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Comment by Rjevski | Hacker News Reader

There are legitimate reasons for spoofing to work given how fucked up the PSTN is.

Mobile roaming is one for example - when you roam on another carrier and place a call, that carrier directly originates the call and “spoofs” your caller ID to make it look like the call originated from you.

Some companies may use different carriers for either load balancing or least-cost routing and so both of these carriers are required to “spoof” the company’s caller ID.

This can definitely be fixed with a CA system and “delegation” where the main carrier who owns the number can issue certificates for any other carrier you’d like to use to temporarily allow them to use a particular caller ID, and each call request should be signed with that certificate and the signature should be verified by call intermediate carriers down the chain, and the call dropped if the signature is missing or invalid.

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I think the correct approach is economic, not technical. Make a rule that, if you get a spoofed call, then your telco owes you $100, not subject to any arbitration clause or other contractual waiver. Give a way out to avoid actually killing the telcos: annual penalties are limited to a few percent of annual gross revenues.

The telcos will find a technical solution real fast.

How would you prove the call was spoofed? Record all calls? Prove it with statistics? No telco will pay. This is a technical problem.

>> I think the correct approach is economic, not technical.

> This is a technical problem.

IMHO, it's both. Economic sanctions need to be put in place to motivate the telcos to create and adopt robust technical solutions.

You have a call received on your monthly bill from a number and the owner of that number does not have the call on their bill.

How? Even in the same city, cellular and land lines aren't always serviced by the same company. In most places I'm pretty sure it's illegal for phone companies to be swapping call data. Or are you suggesting I call back all the numbers that call me to compare bills with the owner on the other end? This plan is not going to work out.

The courts can deal with things like this.

If an incoming call is saying it's coming from 555-1234 and telco owns 555-1234 and it's not one of their authorized income points then the call should get dropped.

Or if they don't own it then it's on who's inserting the call into the system.

Telco systems are fun. And by fun I mean it's a complete mess. ISDN is hard and full of caveats (look at SIP for a taste of what it involves).

Or just let telephone users set a price, for someone not in there contact list, to call them. Set it at 5 cents by default. Problem solved for the most part. People that don't know you can still call you (like the person who you left your curtains at for repair) but most robo call campaigns won't be worth it. If you really hate spam, set your price to $10.

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