3 ms·

It's been years since I looked at any of the telephony standards but... why is phone number spoofing still a thing? Your telco knows what phone number you pay

by ohazi 9y ago

It's been years since I looked at any of the telephony standards but... why is phone number spoofing still a thing? Your telco knows what phone number you pay for. Can't they just not connect calls that claim to be coming from not-that-number?

toast0 9y ago
This works fine for calls from your landline or cellphone. It doesn't work as well go businesses which may legitimately split incoming and outgoing service, so the outgoing carrier really has no way to know what source numbers are legitimate. There's also a pretty big business in traffic resale, and none of those guys have any idea. What would be more useful is accessible path information, so I can complain to my carrier about a call, and they can find out where it came from and throw people or companies off the network.
- jonhendry18 9y ago
  "so the outgoing carrier really has no way to know what source numbers are legitimate." It shouldn't be difficult to get a single number that is legitimate and limit the caller id to that number. Any telecom carrier whose customer is requesting a wide variety of phone numbers ought to know that something sketchy is going on.
  - toast0 9y ago
    Let's say I'm a not entirely small company, with employees with phones on their desks who call customers and have direct numbers to be called. When they call out, the caller id should be their desk number so the people they're calling know it's them and answer the phone. But the carrier that handles inbound calling charges an arm and a leg for outbound, so I'd like to use another carrier for outbound; I don't want to change my inbound carrier.
    - jonhendry18 9y ago
      In that case there should still be some similarity among the numbers (area code, exchange, etc), and it wouldn't be difficult to tell the outgoing provider that you're going to be using a particular block of numbers. At a minimum, the outgoing calls shouldn't have numbers from different area codes every day.

by ohazi 9y ago

toast0 9y ago

This works fine for calls from your landline or cellphone. It doesn't work as well go businesses which may legitimately split incoming and outgoing service, so the outgoing carrier really has no way to know what source numbers are legitimate. There's also a pretty big business in traffic resale, and none of those guys have any idea. What would be more useful is accessible path information, so I can complain to my carrier about a call, and they can find out where it came from and throw people or companies off the network.

jonhendry18 9y ago
"so the outgoing carrier really has no way to know what source numbers are legitimate." It shouldn't be difficult to get a single number that is legitimate and limit the caller id to that number. Any telecom carrier whose customer is requesting a wide variety of phone numbers ought to know that something sketchy is going on.
- toast0 9y ago
  Let's say I'm a not entirely small company, with employees with phones on their desks who call customers and have direct numbers to be called. When they call out, the caller id should be their desk number so the people they're calling know it's them and answer the phone. But the carrier that handles inbound calling charges an arm and a leg for outbound, so I'd like to use another carrier for outbound; I don't want to change my inbound carrier.
  - jonhendry18 9y ago
    In that case there should still be some similarity among the numbers (area code, exchange, etc), and it wouldn't be difficult to tell the outgoing provider that you're going to be using a particular block of numbers. At a minimum, the outgoing calls shouldn't have numbers from different area codes every day.