Why is it so easy to spoof caller id phone numbers for these scammers?
I use Verizon’s call filter app and it seems to help. I haven’t gotten robocall spam in a while.
I use Verizon’s call filter app and it seems to help. I haven’t gotten robocall spam in a while.
Back when every telco was a quasi-governmental national operation, they could all more or less trust each other to do the right thing, so when one network operator receives information from another (for example, caller ID info) it just blindly trusts it as correct.
We've layered tons of modern digital services on top in the last decades but fundamentally there's still that very old network with very basic capabilities underpinning it all.
And so in today's world where every telco offers wholesale access to resellers (who then have sub-resellers and sub-sub-resellers) it's almost impossible to police this stuff.
There's so much traffic going through these networks, it would be very expensive to stop and validate/verify every call's metadata, even though there have been proposals on how to do that put on the table by various parties for years.
But telcos are competitors, and getting them together to agree on how to handle this kind of thing is hard. No one can agree on who should pay for it, and no one wants to go first. Every telco basically passes the buck. So if you are on Verizon and you get a fake caller ID spam call, Verizon will say "we're just forwarding the call from X, go complain to X".
There has been some legislation passed in the last few years as the problem has gotten worse, but don't expect telcos to move on any of this until forced to by law.
source: I work for a telco.
This is why making telcos explicitly, legally, financially responsible for the forwarding garbage calls would fix this really, really fast. The telcos would figure it out, no need to dictate a system.
If you think no one has proposed this or tried this before, you'd be incorrect. :-)
Don't get me wrong, you're right that would work, but getting it to work is near impossible.
Don't forget that every telco would lobby against this, and they are some of the most well-connected enterprises around.
That's the trick, you don't. The US has enough influence that its telcos should be forced to say "from date X international peers that send spam will be disconnected, because we're directly liable for it". There's no serious telco in the world that would say "ok, so our customers won't be able to call the US anymore".
It's a bit like the Brussels effect.
Look I get it, you've imagined a very reductive simple solution to a hugely complex problem and I know it makes sense to you, but you're really drifting into the Dunning-Kruger zone here..
Telcos are hugely, stupidly, complex operations, and all the international inter-connectivity between them even more so.
You can do whatever you want of course, but perhaps consider just trusting me when I say if this was as simple and effective as you put it, it would have been done by now.
> > > Don't forget that every telco would lobby against this, and they are some of the most well-connected enterprises around.
Oh, you already covered the reason I think this actually hasn't already been done.