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Comment by singpolyma3 | Hacker News Reader

Just because a call is a spam call doesn't mean it is spoofed. STIR/SHAKEN ends spoofing but anyone can ultimately buy a phone and make calls that are spammy.

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Spoofing isn’t ended at all

Almost every spam call has that I get, is spoofed.

Someone here explained it, once.

I think the spoofed calls use a legacy transport tech that can’t be forced to validate.

Can't that legacy transport be blocked / not-be-peered with then? That's what usually happens with old insecure tech that is being phased out.

How do you verify it is spoofed? Have you asked your carrier to drop unverified calls from your service?

> How do you verify it is spoofed?

Not my job to "verify," in the technical sense.

When a call for an Indian crypto pump comes in as "SMITH, ROBERT", and a local exchange, I call that "spoofed."

Mine literally come from the verified coinbase phone number and say coinbase and everything. If I didn't know for sure they are not calling me I'd think it was real 100%.

Yeah that does sound spoofed. I'd call your carrier and ask them to make sure attestation below B is blocked.

That's almost certainly not spoofed. They just own a phone number on your local exchange.

No they don't. I've called back, a couple of times, and got some guy named Bob, getting all confused. "Whaddaya mean I just called you?".

Hmm...you seem very interested in redirecting this train of conversation. Why?

I'm very interested in knowing the actual current state of affairs WRT spoofing and a lot of people make claims without evidence which makes it hard to find out. I thank you for providing your evidence here because it does sound like some carriers are still not enforcing. Which is obviously a problem.

I think it’s a mix. If the CID has someone’s name, then it’s almost certainly spoofed, but sometimes, it just has a town name, and that might be what you mean.

There was this telco, in Upstate New York, that was infamous for being a firehose of scam/spam robocalls. I think they may have been shut down, though, because I haven’t seen their numbers in the CID for a couple of years.

I would suggest that carriers are limited in what they can do. Crooks be crooks, and many of them are very clever. They usually figure out how to weasel past the guard dogs.

Sure, but with phone numbers that can't be spoofed, telcos can terminate service, and filtering technologies can block calls. Spam gets expensive if you have to buy new service every five calls.

It does. But the spammers still do it. Because eventually they hit one person who gives them a thousand dollars or whatever and it pays off.

Preventing spoofing doesn't have to make spam cost-prohibitive for every spammer to greatly reduce the volume, and it does not interfere with ordinary people obtaining phone service anonymously.

Nobody is making spam calls with cell phones. Spammers use VOIP services and old TDM systems.

There’s SIM card banks for SMS spam… I’d be surprised if there wasn’t anything similar for calling. Not that I support this bill but it is a thing.

Seems like SMS spammers just get an SS7 link handoff more often and more effective than SIM card banks.

From what I’ve investigated as a recipient of spam calls, I’ve been called from legitimate mobile numbers from my own mobile telco. The only thing that explains that are SIM card banks.

Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to report abuse to the telcos (and regulators).

I think most major US carriers have a short code for reporting abuse now.

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