Additionally, why can’t spam calls be automatically blocked, and why is nobody really doing a whole lot about it? It seems like this is a problem that they would have come up with a solution for by now.
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Automatically blocking all calls just because they don’t have a digitally verified caller ID could also risk unintentionally blocking some legitimate callers.
Most of the spam call centers originate in countries where the governments don’t _really_ care all that much. For example, a good number of them are in smaller cities in India, where the politicians are willing to turn a blind eye for the right price (and so long as they don’t go around scamming Indians).
From there, the call centers are just another overseas call. There are a number of _legitimate_ call centers in foreign countries, so looking to block the scam ones is a needle in a stack of needles. Its a ton of effort for the phone company with little actual benefit to them.
Because POTS is a POS
The Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) is the old copper line based system. A call comes in with routing information about where it needs to go but doesn’t necessarily say who it came from nor is there a way to check so its easy to spoof “local” numbers from overseas and run the call center from a country that either doesn’t care or financially benefits from the scams through them bringing money into the country.
There is a recent change that helps to combat a lot of it. Its called [STIR/SHAKEN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN) because someone wanted to make a Bond martini joke. Since most of the network is now passing digital packets it adds more to the header about who’s system its coming from and who’s vouching for the call which can be checked up on. If there’s a call coming into the Verizon Boston switching center claiming to be from an AT&T number and its coming from the AT&T Boston switching center across town its probably real. If its coming from Mumbai that’s suspicious
There are still some gaps that they’re trying to close, mainly smaller phone providers that accept international connections. They provide a way for the international calls to get into the US system, then get assigned the label of the smaller domestic phone provider and short of blocking all calls from the smaller provider it hard to filter them out. The smaller providers also make money from their international connections sooo they’re not super interested in spending money to shut off that tap.
Already on the way to be implemented in India. All calls will require the caller’s identification information to be displayed to the receiver, so you can just tell scammers to fuck the shut up.
two words: political will.
while the problem probably cannot be 100% solved until the POTS phone system is dead and gone, which will probably take quite a long time indeed, it could be made dramatically better if the FTC introduced rules requiring phone network operators to proactively manage spam.
the trouble is, that means a lot of work without much financial reward. as long as the phone network operators have political clout in washington, they can pressure elected representatives to deny this power to the FTC. elected representatives just want to get reelected, and they get a lot more money for campaigns from AT&T and verizon than they do from you and me.
we all talk about how money corrupts politics, but sometimes it feels very abstract. this is a great concrete example.
I wonder why we can’t have prompts. Like when you call a pharmacy, you have to choose from a menu. Our phones should ask for an input to complete the call. You could also put in a Turing test.
My phone, but more likely my service provider, automatically blocks calls and texts it thinks are spam. There is still a record of the text/call in my phone so I can audit if needed, but so far no false positives. Had phone and service provider for three years.
I’m a developer for a small call center in Canada. I’ve worked with old T4/copper lines before moving to VOIP for calling.
There’s a lot of elements to it. It’s a complex problem that’s going to vary a lot from country to country. A big part of it is that it would be nearly impossible to differentiate between a legitimate number and a scam.
For example, in Canada it’s legal to mask or even change displayed numbers nothing complex about it. So for legitimate purposes, I could force a local number in Manitoba to outpulse a toll free number from Ontario (a lot of places do this so that call display will show a particular number, usually the inbound # for the company, rather than whatever actual number originated the call.)
On the other hand, an illegitimate center could do exactly the same thing, but display an out of country number as a local one (or more likely many local ones) for wherever they are calling.
The other side of it is that copper phone lines are as secure as twitter’s future prospects, and that’s going to be a prime source since that’s what a lot of scammable old people use.
The thing with spam call centers is that they operate ‘under the radar’, using otherwise-legitimate businesses as a front. In fact, they’re often owned and operated *by* the owners of the legitimate business as a side-hustle.
So, if you shut the phone line to the spam call center, you *also* have to shut down the lines assigned to the legitimate business venture, which the owner of the legitimate business can quite reasonably object to.
Because the government is too busy casting the same vote for the 13th time in a row to worry about actual problems. But they have to stay late so let’s feel sorry for them.
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