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Comment by woofcat | Hacker News Reader

Realistically every carrier should be doing this.

I have no idea why I'm even allowed to get calls from V11109011700119 on my cellphone. They're so clearly scams / spam that every carrier globally should close these down.

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This is a call from Memphis TN with a badly formatted ANI. The format that you would recognize would be +19011700119 or (901) 170-0119. 111 or 011 are country code prefixes in the North American Dialing Plan. The "V" may mean verified (which would be an artifact of STIR/SHAKEN, ironically), if you're using XFinity/Comcast... but likely is just an artifact of a bug in the code used to set the headers. The fact that the 901 is prefixed with a 0 hints that the PBX/SBC used to place this call was configured for international use and they missed some localization settings, which could be the culprit for the weird formatting.

This is fascinating, thanks for sharing. I noticed that I get a lot of spam calls from “Russia” (country code 7) because my local number is in an area code that starts with 7. I figured that the caller totally screwed up their caller ID. I find it hilarious that the callers are trying and failing to appear as if they are in my local area.

This is really interesting to me. I've basically just silenced all those calls and my life is much better for it. Interesting that they're in theory passing STIR/SHAKEN.

Most calls I get have my local area code, sometimes even the same first 6 digits. You can't just block phone numbers because phone numbers are self-reported. Spammers will just keep switching.

I get a lot of that too. I haven't lived in the geographical region associated with my area code in over a decade, so I don't actually know anyone with the same prefix.

So they may as well use "I am a spammer" as their Caller ID.

I saw something interesting the other day. This company called me twice within a few minutes. The first call came from "+1 844-###-####", but it was automatically blocked as spam by Android. The second call was from the same number, but it was formatted as "+844#######". That one wasn't blocked.

I wonder if formatting the number this way allows them to circumvent spam lists, but doesn't trip anti-caller ID spoofing mechanisms?

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