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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

Great, but the main problem is to find out who is calling you. I wish the phone company had some kind of obligation to give me that information, so I could trace back annoying telemarketing calls. Stringing them along until they reveal who they work for just doesn't work well.

Another idea would be for banks to offer special credit card numbers, that get automatically flagged as bogus purchases. Any bank offering such a service? If I ever use the magic number, the transaction is perceived to go through, but it's actually tracked and no money is exchanged. Not sure if it's doable with respect to Visa and Mastercard networks.

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> Another idea would be for banks to offer special credit card numbers, that get automatically flagged as bogus purchases. Any bank offering such a service? If I ever use the magic number, the transaction is perceived to go through, but it's actually tracked and no money is exchanged. Not sure if it's doable with respect to Visa and Mastercard networks.

A credit card that allows you to make purchases but never transfers any money? I'm not sure you've quite thought that through.

Actually, why not... My bank knows me. I'm a good customer. 10+ years of banking with them, not one credit card issue. Thousands of dollars on my bank account. When i use this bogus credit card number for $20 to track a spammer, I think my bank could trust me that I'm not just trying to buy something for free.

Are there other use cases you can think of aside from tracking spammers that would incent your bank to invest in the overhead to maintain special/bogus card #s? (And what about bogus card #s used against legitimate vendors that get cheated out of money owed to them?)

Thanks to Voice over IP, this is pretty much impossible to regulate any more. The telephone networks were built on a trust model that VoIP destroyed. Now, you can originate a call on the internet that's nearly impossible to trace.

The current caller ID system is incredibly broken- I'm getting 3 calls a day to my personal cell phone from the same scammers and have not been able to get their real contact info. After watching all these TV shows with the 'hang up within 10secs or you'll be traced!' I expected AT&T to be able to help me out. No dice.

Unfortunately the phone #'s are always random and AT&T just wants to sell me a service that allows me to block up to 30 phone numbers. But they're calling from more than 30.

If you don't mind throwing more of your data to Google, you can port your number to google voice and block as many numbers as you like. It even has spam filtering for calls.

I have my business line on GV and it filters out hundreds of spam calls.

>you can originate a call on the internet that's nearly impossible to trace. //

Why do the phone networks route calls with faked originator numbers. I can see why they don't block genuine numbers (that terminate at an actual phone) -- to get you to pay for blocking. But surely they can tell that an incoming call from a foreign call centre with a local number is fake.

Recently I've had calls, in the UK, from numbers where the [given] originating number doesn't exist. Why any phone company would route these is beyond me. (They're faked because we're signed up to do-not-call lists and they don't want to be sued). More to the point is why the regulators (OFCOM) let the phone companies get away with routing such calls.

Phone numbers are not necessarily symmetric. A given number might legitimately place a call via someone else's network. For instance, think about roaming. You're calling with your local number, via another country's network. So, it's not a super simple problem to solve everywhere.

Roaming doesn't work quite like that. My cell phone is associated with a "home switch" (HS) (based on the provider and cell phone number [1]). When roaming, my cell phone associates with a switch and becomes a visitor to that switch (VS). The VS will inform the HS that it will handle my calls.

Now, when you call me, the HS gets "the call". It then contacts the VS. The VS will assign a temporary phone number to my cell, and send this number back to the HS. The HS then sends this number back to the switch making the call. That switch will then call the temporary number, hitting the VS. The VS sees that number and since it assigned that number to my cell, knows to "ring" my cell phone.

And that's just for cell phones. That doesn't cover call forwarding, for instance.

[1] Number portability adds another layer of indirection to this.

This is one area which would be good for the government to get into. They have the resources to actually follow up and do something about it. Create a number of fake residential numbers, publish them in the phone book, add them to the do not call list, publish them on websites, and so on. Then watch for the calls to come in. They could do the fake credit card thing and prosecute the offenders to hell and back. It'd be self-funding too.

Business Idea:

Instead of the government doing this (and being self-funded), why not do it commercially? Just set up thousands of personal phone numbers (honeypots) and just wait for the calls to roll in.

Naturally issues like tracking down the callers and filing mass lawsuits would generate problems the startup would have to overcome, but you'd be at an advantage because you'd have plenty of data at your disposal. Eventually you'd learn more about the branch of law that deals with these infractions and how different jurisdictions handle the cases.

What are the ethical side effects?

1. If your business became large enough, and it became a realistic outcome that telemarketers who use illegal tactics would have to pay damages like the 4k one in this article, the ROI for telemarketing may decrease to the point that it's not used any more.

Can I register my business phone number or a fax number?

The National Do Not Call Registry is only for personal phone numbers. Business-to-business calls and faxes are not covered by the National Do Not Call Registry.

You could try a more complicated approach: sell consumers a device which records their calls locally, and sign them up to the do-not-call list. The device would have a spam button; when pressed it would send the caller id + recording of call to your company's servers. The company would use this to help the customer threaten or sue telemarketers, splitting settlement/lawsuit revenue.

This would be illegal in many states, but you could restrict it to states with one-person consent to record conversations.

Some credit cards have "virtual numbers" that you can use for shopping online. You set the limit that can be charged on the numbers and you're notified if someone charges over the limit to the virtual number. (citi credit cards)

I like the credit card idea.

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