Eli5: Why is it we still get dozens of calls a day from scammers? Don’t we have the tech to tell a spoof number and prevent it from coming through?
In: Technology
Because spoofing a number has legit reasons. For example. A company could have thousands of employees and hundreds of phone lines. But sets, by the same technology that scammers use, so that all outgoing calls come from the company’s main number.
There are billions of potential phone numbers in the US, and they are very cheap for businesses to acquire and also to cancel, like a dollar a line or less per month.
A scam company can cycle through dozens if not hundreds of new numbers every week, so by the time your phone company gets enough complaints/blocks for a single phone number to flag it as spam in their system, the scammer using it has likely already moved on to a new number.
For the same reason there are still commercials even though you pay for cable TV, or why there are commercials on your car radio when your car could easily be designed to record song for you.
Giant companies get paid by you, for their product. Then they get paid by advertisers, for access to you while using their product. They don’t like their customers, they like money.
Capitalists would pump mosquitoes into your house if it would get you to buy bug spray, and if the bug spray poisoning lawsuits cost less than the profits they would make by breaking the law to steal your blood.
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