Group FaceTime being used for spam calls ↦

Group FaceTime being used for spam calls – Six Colors

by Jason Snell & Dan Moren


Dan Goodin, writing at Ars Technica:

FaceTime users are getting bombarded with group calls from numbers they’ve never seen before, often as many as 20 times in short succession during late hours of the night.

Griefers behind the pranks call as many as 31 numbers at a time. When a person receiving one of the calls hangs up, a different number will immediately call back. FaceTime doesn’t have the ability to accept only FaceTime calls coming from people in the user’s address book. It also requires all numbers in a group call must be manually blocked for the call to be stopped.

This is kind of similar to my group text spam from a couple weeks back, and only reinforces that Apple’s built-in tools—if they may be generously called such—for dealing with spam are lacking. The company’s answer seems to be a shrugging “we’ll leave this to third parties” and while that might work for phone calls and SMS text spam, FaceTime is Apple‘s system. Nobody else to blame there.

—Linked by Dan Moren


Read more at Six Colors

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