How would I even find the right entity to sue. All I have is a spoofed number.

Therein lie the problem. The caller ID system was not designed with the thought that callers might spoof numbers. I think it's time to revise the signaling protocols to make this not possible. If it is a world wide problem and the parties outside the US (my area of concern) choose not to support this, then make the companies that refuse to support this responsible for any fines that accrue from illegal calls. I think this might motivate them to help solve the problem.

And FWIW I'm also in the group that doesn't answer calls that are not linked to my contacts. I have also noticed that the spoofed numbers use my area code, exchange and even a jumble of the last 4 digits to get my attention.

What's particularly infuriating about this is that the phone company knows which numbers it owns. It can tell if a call coming in from another provider is spoofed to a number it owns and block it, but they don't currently do that. If every phone company did this, it would significantly cut down on the number of bogus calls because you could only spoof calls on the same network that you're on.

Exactly. We need some kind of better information than just a trivially faked phone number to be passed to the end user devices.

If nothing else I want some sort of non-forgeable identifier for the telcom provider of the calling party. Then we can work on blacklisting those that cater to spammers.

We don't even have to worry about overseas. Get the US and Canada on board (likely easy to get Canada on board) and at least all spoofed numbers will be from obviously foreign locations (or Mexico?). Those calls can be safely ignored for most people.

> How would I even find the right entity to sue. All I have is a spoofed number.

You probably never will, not without stringing them along and getting them to slip up and mention some identifiable information about themselves.

There's a pretty good Reply All episode about this: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/long-distance/

Ask the NSA