Good start. Next, put the people running these scam phone providers in jail.
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Also hate the scam "work from home for $125,000 per year" texts. They really prey on the desperate.
Mainland China lets people opt out of phone calls that come from outside of the Mainland...it's a feature one can turn off on an on their mobile plan.
Calls from outside the Mainland always cause a warning to pop up on the receiving user's phone that says something like "this call is coming from outside of the mainland, be careful of being scammed".
I can imagine there are many reasons the US doesn't fix this..one of which probably that much of US customer service is outsourced to people outside the US!
There are applications to block international calls but that only helps if the number is not spoofed. People that have SS7 lines into the telco system can spoof as just about any number. I wanted to kill those circuits but my employer at the time said, "they are paying their bills, arent they?". This was in the 90's. I guess the laws are every so slowly starting to catch up.
Also, pragmatically, basically everywhere outside of China and Russia is subject to US "prosecution".
This. Gotta have your round robin of foreign call centers be able to spoof the main customer service line numbers for whoever they're contracted to represent.
Personally I think that should all be done in software these days, not something supported at the teleco level but what do I know.
I agree. In fact, 1200 SS7 circuits is nothing. If these people are not locked up they will just get another circuit using another fake identity. It's like blocking 1200 ASN's and saying one made a dent in spam.
This is loud to me, mostly because the last time I got non-TCPA compliant texts trying to solicit business, the VOIP provider refused to give the company's actual name or contact info.
Absolute scum of the earth.
Because spam call centers pay much more to access phone networks than you do, therefore telcos care about them, and not you. Plus you NEED a phone and they know that.
I don't understand why this doesn't happen EVERY DAY until the problem is resolved.
And before someone cite US code: it's virtually impossible for foreigners to seek justice in this context. Not only do these criminals lack the money, education, and access to legal representation to do so, but the DoJ has better things to do than spend their time looking into the veracity of an international claim of this kind.
It's easy to say it's idiots who fall for this stuff when we're young enough to have grown up in this world or started using new technology at an early age. We will be the ones targeted someday and it will be a medium that didn't become available to us until later in life just like what the seniors are experiencing now.
Which is why this is likely to end up getting rolled back. Surely most of these providers are dominated by spam. But equally surely all of them carry some legitimate traffic (or else this particular trigger would have been pulled already).
There will be friendly fire from this policy decision, almost certainly.
Most international telecom operations aren't facilitating scam call centers, and of the ones who are I suspect very few are so eager to turn a blind eye that they will continue to do so when staring down the barrel of actual consequences.
In the US? Most normie people I know barely even know anyone that's visited overseas anywhere other than Canada and Mexico, much less stay connected to family living abroad. Tons of people don't even regularly talk to people outside of state they live in.
Don't get me wrong it's not entirely uncommon and can be common in immigrant communities but outside of that unless you've got wealthy globe-trotting family you probably don't have anyone to talk to overseas. Its something far from "pretty much everyone".
It’s not just “easy”, it’s an ideological imperative to ensure that the vulnerable have “personal responsibility” to avoid predation, while predators bear no responsibility for their own actions. Many tech business models depend on exploitation — it’s not just phone scammers.
Or rather, to justify what the strong were already doing and didn't have to ask anybody's permission to do, and that nobody else ever had a say about that mattered.
It should be illegal for Telco to allow SS7 spoofing for numbers that customer does not show they own.
Initial SIP setup shows number not to be a number they own, drop the SIP dial and be done with it.
Also, all US based phone numbers should have US based person tied to it. If they misbehave, drop them and blacklist them.
All this is solvable if we don't let phone providers get away with "Welp, the checks cleared, this is not our problem."
Yeah, and they use Whatsapp, Telegram, or Facetime, or Messenger to connect.
Country codes stopped being indicative of location the moment we removed the wires from our telephones.
Apple makes a lot of dumb user-hostile decisions but this one is particularly egregious and has caught me off guard.
I have no idea the reason.