How You Might Get Your Money Back from Scammers with New Tech

What is it about?

Imagine this: It’s a Monday morning, and a call comes from a trusted number. You answer, only to hear a strange voice claim that your loved one is being held captive and she’ll only be released if you pay a ransom. Even more terrifying, you hear her voice crying for help in the background. In a panic, you do whatever it takes to send the ransom, only to find out later that it was all a scam and there was no kidnapping. A call you trusted became a nightmare—the fear stays with you. While this scenario is fictional, real cases of virtual kidnapping scams have devastated victims. In December 2023, a Chinese exchange student in Utah fell prey to one such scam, leading his family to pay $80,000 to scammers. Fraudulent calls, including these elaborate schemes and robocalls, account for billions of dollars in yearly losses. Despite efforts by agencies like the FCC, FTC, and ITG to curb telephony abuse, the process of identifying the source of these calls—known as traceback—remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. The sheer scale of the problem has eroded consumer trust in the phone network, demanding innovative solutions that can restore confidence and protect individuals from exploitation. This research presents Jäger, an innovative system designed to turn the tables on scammers, making fraudulent activities both expensive and risky. By employing advanced privacy-preserving techniques, Jäger automates tracing the origin of illegal calls, dramatically reducing the time required for traceback to just a few seconds. This breakthrough relieves regulatory and law enforcement agencies of the heavy burden associated with traditional, resource-intensive methods of call identification. Jäger ensures that while illegal calls are traced efficiently, the privacy of legitimate users remains uncompromised, restoring trust in telephony networks and significantly enhancing the fight against telephony fraud.

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Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash

Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Jäger: Automated Telephone Call Traceback addresses a critical gap in combating telephony abuse, a widespread problem costing individuals and organizations billions annually. Existing traceback methods are largely manual, requiring hours or even days to identify the origin of a single call, making them insufficient to handle the millions of robocalls and fraudulent schemes occurring every month. Jäger introduces a privacy-preserving, distributed system that automates the traceback process, reducing identification time to mere seconds while safeguarding user privacy and carrier confidentiality. Its innovative use of cryptographic techniques like witness encryption, group signatures, and oblivious pseudorandom functions ensures secure and efficient traceback without requiring modifications to the existing telephone infrastructure. By significantly lowering the barriers to investigating fraudulent calls, Jäger empowers regulators and law enforcement agencies to scale their efforts, deterring bad actors and restoring consumer trust in telephony networks. This system represents a technical breakthrough with profound societal implications, protecting individuals from scams and enabling a more secure communication ecosystem. Jäger provides an efficient, secure, privacy-preserving system to revolutionize telephone abuse investigation with minimal costs to operators

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