They haven’t fixed it. They just made what scammers do illegal for one more reason. Unless they make telecommunication operators liable, this will remain a problem.
These calls are largely preying on the elderly. They're despicable and it's disgusting it's taken us so long to stop them—there's no excuse, it's not like human beings don't control every part of what's happening, this isn't some force of nature. Nuke them from orbit.
In the past she'd been scammed by the "your grandson is in jail" scam and the bank stopped her.
One day she was really worked up because she was sure someone was going to come to her facility at 4pm and demand their money from her, and it was all tangled into my family needing money or something. Luckily she has no direct access to funds anymore.
Enough was enough. I found a product that I could put on her phone line that lets me white list her calls. It also suppresses the first ring because with Alzheimers, the last thing you need is the phone ringing once constantly.
It isn't perfect -- it has to be configured over bluetooth and only from a cell phone. I'd prefer a device that lets me do this remotely over the web, but this is what we're using for now:
https://www.amazon.com/Call-Control-Home-Automatically-Telem...
For ourselves, I have a linux box running ncid. I just wish I could find a first ring suppressor that works on POTS. The FRS22100 I tried resulted in a fast busy for any caller -- didn't conform to whatever the central office required.