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Comment by tinus_hn | Hacker News Reader

You can rest assured that the phone company 100% securely knows who to bill for the call. They just aren’t telling you.

In America’s “receiver pays their part” system I wouldn’t be too sure. In the rest of the world, the caller/texter pays 100% of the charge, but in the US you’re charged per text and minutes received.

Once you add a “free call” entity on the other side (like Google Voice) then no one is charged to make the call.

Additionally, plenty of people “sell” their real number and there are android apps routing internet call through the victim’s real number. In this case, even if the person is charged, it’s not necessarily the spammer.

> , but in the US you’re charged per text and minutes received

I doubt 99%+ of end users in the US have been charged for non international minutes or non international text in the last decade or even 15 years.

The bill the end user receives being zero doesn't change how telecom billing is set up. The fact that it's "Free" and costs are hidden from the user in America isn't exactly uncommon.

If the phone companies are billing each other, they don’t they have to know who to bill, per tinus_hn’s comment?

Lol, no. "[call|charging] [data|detail] records" (CDRs) are batch transferred over FTP, followed by a pseudo ETL into a billing system. It (mostly) works, but it's an archaic mess.

To be fair, T-Mobile and AT&T are on sFTP nowadays.

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