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Comment by lysp | Hacker News Reader

When I was younger I used to work for a market research company doing surveys over the phone.

The way their process worked was:

* Big company wanted a survey completed. * Big company would want it targeted to a specific state/regional area, so would provide a list of post/zip codes.

* Survey company would translate the list of codes into phone prefixes for each area.

* Computer would randomly generate phone numbers in the area - starting from xxxx 0000 through to xxxx 9999 for operators to call.

That meant you'd get disconnected numbers, businesses, private/silent numbers, faxes, modems, etc.

So having a "clean" number didn't protect you. While a few projects were targeted to specific people/numbers - most were just random.

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In some countries it's illegal for companies to call random people, they need to gather opt-ins from all people they wanna call.

It doesn’t seem like it’s being enforced in the US, currently..

They actually do try to enforce it, but right now it's a losing battle. You can spin up a new voip company and start blasting scam calls from an overseas call center in a weekend, then spin that company down before anyone has any idea who you are.

Customers complain to carriers, who then either get the offending voip provider to block the scamming customer, or just threaten FCC action. But the whole cycle is so slow and you're fighting a never-ending shapeless horde.

I think STIR/SHAKEN will help with this if it ever gets fully implemented and enforced, and voip providers are always trying to come up with better fraud detection to avoid the man-hours associated with assuaging carrier concerns, blocking the customers, etc, etc.

Here's a kind of adversarial test of that hypothesis:

1. Spin up new voip company

2. Issue death threat to US President (or similarly powerful man)

3. Spin down voip company

4. Wait to see if/when someone finds out who you are

How is that a test of GP's hypothesis? Their claim was about commercial spam or scam calls, not potentially felonious threats.

It seems to me the claim is that identifying VOIP subscribers is not feasible.

Feasible (as in practical in general to identify spammers/scammers) and possible (as in "could a concerted legal effort identify a single caller who made a threat against an official?") aren't the same thing.

Absolutely. So now that we've established the possibility, the question is, why exactly is it infeasible to use our existing means to identify spammers. And what do we have to do make it feasible?

And its working well, I only get 3-4 random calls a day instead of 5-6 now.

I only get 2-3 per month and they are from recruiters.

> When I was younger I used to work for a market research company doing surveys over the phone.

Were you the one making calls? How did go through the randomly generated phone numbers?

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