Thank you to everyone for the warm welcomes! To answer some of the above questions... here goes. I'm long winded, so bear with me...
We've been working with many different groups of deaf people. They are aware of the problem, but unfortunately, aren't terribly concerned.
The heart of the problem is this: Functional Equivalence. The services for the deaf must be "functionally equivalent" to what hearing people must do to use their phone. Functionally equivalent services are heavily accented mandates put out by the FCC and the ADA. What seems to be misunderstood though, is that we DO have to register for our phones. We DO have to give the phone companies our private info in order to have our phones in our home. The difference would be that in order to register for the IP Relay services, you would need something similar to getting a handicapped parking sticker. A doctor would have to say that this is a service you need. They are adamantly opposed to this. Hearing people don't have to enter a username and password before they make a phone call, either.
The thing I think most deaf groups don't seem to grasp though, is that soon their functionally equivalent services will be rendered useless. Already, after just a couple of years of the IP Relay hijacking by the nigerians, people regularly refuse relay calls. Especially if you're calling small businesses, auto parts stores, or pharmacies. These places are big targets for the Nigerians. In turn, the deaf people are getting hung up on because the business thinks all relay calls are scams.
As for the FCC "looking into the problem" is a bit late. Same idea as the lack of action in the deaf community. The damage is done.
About a year ago, I know that some of the big IP Relay corporations decided that in the long run, the profits they are making on the volume of scam calls were going to be outweighed in the long run by ruining their reputation and their business and services they provide. So they started implementing "disconnect procedures". This was in direct conflict with the FCC mandates that we are to make absolutely no decisions to disconnect any call for any reason. Somehow, the companies got around this. What they did is kind of hard to explain without tipping off the scammers. I'll try my best.
There are certain things that happen in every scam call. They do and say certain things that make the operator know that it was a scam. (Any operator worth their salt can tell a scammer just by the manner in which they type the phone number to dial.... but anyway). It's almost like they all use the same script. So the management decided that if X Y or Z happened in a call, you could call a supervisor over to your console, and have them determine that it was a fraud call. Then the supervisor would get on the phone, warn the person in generic terms that this was probably a scam call involving fraudulently obtained credit card numbers, and that the call would now be disconnected. They gave the number to customer service and hung the phone up and disconnected the scammer.
To the operators, this was a GODSEND. But it didn't take long before the scammers figured out the criteria and they now work around it. They're not as successful as they used to be, but they're more determined than ever.
So the fraud continues. I'm afraid that the service has already been ruined. It would take years to undo the damage, even if the registration process was implemented today. I don't know what the answer is, so all the operators can do is continue the good fight. We try to warn people, we call victims on our own time... all things that could get us fired. But I know a lot of operators the ONLY stay at the job so that they can fight the scammers.
