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Comment by nonbel | Hacker News Reader

It never made much sense to me that the providers would not offer some kind of robocall-free plan. I would instantly switch to avoid getting any more of these spoofed calls, which would block the vast majority of robocalls. It turns out that it is government regulation somehow preventing this:

>"The FCC last year authorized voice service providers to block more types of calls in which the Caller ID has been spoofed or in which the number on the Caller ID is invalid." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/robocallers-evol...

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I pay t-mobile $4/month for their advanced spam-call blocking feature, and it works very well. I now get maybe 1 spam call every 2 weeks, compared against my worthless work number that has no such blocking which gets maybe 6 spam calls a day.

FYI: T-Mobile's app that they charge $4/month for is a reskin of the Hiya app (https://hiya.com/) that's only $1.25/month when paid yearly.

I just installed it. It identifies many of my recent robocalls as spam. Thanks!

It also allows me to block numbers from my sim area code. This is where most spam calls spoof to be coming from. When I recently called T-mobile to ask for them to do this, they said they couldn't help me.

I'm not entirely sure that is correct, because the behaviour of hiya and t-mobile's offering is different. Hiya will hang up on a spam call, but t-mobile's app seems to make it so they don't even connect to me.

How does it identify spoofed numbers?

The company I work for has a similar feature. We have a tap on the actual phone network (for some carriers) and can track in real time. If we notice that (407)-555-1212 has placed 100 outbound calls in the past 10 seconds, that's probably a robo call. If it's from a phone number that isn't provisioned (or not in use---there are databases for such information) then it's spoofed. Or it could be a valid phone number whose home switch [1] is in Kentucky making dozens of outbound calls per second from the Barbados, it's probably spoofed as well.

[1] At least in North America, each phone number is assigned a "home switch," which will always be notified where (as in "which phone switch it servicing it" not "at 40°58′35″N 80°8′9″W") it is so calls can be forwarded to the proper switch (think roaming).

Thanks. It seems technically possible to stop a great deal of these robocalls with that info.

I was using t-mobiles free tier scam call blocker, which worked pretty well except it also blocked calls from Twilio, including our downtime alerts. So I unfortunately had to disable it.

FYI, in France, the ISP called "Free" provides an option to block marketing calls in their box but many still go through

http://portail.free.fr/m/l-aktu-free/astuces/6159173_2015100...

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