There is the new wave of the fake discount "to which you are entitled" with the forced transition to the free market of electricity and gas. Or the new (and equally false) contract to be reformulated for the transition to the "new digital technology" of our telephone line, with the associated change of operator. And it is not just the drip of scam phone calls on utilities: the scam is spreading right now, through a Portuguese prefix that looks like an Italian mobile prefix (+351), of those who tell us that we have been selected for a non-existent employment contract and invites us to a telematic interview via WhatsApp to steal our personal data to resell to identity thieves. Here is the new wave of scams that run on the wire and on the Internet and that are added to the now well-known sample of consolidated scams: from the amazing investment proposals in Amazon (also a victim) to the offer "certified and recommended by the ASL" of home water purification devices.
Two years after the extension to cell phones of the old and already limping opposition register, the assault of scam calls, or in any case unwanted calls because theoretically prohibited by our preventive denial, has not subsided, and has become more insidious. And so the "register" itself confirms itself as a great scam: it does not work, it does not work. As it was (badly) conceived, it is completely useless. The fault lies with a naive mechanism that was not accompanied by a solid system of checks and sanctions. So much so that our country is firmly at the top of the unenviable ranking of the most hateful tool that technology has made available to telephone scam pirates: the caller id spoofing, or the masking of the number that appears on the cell phone with a non-existent number or even cloned from the telephone number of an unwitting "regular" user.
A parachute that doesn't work
Nothing works of the barriers theoretically erected by the institutions to stem the phenomenon. The mechanism for reporting abusive phone calls to the guarantor of privacy which among other things requires you to indicate the contact details of the operator who contacted us when your failure to identify constitutes precisely the most relevant problem: seeing is believing. And the appeals to make the protection mechanisms more rigorous against contracts activated simply after an extorted consent, or in many cases even invented, after a phone call from one of the many call centers that subject us all to a continuous massacre, when in fact they are at our disposal, are decidedly unheard much more effective procedures to choose the most advantageous contract based on our consumption profile.
Are “official” operators guilty or at least complicit? What can be said for sure is that the “pirate” call rarely comes directly from the official operator, especially if this is a primary brand. The person calling us, perhaps from a foreign call center, is almost always someone who operates from the vast array of agents or second level dealer, which operate by earning on commissions related to the individual contracts activated. Bringing the entire process of contacting customers or potential customers "in-house"? Perhaps that would be the solution. Introducing stricter rules of identification and perfection of contracts? Mandatory.
In mobile telephony something has been done: for the activation of a new SIM or for the change of operator, the trap calls have become less frequent thanks to the new constraints that force to complete the procedures either in the store or with the direct registration on the operator's website and validation of the procedures via Spid. But the contracts for landline telephony continue to be under attack, and those for energy utilities remain fertile ground for cheaters.
The writer has also repeated a test in recent days (of which he has detailed documentation) with the Enel Energia call center: it is still not possible "because this is what the rules require" to warn our current operator in advance against a change of contract that should be requested by another operator in the name of a presumed consent of the customer. A defenseless trap, in short. And so the cases of fraudulent activation in exchange for a contract continue to multiply, as the main consumer associations testify. Of course, it is possible to cancel the scam when the first bill arrives by asking for the Contract Restoration previous, but the procedure is still treacherous for the continuity of our energy or telecommunications supply, as anyone who has fallen into the trap knows well.
Possible solutions
Could those who manipulate the rules do more and better? Yes. The phone call masked with caller ID spoofing is difficult to stop with technology, because as curious as it may seem, telephone systems do not yet provide technical protocols for strong authentication of the number and references of the caller. But something, indeed a lot, can be done. Abuses could be neutralized, for example, with the obligation to impose on anyone who calls to provide a telephone contact and an e-mail address to be contacted before any possible further investigation of the contractual proposals.
In the meantime, to ensure that contracts are actually negotiated according to fairness criteria, our institutions could take a look at what the Spanish government: the obligation always and in any case, both on the part of the client's manager, to sign the contract either in person at a physical location or via PEC ensuring the certification of the manager's PEC with an additional validation mechanism.
In Spain "just like in Italy – explains the journalist, engineer and popularizer Gianfranco Giardina – even after the law came into force, in fact nothing or almost nothing has changed. Indeed, in some ways the situation has worsened with the increasingly frequent use of robocalls”, the now well-known automatic calls generated by a robot, which are also very popular in our country. Result: since – Giardina insists – “every professional calling software can configure the Caller ID at will and therefore can show itself to the user with a fantasy number that is almost always non-existent, any subsequent attempt to report the illicit activity ends up being against the only useful identifier, the telephone number, which obviously does not correspond to anyone. Report against unknown persons, complete impunity”. Unless something even worse happens: the number that appears is not fake but is “cloned” from a real number registered to an unaware user, forced to face (this also happens) an undeserved accusation.
Our emergency strategy
How to behave while waiting for our institutions wake up from torpor and impose more effective rules and practices for our protection? With the arrival of new and increasingly sophisticated deception practices, the precautions that have always been recommended to anyone navigating the vast world of the Web and digital communications are evidently no longer sufficient.
In the case of new scam calls, an effective first barrier could be to fill our mobile phone address book with all known contacts and limit ourselves to reply only to those, activating the answering machine with the answering mode after a certain number of rings with a message that invites you to leave your name and contact information. This is an effective filter, but it cannot be used by those who cannot afford, for work or other reasons, not to answer unknown numbers directly.
If instead we prefer to answer, or more simply answer without thinking, we must observe two rules with the utmost rigor: we never pronounce the term "Yes", perhaps in the case of the question “I am speaking to Mr. John Doe” with which our interlocutor begins after having fraudulently obtained our references. That “yes” recorded by our interlocutor can be recorded and used (numerous documented cases) to display a fake telephone consent to a commercial proposal.
The most effective precaution, if we find ourselves answering, is however another. In the case of a phone call with a recorded text, we immediately interrupt the call and if necessary we'll call you back that we see on the display. In the case of a phone call received from a real person, we immediately ask our interlocutor to confirm the validity of the number that appears, inform him that the conversation will be temporarily ended and that we will call back the indicated number, or an alternative number that must be strictly provided to us. This is the only possible way to interrupt a scam phone call without risking losing a possible authentic phone call, perhaps from an operator to whom we have somehow given consent, which can actually be useful to us.
