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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

Sure, it would help. If the caller ID number was related to the true owner, phone companies would stop the scammers and citizens could log spam calls then sue the owners. The law allows you to collect cash penalties from anyone spam calling.

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Good luck suing a call center in Bangalore when you live in the U.S.

Suing is for spamming. Spamming is an unsolicited legitimate marketing call. Most of those calls originate in the US or are selling the products of US companies who hired them.

If appropriate laws existed, you could still put pressure on them. Something like "if your international partner sends more than X spam calls, you're responsible for them". The telco would have a choice of getting fined or dropping the interconnect / filtering that source. On the other side, the telco in Bangalore doesn't want to lose the ability to handle calls to the US, so starts monitoring itself.

International phone companies could be required to put up a bond that citizens could sue against.

If I could block all calls from Bangalore, that would be good enough for me.

Telco billing records are very detailed. They can identify the call from the time it reached you and know who initiated it (their customer or some specific other telco). The fact you see the originating number is irrelevant to the telco and shouldn't matter for any applicable law.

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.

Getting those records would likely require a lawyer and that would require a lot of spam calls. I'm talking about suing in small claims court which would be more likely for most people. Having a true caller ID would put a critical document directly in the citizens hands.

This is not completely true. Especially in VoIP, there are usually 1-5 layers of FCC-licensed phone companies involved in the call. The CLEC (Bandwidth, Level 3, AT&T, Comcast, et al) sell their numbers to Class 3 ITSPs like Flowroute, SIP.US, VOIP.ms, SIPSTATION, Twilio, etc, and then frequently that service is once again sold to another vendor that might have an actual end-user using the service. Just because one company's switch says "where the call came from" does not mean anything related to the actual calling party.

You're completely right. I didn't mean it's going to be a single step. If the answer is: it came from another telco X, you ask them. And repeat.

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