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What baffles me about this is that getting people to dial these numbers has been a known scam for many years. The fix seems stupidly trivial: break up the North
by abtinf 7y ago
What baffles me about this is that getting people to dial these numbers has been a known scam for many years. The fix seems stupidly trivial: break up the North American Numbering Plan to move them out of the +1 zone. They just don’t belong there. Frankly, Canada should be moved out the +1 zone too.
- Marsymars 7y ago> Frankly, Canada should be moved out the +1 zone too. Why? Who does that benefit? It's pretty common for phone plans in both the US and Canada to treat the US/Canada as a single region for the purpose of long distance calls and texts.
- jgowdy 7y agoGood point. The purpose of my comment you replied to above was that there should be either pricing normalization such that callers aren't surprised, OR split the +1 country code. Its not just "kick everyone out of the US country code", it's protect consumers by principle of least surprise sorta. But again, this only protects against toll fraud and not all of the other "Appear to be in a nation you aren't" scams.
- jarfil 7y agoJust changing the zone would do nothing for people who blindly dial back without even checking the number. What we need is a system to report the per-minute cost of an outgoing call, and being able to block any call above that limit (like, set the limit to $0.00/min and you can only call numbers included in your plan). But of course carriers wouldn't want that, not only because it would make consumers painfully aware of how much their calls cost, but also because they are profiting from these scams.