GOOD NEWS: The robocalling scourge may not be unstoppable after all.

“We know that the majority of robocalls only come from 38 different infrastructures,” Aude Marzuoli, research scientist at a company called Pindrop Labs, told Ars. “It’s not as if there are thousands of people out there doing this. If you can catch this small number of bad actors we can “stop the problem.”

Pindrop researchers reached the conclusion by creating a security honeypot of phone numbers that received more than 1 million robocalls. The researchers transcribed about 10 percent of the calls and analyzed the semantics with machine-learning techniques to isolate identical scams. The researchers combined those results with analysis that tracked 150 different audio features of each call. By studying the codecs, packet loss, spectrum, and frequency inside the audio and combining the results with the machine learning, the researchers were able to obtain a fingerprint of each different call center.

I get up to a dozen of these things every day, and haven’t found a better solution than to simply never answer the phone.