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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

So if I buy a $20 prepaid cell phone for cash and use it to robocall ten of my friends, they'd share $1000?

A network shouldn't allow a $20 prepaid cell phone to spoof numbers. Give it one number, if it starts spamming it can easily be blocked.

Yes, my $20 prepaid cell phone would only have one number, and would be blocked after my friends report the robocalls.

But whence comes the $1000 my friends are now owed, for the calls made before their complaints were filed?

I specified the fine would be for spoofing that broke the laws.

That would eliminate spoofing, which would make it much easier to identify where the bad calls are actually coming from.

Stating the obvious: you won't be able to buy a $20 burner without an ID and deposit if it can cause your carrier to incur a $1000 fine.

Yeah, a fail2ban would be great. Bell labs ushered in a lot of our infrastructure, it isn't like baby bells haven't been involved in the ecosystem that creates these tools, it looks like they aren't willing to lose any traffic.

Yeah, let's throw out the entire idea, because it is not perfect. Spoofing is the main problem here. If that was blocked the $20 disposable phone would be much harder and more expensive to exploit (his many disposable phones they would have to use to perform a single successful campaign?

Clearly you missed the part where the OP said SPOOFING of numbers.

Spoofing is a huge security issue, robocalling is annoying.

Things don't happen in a vacuum, don't be so dismissive. There would probably have been put something in place to stop a $20 sim from doing these things in the first place.

You could, but you also need to take into account the number travels with the SIM, not the handset.

The SIM is you. People already buy burner SIM's, and many countries have started to implement tighter controls on SIM purchasing in order to aid law enforcement's ability to track down telephony enabled crime.

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