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How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The tariff perhaps could be

How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The tariff perhaps could be as small as 2 or 10 cents per call to make these operations unprofitable. I'm sure that the telecom operators in the foreign country could easily track down (or already know precisely where to find) the call centers. Once the fraud falls below a threshold the tariff can be removed. Punitive tariffs, quotas, bans get applied to every kind of product -- counterfeits, contaminated foods, polluting vehicles. I never heard any government agency suggest applying it to countries that are the overwhelming source of scam calls.

treve 7y ago
The phone system seems pretty absurd. Just the fact that we can't trust originating phone numbers seems odd. There's lots of good ideas to go around, and there's so much in internet technology that could be applied to the phone system, but I'd love to read an article on why its hard to update the phone system.
- smnrchrds 7y ago
  Take the difficulties of IPv6 migration and remove the ticking clock of running out of IPv4 addresses. How long would the migration take? 10 years? 10000 years? I bet it would be closer to the latter than the former.
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    And add in the fact that Nortel made a ton of the currently deployed phone switch gear, and they haven’t existed for almost 20 years now.
    - dade_ 7y ago
      The businesses were purchased by Avaya (enterprise) and Genband (carrier). There are support and upgrade paths available. This fact also has nothing to do with the problem.
- dade_ 7y ago
  There are many reasons: -You forward your office phone to your cell phone. You want the number of the original person calling to show up on your cell phone. This means that the office phone system needs to spoof the original caller's phone number. This could be a local call, an overseas call, etc. This is not a simple update issue. How does the telco know that this is a legitimate spoof? Further, if this is blocked and the number is rewritten to the billing telephone number, the client will complain that they are answering outside calls, thinking it is their office calling. -How the carriers are integrated, how do they trust the incoming call info from another carrier? Blacklists and whitelists are impossible to keep up as scammers are randomizing the data. This is an expensive problem, and one that carriers would love to solve - there isn't a lack of incentive either. I've seen a few solutions out there, but I am not convinced they work as advertised.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    If I want to call someone using a different caller ID through twilio, twilio makes me verify ownership of that number. But of course, then twilio is only doing this to keep scammers off their own platform. Since the telcos don't validate anything, there are plenty of less scrupulous providers that don't validate anything. So all the telcos need to do is require anyone providing access to their networks to validate their caller ID numbers.
    - to11mtm 7y ago
      Hahaha So true. I actually deal with (part of) this problem from the other side: I maintain text messaging for the biggest company in our sector. Within the last few months, we've been running into issues where our phone numbers are actually being stolen by these third parties. Service providers are SUPPOSED to receive letters of authorization before porting a number. I.e. if I want to use my phone number on Twilio, I need to provide a letter showing ownership of the number (or blocks of numbers) I wish to provision on their platform. Twilio, BTW, is one of the good guys on this. But FWIW, if the number's already provisioned they can't really tell you when a number's been hijacked, you won't know till you try to use it and Twilio's API gives errors. Anyway... big takeaway is our numbers keep winding up 'stolen' by another provider (not Twilio). Every time we email them, they release the numbers back to us, but asking for LOAs to see how this happened gets crickets. Oh and this process leaves the numbers unusable for 1-3 business days.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  The internet has been slowly getting better but remember that in general we can’t trust the ”from” field of an email message either. No need to even spoof it as it’s literally whatever the sender wants to put there, by design.
kerkeslager 7y ago
It may be a surprise to the HN "incentives are the only way to do anything" crowd, but there simply is not an incentive structure that will fix this problem, because nobody knows where the calls are coming from. Not the US, not the telcos, not the countries the calls are coming from, nobody. You can place the tariff on countries, and then the countries just have to accept the tariff because there's not a damn thing they can do about it as long as scammers can spoof phone numbers. The converse of this is that it's pretty ridiculous to assume that countries have scammers in them because they're just tolerating them. Sure, we could rush out a technical solution, but then it would run the risk of being broken rather quickly, and further it's important to not compromise the reliability of the phone system. Too many critical services rely on it. It's worth taking the time to do it right. Last I heard, the FCC was in talks with telcos to finalize a solution, but I would expect it to take at least another year to implement and deploy it. Until then, I guess we'll all have to deal with annoying scammers and comments by people who don't understand why spoofing makes their pet incentive idea irrelevant.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fellellor 7y ago
  It’s not right, that a sensible comment like yours is being downvoted. Spoofing is real, and not easy to track down depending on the resources you have at your disposal. And Indian law enforcement is certainly behind the western world in that regard. Besides, it’s not like these scammers are paying taxes to the Indian government, so they don’t have any national incentive to facilitate scammers. Tax compliance in countries like India, outside the first world, is very poor. Though the article mentions that Indian authorities are cooperating with Canadian officials, it needs to be understood that this cooperation isn’t based on any incentive structure, other than civilised societies need to crack down on crime. Crime in Canada is a low priority for Indian officials, just like I’m sure it’s the other way around. Finally, Canada doesn’t even feature in the top 15-20 trading partners for India, last time I checked, so I don’t know what punitive incentive can be hoped for here. If you need a solution, it would be more productive to approach from a more pragmatic, cooperative point of view, rather than being all high and mighty and taking a carpet bombing style approach that affects legitimate business as well. Or, you could do that but it wouldn’t even matter. Edit: I’d like to add that every day there is news about people, here in India also losing their life savings to these scammers. So it would be wrong to have an impression that authorities and citizens of this country take pleasure in people from richer countries being scammed. I’ve old, not so tech savvy parents myself, who I realise are pretty vulnerable to this evil.
gregmac 7y ago
My understand use these call centers use VoIP providers in the country though. The traffic crossing the border is likely just an encrypted stream, indistinguishable from some VPN or other generic service. The VoIP providers are getting paid (by the scammers), your cell/phone company is getting paid twice (by both you and the VoIP provider). It's not like customers are switching to the other spam-less phone option, or giving up having voice service entirely. I hate to be cynical about it, but literally all the players in a position to track and shut these calls down via technical means have absolutely no tangible incentives to do so.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  This. Exactly this. Some company in the US does the VoIP->POTS connection. Someone's name and CC is on their file. Saying "oh there's no way to know where the calls come from" is just lame excuses. CallerId spoofing is one thing, but POTS has other systems.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dade_ 7y ago
  Please point me to the technical solution that I am avoiding.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  Why not put the onus on the last mile? If you get spam calls, your carrier is liable unless they can point to the source of the disruption. If they can't point to where they got it from, they are liable, and so on. If they can identify them but they're unwilling to pay out, their link to you is still liable. Eventually, the buck has to stop somewhere.
  - gesman 7y ago
    +1 If you facilitated criminal to directly connect with me - you’re liable. Telcos should be liable for “call laundering” similar as banks as for money laundering. If you don’t know identity of person calling me - you’re responsible for damages. Problem solved.
Aperocky 7y ago
Things coming over lines no longer have a country. How do you determine which call are international? All of them are local and operated by foreign call center over the internet. They can easily acquire a VPN and the internet traffic will be local as well. How do you even track all that internet traffic? Are you prepared to give all your secret to government to track these things?
- varjag 7y ago
  If connection between two nodes in the network is possible to establish, tracking it down is possible as well - giving the willing intermediaries. The fines or tariffs structure may help ensure they will be willing. It is the same problem as with finance transactions wrt money laundering really, which is a solved problem. The only cover bad actors have is finding a sovereign state willing to cooperate.
Arun2009 7y ago
Indian law enforcement officials do take action against those who are complicit in scams similar to this. E.g., see here: https://globalnews.ca/news/6182793/india-call-centre-scam-arrests/ https://globalnews.ca/news/6182793/india-call-centre-scam-ar... > In a press release issued Sunday, Delhi police said they had arrested 32 “white-collar criminals” and seized 55 computers along with dozens of cellphones, internet routers and “illegal software” being used in what they described as a “swanky international cheating scam call centre targeting Canada citizens.” > All of those arrested are residents of India and between the ages of 18 and 38, according to the statement. > The Delhi police alleged the scheme has been targeting Canadian citizens by claiming their social insurance numbers had been compromised. Here's another: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/uk-india-police-shut-down-kolkata-call-centres-in-major-online-fraud-probe/articleshow/71693552.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio... > LONDON: British Police service on Monday said it had shut down two sophisticated criminal call centres in Kolkata, instrumental in defrauding thousands of victims in the UK alone, with the cooperation of Indian police. > The call centres were raided by 50 officers from the Cyber Division of Kolkata Police last week as part of a worldwide four-year operation conducted by the UK police and Microsoft.
csomar 7y ago
> How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The calls are coming from Canada. These guys are buying Voip and dialing over the net.
tinus_hn 7y ago
With VOIP location is pretty much irrelevant. Unless the scam is getting people to call premium numbers this is much harder than you think.
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
Most unsollicited phone calls I receive are not from another country.

treve 7y ago

The phone system seems pretty absurd. Just the fact that we can't trust originating phone numbers seems odd. There's lots of good ideas to go around, and there's so much in internet technology that could be applied to the phone system, but I'd love to read an article on why its hard to update the phone system.

smnrchrds 7y ago
Take the difficulties of IPv6 migration and remove the ticking clock of running out of IPv4 addresses. How long would the migration take? 10 years? 10000 years? I bet it would be closer to the latter than the former.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  And add in the fact that Nortel made a ton of the currently deployed phone switch gear, and they haven’t existed for almost 20 years now.
  - dade_ 7y ago
    The businesses were purchased by Avaya (enterprise) and Genband (carrier). There are support and upgrade paths available. This fact also has nothing to do with the problem.
dade_ 7y ago
There are many reasons: -You forward your office phone to your cell phone. You want the number of the original person calling to show up on your cell phone. This means that the office phone system needs to spoof the original caller's phone number. This could be a local call, an overseas call, etc. This is not a simple update issue. How does the telco know that this is a legitimate spoof? Further, if this is blocked and the number is rewritten to the billing telephone number, the client will complain that they are answering outside calls, thinking it is their office calling. -How the carriers are integrated, how do they trust the incoming call info from another carrier? Blacklists and whitelists are impossible to keep up as scammers are randomizing the data. This is an expensive problem, and one that carriers would love to solve - there isn't a lack of incentive either. I've seen a few solutions out there, but I am not convinced they work as advertised.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  If I want to call someone using a different caller ID through twilio, twilio makes me verify ownership of that number. But of course, then twilio is only doing this to keep scammers off their own platform. Since the telcos don't validate anything, there are plenty of less scrupulous providers that don't validate anything. So all the telcos need to do is require anyone providing access to their networks to validate their caller ID numbers.
  - to11mtm 7y ago
    Hahaha So true. I actually deal with (part of) this problem from the other side: I maintain text messaging for the biggest company in our sector. Within the last few months, we've been running into issues where our phone numbers are actually being stolen by these third parties. Service providers are SUPPOSED to receive letters of authorization before porting a number. I.e. if I want to use my phone number on Twilio, I need to provide a letter showing ownership of the number (or blocks of numbers) I wish to provision on their platform. Twilio, BTW, is one of the good guys on this. But FWIW, if the number's already provisioned they can't really tell you when a number's been hijacked, you won't know till you try to use it and Twilio's API gives errors. Anyway... big takeaway is our numbers keep winding up 'stolen' by another provider (not Twilio). Every time we email them, they release the numbers back to us, but asking for LOAs to see how this happened gets crickets. Oh and this process leaves the numbers unusable for 1-3 business days.
Sharlin 7y ago
The internet has been slowly getting better but remember that in general we can’t trust the ”from” field of an email message either. No need to even spoof it as it’s literally whatever the sender wants to put there, by design.

kerkeslager 7y ago

It may be a surprise to the HN "incentives are the only way to do anything" crowd, but there simply is not an incentive structure that will fix this problem, because nobody knows where the calls are coming from. Not the US, not the telcos, not the countries the calls are coming from, nobody. You can place the tariff on countries, and then the countries just have to accept the tariff because there's not a damn thing they can do about it as long as scammers can spoof phone numbers. The converse of this is that it's pretty ridiculous to assume that countries have scammers in them because they're just tolerating them. Sure, we could rush out a technical solution, but then it would run the risk of being broken rather quickly, and further it's important to not compromise the reliability of the phone system. Too many critical services rely on it. It's worth taking the time to do it right. Last I heard, the FCC was in talks with telcos to finalize a solution, but I would expect it to take at least another year to implement and deploy it. Until then, I guess we'll all have to deal with annoying scammers and comments by people who don't understand why spoofing makes their pet incentive idea irrelevant.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fellellor 7y ago
It’s not right, that a sensible comment like yours is being downvoted. Spoofing is real, and not easy to track down depending on the resources you have at your disposal. And Indian law enforcement is certainly behind the western world in that regard. Besides, it’s not like these scammers are paying taxes to the Indian government, so they don’t have any national incentive to facilitate scammers. Tax compliance in countries like India, outside the first world, is very poor. Though the article mentions that Indian authorities are cooperating with Canadian officials, it needs to be understood that this cooperation isn’t based on any incentive structure, other than civilised societies need to crack down on crime. Crime in Canada is a low priority for Indian officials, just like I’m sure it’s the other way around. Finally, Canada doesn’t even feature in the top 15-20 trading partners for India, last time I checked, so I don’t know what punitive incentive can be hoped for here. If you need a solution, it would be more productive to approach from a more pragmatic, cooperative point of view, rather than being all high and mighty and taking a carpet bombing style approach that affects legitimate business as well. Or, you could do that but it wouldn’t even matter. Edit: I’d like to add that every day there is news about people, here in India also losing their life savings to these scammers. So it would be wrong to have an impression that authorities and citizens of this country take pleasure in people from richer countries being scammed. I’ve old, not so tech savvy parents myself, who I realise are pretty vulnerable to this evil.

gregmac 7y ago

My understand use these call centers use VoIP providers in the country though. The traffic crossing the border is likely just an encrypted stream, indistinguishable from some VPN or other generic service. The VoIP providers are getting paid (by the scammers), your cell/phone company is getting paid twice (by both you and the VoIP provider). It's not like customers are switching to the other spam-less phone option, or giving up having voice service entirely. I hate to be cynical about it, but literally all the players in a position to track and shut these calls down via technical means have absolutely no tangible incentives to do so.

raverbashing 7y ago
This. Exactly this. Some company in the US does the VoIP->POTS connection. Someone's name and CC is on their file. Saying "oh there's no way to know where the calls come from" is just lame excuses. CallerId spoofing is one thing, but POTS has other systems.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dade_ 7y ago
Please point me to the technical solution that I am avoiding.
heartbeats 7y ago
Why not put the onus on the last mile? If you get spam calls, your carrier is liable unless they can point to the source of the disruption. If they can't point to where they got it from, they are liable, and so on. If they can identify them but they're unwilling to pay out, their link to you is still liable. Eventually, the buck has to stop somewhere.
- gesman 7y ago
  +1 If you facilitated criminal to directly connect with me - you’re liable. Telcos should be liable for “call laundering” similar as banks as for money laundering. If you don’t know identity of person calling me - you’re responsible for damages. Problem solved.

Aperocky 7y ago

Things coming over lines no longer have a country. How do you determine which call are international? All of them are local and operated by foreign call center over the internet. They can easily acquire a VPN and the internet traffic will be local as well. How do you even track all that internet traffic? Are you prepared to give all your secret to government to track these things?

varjag 7y ago
If connection between two nodes in the network is possible to establish, tracking it down is possible as well - giving the willing intermediaries. The fines or tariffs structure may help ensure they will be willing. It is the same problem as with finance transactions wrt money laundering really, which is a solved problem. The only cover bad actors have is finding a sovereign state willing to cooperate.

Arun2009 7y ago

Indian law enforcement officials do take action against those who are complicit in scams similar to this. E.g., see here: https://globalnews.ca/news/6182793/india-call-centre-scam-arrests/ https://globalnews.ca/news/6182793/india-call-centre-scam-ar... > In a press release issued Sunday, Delhi police said they had arrested 32 “white-collar criminals” and seized 55 computers along with dozens of cellphones, internet routers and “illegal software” being used in what they described as a “swanky international cheating scam call centre targeting Canada citizens.” > All of those arrested are residents of India and between the ages of 18 and 38, according to the statement. > The Delhi police alleged the scheme has been targeting Canadian citizens by claiming their social insurance numbers had been compromised. Here's another: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/uk-india-police-shut-down-kolkata-call-centres-in-major-online-fraud-probe/articleshow/71693552.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio... > LONDON: British Police service on Monday said it had shut down two sophisticated criminal call centres in Kolkata, instrumental in defrauding thousands of victims in the UK alone, with the cooperation of Indian police. > The call centres were raided by 50 officers from the Cyber Division of Kolkata Police last week as part of a worldwide four-year operation conducted by the UK police and Microsoft.

csomar 7y ago

> How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The calls are coming from Canada. These guys are buying Voip and dialing over the net.

tinus_hn 7y ago

With VOIP location is pretty much irrelevant. Unless the scam is getting people to call premium numbers this is much harder than you think.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

Most unsollicited phone calls I receive are not from another country.