SHAKEN/STIR is the (technical) answer to this, though I'll be interested to see to what extent it's adopted.
There is, at least for foreign calls: assuming US provider A gets an incoming call from the country B's operator C, then A has to verify if the phone number supplied by C is in the country phone number range of country B. If there's a mis-match, deny the connection.
(And that's not even mentioning the issue of how you'd map providers to prefixes. It's somewhere between non-trivial and impossible in practice.)
Its easy to send an IP packet with a source address that is whatever you want, but if you do that the receiver is going to reply to someone else and you won't be able to establish two way communication.
Yes, I know most ISPs don't do this. But they could if they wanted to.
There's a bunch of solutions. I received 19 spam calls spoofing cell numbers. That's a felony
I suggest everyone that get an illeagl robo call to call your rep Everytime. Ask them to block India entirely. The problem would be solved very quickly. Or block all calls from Florida and Texas. The nuclear option
The basic one is just waste their time. Ask a lot of questions. And then tell them you were doing that
IOW: They have so many resources available, and it is so cheap for them to make the calls, that even after they knew I was going to waste their time, they continued the calls.
This was after I had tried their options for "press 1 to be removed" and talking to someone and saying "please remove me from your list".
The thing they may not have been anticipating: I had 3 numbers forwarding to my cell phone. Up until this call I didn't know which of them was on their list. I cancelled that phone number, and the calls dropped to almost 0.
No one wants the hearing damage, I suspect.
I need a Mandarin sound board to keep them on the line since I don’t know any more than “Nihao”.
This could very well be an urban legend, and I know that most telemarketers are untrustworthy anyway, but I've heard somewhere that you actually have to explicitly say "put me on your do-not-call list" because the phrase "remove me from your list" allows them to interpret it a request to remove you from the do-not-call list.
Like I said, probably an urban legend.
> If a person or entity making a call for telemarketing purposes (or on whose behalf such a call is made) receives a request from a residential telephone subscriber not to receive calls from that person or entity...
This is from 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d). If someone says "please remove me from your list," I believe any reasonable individual should understand that as a request to stop calling.
If they get a request to stop calling, a telemarketer must immediately record the number to the company's do-not-call list and comply with the subscriber's request in a reasonable period of time not exceeding 30 days, and the telemarketer must honor the request for 5 years.
If you want to get technical about it, it doesn't even say the request must be made on a phone call. Presumably, one could make a written request. Perhaps someone could even offer as a public service a way to preemptively send copies of form letters to the addresses of known telemarketers requesting no calls. Someone like the postal service.
Considering they are committing a felony by simply making the phone call. It's a felony to spoof phone numbers. Everyone from the top down should be facing 20 years
Until the scammers figure this out and respond with their own bot. Then, just like Twitter, it'll be bots spamming each other..
It's honestly pretty great, I use it all the time.
Fuck your ban.
And please don't give me a lecture about civil discourse. I clearly stated my opinion
If I am banned. Fuck my ban as you clearly stated
Wouldn't it make more sense to punish the phone companies letting them do this? Is this just prejudicial hatred on your part against a couple of states you don't like for some reason?
It would be easy enough for a regulator to simply fine any company whose products are advertised or sold through telemarketing.
Make it the companies problem that some of their marketing contractors or affiliate schemes lead to illegal calling.
- which regulator has the power to fine a company when it didn't do anything wrong?
- how would you prevent abuse, e.g. if I want to destroy your small business, I can just spend a few thousand dollars on a robocall campaign selling your products (not even claiming to be you)
That same difficulty would arise when trying to identify those abusing the process in the way I described.
There is a lack of will
Spoofing numbers could be considered a criminal organization
Take down every single person
Management/c-suite? Sure. Your typical telemarketer working at minimum wage? No.
If they're claiming to be the IRS so they can scam you out of iTunes gift cards, why not? They know what they're a part of.
Actions need to have consequences. But they currently have none
Small fines, for the issuer of the number used to make calls reported by more than N consumers, should do the trick. Small to accommodate false positives. Fine to create an incentive to vet before issuing numbers. Number issuers because they’re less numerous and clearly in the FCC’s jurisdiction.
If one wanted larger fines, N could be lowered but only count complaints with a recording of the call and proof it came from that number (e.g. a telephone bill). Harder to make a complaint, but also harder to turn the mechanism into a home for general grievances.
If the callers (who LE can get to already with enough questions) are safe now, they'd be safe after the change. Sure, the hn crowd will easily set up appropriate filtering, but we were never a viable target to begin with, so that's actually helping the spam calls reach better targets quicker.
It would maybe reduce the number of scam calls though. Spam, not do much.
To sue someone, the court would still need to ask the telco about the owner of the number. Right now they would need to ask for the initiator of a call to XYZ at 12:34. Seeing the number doesn't change anything.
Sounds great, lets do that.