Someone or company is selling their product/service, why can’t the government go after these people? Seems easy-peasy.
In: Technology
It’s complex.
Technically one big issue is that anyone calling you can “spoof” their outgoing number. This is an important feature: when your bank calls you, they want the outgoing number to look like their main customer service number. If you call back, they want you to go to their main number, not to the representative who happened to call you.
Of course, the problem is that scammers use that feature too. They spoof their outgoing number making it harder to track them down.
Technology was developed to address this (called STIR/SHAKEN). However, lots of smaller businesses and smaller phone companies haven’t bothered to upgrade. So if carriers started blocking their calls, those smaller businesses suddenly wouldn’t be able to get through. Carriers have been afraid of blocking all unauthenticated phone calls and not letting legitimate business calls through. The FCC has mandated that phone companies block traffic that isn’t compliant or in a known list of exceptions, by May 28, 2024.
We will see how much that helps. There have been many steps along the way over many years trying to fight spam and robocalls without breaking things.
HOWEVER, yet another challenge is election-related calls and texts are still allowed. That’s not going to change ever because politicians WANT them to be allowed, they’re never going to vote to ban themselves.
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