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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

This article did not mention spoofed caller id, which is really scary and annoying. Normally I do not pick calls from numbers I do not recognize. With calller id spoofing, the fraudsters are able to show a phone number that is very similar to mine : the first 6 digits are identical to my landline ; this fools me into believing it is a neighbor or my kid' friends that is calling and I end up picking up the phone.

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It's not just fraudsters. Until recently, I was a reasonably high-up IT leader at a big corporation and I probably received 3-5 cold calls per day from vendors and other service providers. By the past 12 months, almost all of them spoofed my local area code -- this is what finally put me over the top. I no longer answer calls from numbers I don't recognize unless I am expecting one.

In Australia that's flat out illegal. You must present a number, and that number has to be connected to your business so that the person receiving the call can call back.

Spoofing caller ID for financial gain is illegal in the US, too, with a $10K per violation fine. But having worked in wholesale telecom a bit, no one actually cares, because no one follows up.

When you complain to your service provider, what happens is the vendor will say to the carrier sending traffic "hey calls from this number are getting us complaints, please shut it off". The call traffic just moves around or changes number. There will be several layers of resellers involved, so it's not like the resellers are being intentionally malicious and generating bad traffic, they're just relaying the calls for their customer and so on.

No one actually wants to investigate, so getting calls from a certain number to stop is usually enough to please everyone. If the FCC wanted to, they could kill this stuff in a week just by adding stronger liability rules and making carriers vet their traffic. If resellers had even a $5000 fine liability for sending bad traffic, they'd pretty quickly figure out a way to limit their exposure. But without real pressure, the FCC is happy to let things stay as they are.

That's very interesting. Why is the FTC happy to let people get scammed and annoyed, and let scammers reduce the utility of the phone system in general?

Is the FTC in on this rubbish? Are they getting payoffs? WTF?

My guess is the FCC asked carriers how to stop it and carriers said it was too hard. It's unlikely that the people the FCC talks to would say that fining them was a good idea.

Or they proposed a fine, then the big carriers said if there was any liability, they'd stop selling to smaller guys and the whole system would stop working.

I've been using numbers from Burner to sell stuff on Craigslist, and they actually let you select the area code of the number they assign you. Pretty neat, but it definitely demonstrates the meaninglessness of phone number digits today.

I got one that was my exact name and number showing up on caller ID, which should be unlisted. As in, my home phone appeared to be calling itself.

That one pissed me off enough to ask for a supervisor, which caused the guy to immediately hang up.

How hard would it be to add X.509 (or other PKI) capability to caller ID, where the certificates would be 100% managed by the carrier?

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