4 ms·
Scammers are getting more and more sophisticated now a days. It seems like most of these scam calls are a result of the ability to spoof phone numbers. Spoofin
by busymom0 8y ago
Scammers are getting more and more sophisticated now a days. It seems like most of these scam calls are a result of the ability to spoof phone numbers.
Spoofing phone numbers does have legitimate purposes (for example a phone number from a customer service company is able to use their company phone number as the caller ID) but these scammers seem to abuse this. It's quite similar to how SMTP for emails allows the "From" field to be set to something other than your actual email. Email scammers abuse this same thing too but the difference is that in SMTP emails, you can still tap the detailed headers of the email and see what the actual "from" email is. But for phone numbers, this isn't the case.
I think, the best way to solve this phone scam issue would be by modifying the phone protocol (I am not sure of the details) to allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number.
- marcoperaza 8y agoAt the very least, for calls purporting to come from within the US, it seems that telephone companies should be able to verify the actual origin of the call and cut off spammers. But perhaps there is more to this than I understand that makes it infeasible.
- Aloha 8y agoThat is largely correct, yes - the issue comes up where numbers are valid from more than one carrier, even though say, carrier A owns the numbers, its perfectly valid to place outbound calls for those numbers via carrier B - there is no records kept for that kind of thing currently however.
- warp 8y agoThis is apparently being implemented as we speak ( SHAKEN/STIR, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR ). (which seems a US focused initiative, which I guess makes sense as the problem seems much worse there than in other countries... but I wonder if that means that you guys will be getting lots of robocalls from unknown foreign numbers in the future ;)
- Aloha 8y agoIf a majority of robocalls are originating on IP endpoints as the entry to the PSTN - this would appear to solve the issue at hand, SHAKEN/STIR, is an IP only protocol, and has not been extended to TDM originating traffic though (nor could it be really)
- busymom0 8y agoI am located in Canada and I received about 15 - 20 spam phone calls each week. Most of them would even spoof the phone number to my area code (sometimes my own phone number lol). So I don't think it's a US only problem.
- rsync 8y ago"This is apparently being implemented as we speak ( SHAKEN/STIR, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR )." I see twilio at least mentioning shaken/stir: https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-eliminating-robocalls https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-eliminating... ... but I am curious if anyone knows: can this be interacted with, currently, with either twiml or twilio functions ?
- rqs 8y ago> I think, the best way to solve this phone scam issue would be by modifying the phone protocol (I am not sure of the details) to allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number. In China, we call this type of scam "响一声". It was very common until phone screen softwares started marking this kind of calls[0] so people stopped calling them back. Maybe use one of those call screen app (offline one is better) until phone companies figured out how to resolve this? [0] https://i.imgur.com/vkzbqhc https://i.imgur.com/vkzbqhc
- viraptor 8y ago> allow users to be able to see the "Real" underlying phone number There are many cases where people will find it unacceptable. You don't want someone to dial directly to someone's desk at a corporation rather than front desk. You don't want someone to call a doctor on their private phone (they call out via practice's number from the road). Etc. You can't solve this issue by providing the two number. It's only solvable by making spam calls expensive for the callers, or punishing telcos for unverified spoofing.
- busymom0 8y ago> You don't want someone to dial directly to someone's desk at a corporation rather than front desk. Couldn't this also be said about emails from companies? Similar to how they have the "donotreply" emails, can't they also have "donotdial" phone numbers?
- viraptor 8y agoThe emails have links in them which direct you back to the website where you can continue the transaction/communication/whatever. You can't easily do this on the phone. You do want people to call you back. You as a company, not a specific phone on a specific desk.
- icedchai 8y agoJust like with email, that ship sailed a long time ago. In many cases, there is no "real" underlying phone number (example: VOIP... VOIP numbers may as well be disposable.)
- foobarian 8y agoI don't know, I could see the big mobile networks going off on their own and highlighting trusted callers from their own networks. And it would take only a few peering points between the big providers to cover the vast majority of cell users. I would actually switch networks for this (presumably one would do it first).
- Aloha 8y agoIt's not even trusted callers, its blocking CID spoofing for numbers in their own owned pools, that are originating calls from elsewhere - this should be blocked, as I can think of very few cases where a cellular provider would find this valid.
- Scoundreller 8y agoHeh, I once spoofed the number of a provider’s outbound promotions CID. My friends on that network never paid to receive my calls, even while roaming.
- 8y ago
- dcbadacd 8y agoSMTP is nowadays quite protectable against real domains being used by someone else. SPF, DKIM and DMARC all tremendously help. However, Microsoft has a patent that stops a few additional measures from being taken against certain spoofings (SPFv2), you can thank them for that.