Good start. Next, put the people running these scam phone providers in jail.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.