access to their phone, only allowing calls from saved numbers would probably be the best solution, assuming she doesn't get random calls from hospitals and the like. If she's still using a landline though, that's a tough one to solve.
by Telaneo - In the last 2-3 years, my impression is that most french numbers receive daily unsolicited phone calls. In 2026 they even started sending scammy “missing delivery” text message with your real name printed on an attached MMS picture (on a parcel to deliver), making it even more real.
Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
by ttoinou - #FranceFuiteby Vosporos
- Yup, having a French number is unbearable without automatic blacklist apps. I definitely notice it when it breaks after an iOS update, is start getting multiple calls a day. For any french here with an iPhone: Begone works great and has community lists for spam numbers.
The SMS are getting out of hand too, they send you a pre-recorded MP3 in addition to the picture too. At least they don't have enough information to know I don't have a letterbox.
> Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
Yeah, more and more French people are getting annoyed at it, esp. when companies always say "no worries no payment info leaked". I don't care, I can change my credit card but I can't change my personal informations.
And literally last week it's Bloctel that leaked! It's the government managed list of phone numbers that don't want to receive telemearketing calls, where anyone can add its own number to be excluded. Great idea on paper, goldmine of a data leak.
by tuetuopay - The correct solution is just giving people the option to charge people for phoning them.
Say minimum wage is 12euro/hour, and declining a call takes about a minute of your attention, so this is worth at least 20cent.
Instead of just "Answer" and "Hang-Up", there should be a gov't enforced "charge caller 20cent" option.
This would have no impact on 'real' calls, nobody would charge their Mother and if someone is tacky enough to charge their GP or mechanic they could just be billed for it, and it would hardly be worth someone's trouble to try to steal a phone to call themselves to collect 20c, but it would totally ruin the economics of these spam calls.
The same should exist for emails.
by amoshebb - impressively convoluted. Spam calls are coming from all over the world using voip and prepaid sims. There aren't any accounts to "bill". Not to mention a whole new arena for fraud in spoofing regular numbers for micropaymentsby grouchomarx
- There a story, perhaps apochraphal, from 15 years ago of a man setting up a premium rate line and getting paid whenever telemarketers called him. I believe the phone service said anyone doing that would be fined because you need to inform potential callers it's a premium rate number
- The previous system never blocked scams because scammers didn't bother to check if your phone number was in the block-list before calling you.
That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.
by ZeWaren - Someone is paying for the number, make them responsible.
And if that is a company that offers service of lending number for such calls, they deserve to suffer too
- It's not about scams, it's about commercial telemarketing calls.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
by stymaar - Essentially useless. My country also banned them and has a "do not call" registry, doesn't stop scammers from calling my phone non-stop.
Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally.
You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.
by flyingshelf - Exactly, I think all these regulations in the Europe fail to understand the enforceability of these, any legitimate business won't be making unsolicited calls already. For instance, I weekly get unsolicited calls from a legit recruitment agency in the UK, never ever shared my data with them, they don't even email but directly call in absurd times. I requested removal of my data after months of ignored calls but they kept calling still, reported to ICO but no luck either.
I'm 30+ and was trying to buy some wine yesterday, and was IDed and i'm clearly well over 18 yet they had to take the bottle back as I didn't carry my ID with me. Essentially the same thing with pubs/bars etc, you're clearly over 18 but there is a weird power trip yet in some raves/clubs you still see under 18s being let in.
by ascari - "It's useless to make laws, bad guys will ignore them".by OrangeMusic
- It's not about scam calls.by drcongo
- At least it gives a legal framework for prosecution.by nexus6
- As someone else pointed out, it's not about the scammers. The scammers could however be hampered if the phone system was safer.
There's no reason why the phone system should allow my number to be spoofed, but that's what happens. There might be some companies that benefit from having all outgoing calls shows coming from some main number, but in that case a solution where a set of numbers are allowed to pretend so be some other number could be implemented. The majority of scams I've encountered and have heard about involves someone calling you from a random number, belonging to someone that's not involved, but who are just having their number misused. I assume this is to avoid getting blocked or looking legitimate if the target looks up the number.
by mrweasel - Norway has the same law. I get no spam calls like this from Norway.
What I do get is spam calls from abroad. Often with a spoofed Norwegian number. Why can't operators block this? I know call centers and various things need to "spoof" a number they own, and when I myself call from abroad my Norwegian number will come from outside Norway.
But why can't they attest the numbers somehow? Owner of +47 XXXXXXX is currently not abroad. So why allow someone from the other side of the world to call me pretending to come from that number? Why does the Norwegian operators allow that?
by matsemann - It's even worse than that, I sometimes get calls from phone prefixes which do not even exist in the world.
They don't even check that the number can exist.
by realusername - It is technically possible, here in Finland such blocking (i.e. all inbound international calls with Finnish caller ID, except for roaming) has been obligatory for a few years now (https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...).by AnssiH
- Kudos to France. But the problem isn't telemarketing calls. It's the wholesale grab-fest of phone numbers from every.damn.nook.and.crany of the US soil. Hospitals, Car dealers, dentists, vets, brokerages, title offices... literally EVERY one of them is leaking YOUR information to everyone in the world.
within a week of closing a deal on my house i get a scam paper mail that almost looked legit asking me to pay $100 to get the title documents for my house. There aren't that many parties involved in the sale.. and its one of them (or all of them) broke the trust and bartered my information.
nearly all of them are uploading their contact list to meta and google.
THIS practice has to stop.
by dbgrman - I think the problem is that you can’t create virtual, domain separated, phone numbers on demandby baby
- In US, deed is public (grantor name, grantee name, property id). That’s probably how the scammers knew that you are involved in a recently recorded deed, and offered to send you a copy if you pay them.by gene91
- Great tip I saw once - whenever you have to register through a form, use First Name + the name of the company / service you are leaving your data to. Once you start receiving spammy emails / text messages calling you by your « name », you know who you have to thank for leaking your databy FizBack
- > On the other hand, France's new law has raised concerns in Morocco, where Employment Minister Younes Sekkouri, said in March that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs were at risk in the country’s call centers. Sekkouri said the French market accounts for more than 80% of revenue in the sector.
Never build a business around hassling other people. It's always at risk that laws will suddenly change and destroy your livelihood; because good leadership will realize that the best approach to handling you is to exclude you from the negotiating table and abruptly cut you off.
This might come as a surprise to some people, but no one likes having their phone turned into a device that makes them listen to a commercial at random times throughout the day.
by gwbas1c