Nope, turns out it is some sort of crappy regulation preventing providers from stopping the robocallers from spoofing numbers in the US:

>"The FCC last year authorized voice service providers to block more types of calls in which the Caller ID has been spoofed or in which the number on the Caller ID is invalid." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/robocallers-evol...

If that were the root cause, it would have already been fixed. There is no FCC regulation that Congress can't change.

Nope, turns out there is virtually no downside to making spam calls in the US, and so companies continue to do it. The spoofed numbers are just a way they implement that to get around consumer efforts to prevent it.

I'll take your word for that. But the problem is that bad regulation has created a downside for providers to block spam calls so they continue not to.

I would easily switch providers tomorrow if one of the features was "no spoofed numbers". This would be a giant market advantage if not prevented by this regulatory issue (whatever it is).

T-Mobile offers it for free: https://www.t-mobile.com/resources/call-protection

Verizon Wireless offers it for $2.99 a line: https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/call-filter-faqs/

Not sure about the other major carriers.

I am on T-Mobile. There was a point when most of the spam to my phone was from Scam Likely. Then the robocallers learned that this is the truth, and I get spam about my credit card and something in Chinese that isn't so flagged.

I haven't gotten a single spam call since enabling the blocking.

Neither of those block spoofed numbers, both work by creating a blacklist.

We have plenty of regulation and government attention on the issue, and I somehow doubt Congressional pockets are being lined by the campaign contributions from Big Spam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry

Politicians are not being supported by the spammers themselves, but by the telecoms that do not want to make costly changes to their network to stop or enforce this problem.

This couldn’t be more obvious in our fcc chair who is basically against any kind of government regulation.

And don't forget the little fact that the telecoms make money from providing service to the spammers.

The problem is that a lot of spam callers are not based in the US, and it is incredibly time consuming and expensive to prosecute spam callers outside the US.

The wheels of justice work, but they don't move very quickly. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/business/irs-phone-scams-...

Carriers make money terminating the calls both in terms of using people’s cell minutes but all reciprocal compensation for terminating the call on their network. Carriers can get rid of it any time they want. Some even offer services to block the calls for a price like Att call protect.

It's amazing how often I hear this kind of argument. "<Xyz> didn't work because it wasn't done correctly"

Why do we humans do that? Why doesn't failure cause introspection/examination rather than excuse making?

On a side note, it feels conspiratorial to explain failure as, "there's double agents on the inside sabotaging the effort"

> On a side note, it feels conspiratorial to explain failure as, "there's double agents on the inside sabotaging the effort"

There are people currently heading government agencies that lobbied or fought against those agencies. See the CFPB and EPA. It's not a conspiracy–it's reality.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture for a discussion of this topic.

> conspiratorial

Politicians underfunding programs, then suggesting we should cut or privatize them because they performed poorly, all intentionally, is a well known and mostly open fact, not a closely guarded secret conspiracy.