There was a period, over a decade ago now, where I was constantly getting scam calls from certain area codes and prefixes. Looking them up on TelcoData[0], the

There was a period, over a decade ago now, where I was constantly getting scam calls from certain area codes and prefixes. Looking them up on TelcoData[0], the prefixes and thousands blocks were all from various phone companies I'd never heard of (and had nothingburger websites). It turned out that scammers had set up actual phone companies to carry their traffic. They were not only doing their usual scamming, but also raking in cash from the resulting incoming Caller ID lookups. These have either been shut down or have fallen under the radar. It's a shame that (just like TCP/IP), SS7 was designed in an era of good faith and didn't have security baked into it from the start. [0] https://telcodata.us/ https://telcodata.us/