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Comment by SpecialistK | Hacker News Reader

Are calls originating in France a major source of these unsolicited calls? According to the article, a lot of the calls are coming from Morocco, outside of their jurisdiction.

I'm in North America and most of the calls I get are using local numbers, often spoofed from (I suspect) South and South East Asia. Good luck enforcing Canadian or American law in literal slave camps on the China-Myanmar border.

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Morocco is just where lots of french-speaking call centers are located. The industry generates a non-negligible part of Morocco's GDP and most of the clientele is from France. So yeah, Morocco may be right to be concerned by an eventual shrinking of the market.

The call centers themselves are in Morocco but the calls never come from +212.

>Morocco is just where lots of french-speaking call centers are located.

"just"?

Or is it deliberately done because it is cheaper?

Why not have these in France proper giving jobs to French people?

Yes, "just". Because the Morocco bit of the article is mostly inconsequential. Those unsolicited telemarketing calls are extremely annoying no matter who is calling and from where. That's what this is all about.

> Or is it deliberately done because it is cheaper?

Well, of course it is.

> Why not have these in France proper giving jobs to French people?

Because you would have to pay them French wages, which would make no economical sense. If anything, the fact that most of that industry is abroad probably makes it easier to pass such a law.

>Because you would have to pay them French wages, which would make no economical sense.

So, same for any profession. Why have any jobs in the EU at all then?

If a legitimate French business contracts with a Moroccon call center, they will then of course follow French law since the French business is liable.

As for international scam calls, not sure what the situation is in France and what measures they have in place, but one relatively easy way is to block international callers from spoofing a local caller ID, which decimated these calls in Finland a couple of years ago: https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...

So, this is specifically for telemarketing call, not scam call. In the context of telemarketing, it doesn't matter that the company call center is outsourced in other country. The company who contracted them are in France, trying to sell their business in France, they are responsible. So if you get a telemarketing call from RandoCallCenterCo S.A trying to sell you on BusinessABC Ltd., they have been contracted by said company to do so and BusinessABC Ltd. will be on the hook.

Ah, my mistake. I don't think telemarketer cold calls are popular where I am: when I do receive one claiming to be a phone company with a new phone offer, I expect it to be a scam rather than a "good-faith" attempt to win legitimate business.

All calls at least appear with a Caller ID from France (+33). Are they really from france or just spoofing them is anyone's guess (not really, former French colonies in the Magrheb like Morocco make good money running call centers for French numbers).

My anecdotal experience is yes, most spam calls come from french numbers.

Is there a technical reason why phone numbers would be easier to spoof in North America than other places?

Anecdotally I’ve not heard as much about it being a problem in other places such as the UK.

I'd say the deregulation of the telephone industry in America, breaking up the baby Bells, etc would have probably been the biggest hand.

We broke everything up and let any old player enter the telco world over here which broke the entire sanctity of the security of the telephone network.

I'm not sure if that's the whole story, because I speak from a Canadian perspective where telecom ownership is quite protectionist. And these spoofed numbers are almost always local. I guess bad-faith US telcos could allow spoofing Canadian NANP numbers...

It is possible to "spoof" numbers in the UK. I've seen it. Calls from outside the UK masquerading as UK numbers. They tend to use London numbers which is the main giveaway.

In the UK, a lot of the calls were coming from India and vsrious countries in Africa. I think India has cleaned up its act, but it's prevalent elsewhere. The callers pretend to be UK-based but there sre a number of giveaways.

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