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Is that the case? When I worked in telefony abuse, like this, was pretty hard to track because of all the middlemen involved. They'd have phone banks with mult
by kodah 4y ago
Is that the case?
When I worked in telefony abuse, like this, was pretty hard to track because of all the middlemen involved. They'd have phone banks with multiple phone numbers that they'd lease from providers in India who worked with them to rotate through outbound numbers. India doesn't allow Americans telefony companies, much less voip (in order to provide these telefony companies business), so looking at India from a telefony perspective is much like looking at several black boxes.
Tldr; because of India's policies the country of India has to do something about it. Much like Chinese knockoffs and IP theft.
- bradleyjg 4y agoWe handled this in the days of email spam by blacklisting providers that refused to police their customers.
- saghm 4y agoWhat would happen if the American companies just started playing hardball? For example, what if they required that contracts with foreign telephone companies had a fee based on scams detected as coming through and just refused to work with any company that wouldn't agree to those terms? I have no idea if that exact idea would make sense or even be possible to implement, but my thinking is that in many cases the American companies might be able to afford to lose the business more than their international partners, so playing a game of chicken might be worthwhile. In other words, just because American telecoms might not be able to do anything from a technical perspective doesn't mean that they don't have social or business pressure they could apply if they actually wanted to solve the problem. Ultimately, it seems like the American companies haven't done anything because they don't really have any business incentive to; as long as they aren't held culpable legally and don't lose sales due to the PR hit, trying to use their influence to solve this is purely a risk from a financial perspective. I don't at all subscribe to the Friedman perspective that businesses are ethically obligated to maximize profits at the expense of literally everything else, but I do think that it's a reasonable description of the way businesses trend toward acting; an entity structurally designed for making profits will inevitably end up acting in a way that only considers that measure unless the incentives are changed, which is precisely why we _do_ need to regulate things to curtail business behavior that's a net bad for society as a whole by making it unprofitable, whether that's through direct fines or making business liable either civilly or criminally for their actions.
- kodah 4y agoThe form of hardball (that I'm aware of) would be blacklisting providers, which means good faith people get blocked along with bad faith people. That'd limit a lot of people from the US communicating back to India. It would be possible to block inbound but not outbound calls though, I believe.
- thorncorona 4y agoIn that case the good faith people can move to a different provider and the problem will self segregate out. Pretty much everyone who communicates overseas use apps now because they’re free.
- supertrope 4y agoThe FCC has ordered American phone companies to drop traffic from known spam conduit phone companies. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-global-uc-robocall-mitigation-database-0 https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-remove-global-uc-robocall-m... Hopefully this will tighten the noose and make robocall traffic radioactive.
- saghm 4y agoI may be too cynical, but I can't help but assume that none of them will actually follow through with this unless/until someone gets actually sanctioned for not doing this in a significant way (i.e. something that costs them more than they make from not doing so).