Instead, let me ask you this: why is this a uniquely American problem. Certainly I don't hear about it frequently happening in other countries.
In the US, mobile phones share their area codes with landlines, and it's the person with the mobile phone who pays for the "airtime" of their incoming (these days it's basically free so you can't tell, but historically it was much more expensive)
In the rest of the world, mobile phones have their own special area codes that are charged to a higher rate to the person who is making the call, and incoming calls are free for the mobile subscriber.
If you look at the pricing plans for VoIP providers, calling a mobile phone can be up to 10x more expensive than a landline (e.g. I'm seeing for France a landline is 4c/min, a mobile is 17c/min on RingCentral). But calling a US phone of any kind is often even completely free.
No… that isn’t why. Where I live both are rated the same which is to say, essentially free. We still don’t get this.
I’ll tell you what it actually is: American exceptionalism. Again we’re talking about a country so allergic to regulation that some poster above was talking about inbound fees. Yeah no, here we just regulate, and it works, and I’ve never had to think about it. Maybe just copy the working examples instead of being so dead set that it Won’t Work For Your Country.
I believe Swiss domestic calls are an order of magnitude more expensive than American calls.
This is the internet equivalent of “don’t judge a book by its cover (or a website by its tld)” :)
(I live in Belgium)
The reason it happens so much more in the U.S. more than other countries is the ease of exfiltrating money from an enviroment where on average you can get a wealthy target (relatively, even if someone is living paycheck to paycheck if they're paying $4000 in rent it's a pretty big paycheck worth targeting). If the US starts to get on top of spam calling there's a very real chance that the countries it doesn't happen often in will 'enjoy' a similar level of spam as established scammers retarget their efforts.
The good news is the US telcos are forced to do a lot of the heavy lifting in forcing foreign telcos they connect with to begin using SHAKEN/STIR protocols. This means that other countries (which are in just as bad a technical position as the US) will be able to pass similar regulation on their telcos, without having to worry about accidentally forcing them to cut off entire other countries, as most legitimate telcos will have cut their teeth while dealing with the US telcos.
N.B. SHAKEN/STIR protocol requirements basically means that you can identify a call and say to a foreign connecting telco "Here are these identifiable calls that are a problem, I'm sure it's not you so go talk to the smaller telco you provide services for that you can identify with these number (even if we can't) because we don't want to be forced to cut you off". It basically removes the deniability of "Well we've got 10 smaller sub telcos servicing the country/countries and no system implemented to tell which of the 10 is selling to bad actors" because it enforces having a system going out and if your not getting your sub telcos to use shaken/stir on the way in you're the problem.
Doing some quick googling I found this -
> The research also estimates the average person now receives 6.04 nuisance calls every month, while 56% of people receive nuisance calls every single week, and 83% of people receive at least one nuisance call a month.
https://telecoms.com/518505/britons-will-receive-4-billion-s...