That could be selection bias. Not something that the telcos did. Many of these scams are run out of India and Nigeria. They teach English as a second languag

That could be selection bias. Not something that the telcos did. Many of these scams are run out of India and Nigeria. They teach English as a second language fairly young. That lets them cheaply target English speaking countries. I am not saying it is because of that but if I was running a scam center (I am already looking for 'the easy way') I am not targeting something where the pool of people I draw from need to know another language. One scambaiting call I watched they had gave the person running the scam had a laptop from about 10 years ago with 4GB of RAM and a very low spec processor. In other words cheap and easy to get. Low monetary risk with high monetary reward. The core issue is the system allows spoofing and poor verification of who is getting blocks of numbers. Also low enforcement of laws in originating countries. The laws actually force the telcos to sort of do this too. As they in many cases must route. But the reality is we have bad actors that we do not want to route. But that same tool to not route could be used for reasons like what many tech companies currently use to get rid of people they do not like for whatever reason.