Original spoofing made a little sense in the context of a limited capacity PBX, and a limited capacity exchange providing line grouping and hunt groups. It made sense when it could only spoof to the extent of the branch or local office going out on one consistent number for all the work groups. Sales could always give the number of the local office rather than their desk. A big office might have to have a group of sales numbers. That's the world spoofing came into, and it is long dead.

Most of the responses I see so far don't seem to realise that world ever existed.

The bank/doctor/employer used to call from the local visible office. You'd know if it was the local bank branch, the nearby business office, the card, loan or mortgage centre as they'd all have different PBX spoofed numbers as it was constrained by the line groups. You wouldn't get to know from caller ID whose desk it was.

Let small businesses spoof the least significant digit - yes just ONE, and large businesses two digits. Then it can work like it was meant to, and we can have customer service again.

I wonder if there is way to get a personal 900 # and cost the spammer $10 per minute.

For $600/hr, I wouldn't mind to receive the spamming calls from them. Maybe some robo dialer might just be stupid enough to call? $$$$ :-)

That's a thing in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23869462 7p/minute, but still not bad.

The whole problem with robocalls is that your provider gets paid some small pittance to terminate the call, but gives none of that to you. Because they don't want to change, they drag their heels and complain and complain.

> That's a thing in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23869462 7p/minute, but still not bad.

> The whole problem with robocalls is that your provider gets paid some small pittance to terminate the call, but gives none of that to you. Because they don't want to change, they drag their heels and complain and complain.

This must be the same logic used to allow for spam physical mail but laws against the virtual sort.

Some guy in the UK did this. It's fairly hard to manage however, because there is a lot of regulations around his legal requirements i.e. needs to disclose that it's a paid number, etc. He make a bit of sidecash off it and a surprising number of spam callers are happy to pay.

I wonder if people will try to start moving to app based calling as a default : Zoom, google hangouts, whatsapp, fb messenger etc.

I have already. Its shame you have to get a phone number with cell phone data plan.

Phone gives you QOS, data does not. Until my zoom packets get prioritization, nothing beats POTSoIP

FB messenger call quality is much clearer than any cell phone call I've ever had.

Not guaranteed packets. It’s clearer because better codecs and more bandwidth is used but your data packet will get reprioritized before that low quality voice packet

I've been getting a lot of spam calls from alleged European numbes (and the scammers appear to be speaking Spanish when I overhear them) since my son foolishly entered my number into a website to "win some Robux!" (a very teachable moment about Internet scams) - they list an overseas premium number as the calling number, then hang up before you can answer, in the hope that you'll return the call and end up paying 20 euros for the privilege.

I made a deliberate effort to answer such calls on the first ring, thus costing them money by connecting the call, and after two weeks of that the calls stopped.

> So, when are we going to actually take away the ability to spoof your phone number?

When we burn SS7 to the ground and start over, which will never happen in an era of WhatsApp/FB messenger/telegram/signal

Phone companies should be required to forward the originator information to the users receiving the calls. Then people can collectively block callers, adblock style.

This won’t work. VoIP providers would have to be comprehensively banned.

You can pass the fines the other way. Maybe some VoIP providers decide they do want to be good citizens after all and stop spammers using their service, maybe some decide they like the robocall provisioning business and they'll eat the fines. Adjust the fines until the problem is reduced to acceptable levels.

"Hi, thanks for your enquiry about VoIP. Yes, we have a No Questions Asked policy and it'll be $5000 pcm plus $0.01 per second calls, we need the first $10 000 up front and you need to stay $1000 in credit or we pause service. OK?"

"What! That's crazy, we can't pay 1¢ per second, your competitor is ten times cheaper"

"And my competitor doesn't like spam. Either 1¢ per second is fine or you are wasting my time, get off the line. No questions asked is what you need, and that's what it costs. I paid $25 000 in fines just last week, that's a lot of seconds at one cent per second"

"I'll have you know we're a market leading direct sales business and every one of our calls is based on a legitimate sales lead, but I see your point, the $10 000 will be in your account first thing tomorrow".

They have to provide the IP address of the caller. If it's untrusted it gets blocked. Simple enough. No sympathy here.

> So, when are we going to actually take away the ability to spoof your phone number?

Around the same time we can no longer spoof the From: in emails.

These 2 technologies are quite different, but similar in the way the architecture treats the originator. (i.e. there's no authentication or validation of the originator required)

I'm beginning to wonder whether some regulatory authorities are tacitly accepting the current state of affairs. It wouldn't be too hard to imagine someone with deep pockets coming out and saying to get rid of it would restrict "free enterprise".

The networks do have unspoofable numbers which they use for reciprocal compensation, rural termination fees, and other fees/assessments. They are "bill to numbers" and how the carriers figure out payment between each other.

> Whatever utility that feature may have is clearly outweighed by all the harm it's causing

I'm curious. What utility does spoofing a phone number have?

People calling from company phones, but wanting callbacks to the switchboard.

People with multiple phone cards, but wanting callbacks in one place.

People with phone numbers belonging to another country.

Doctors responding to out of hours requests, but not wanting to share their direct contact.

One legit use is for companies/organizations that have a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) where each desk has it's own external telno. They can make all the calls appear to come from the corporate main number. So instead of 415-555-9xxx for whoever's extension it shows up as "415-555-9000". This is useful for both not revealing a personal extension and for branding

Of course, why it was designed to allow spoofing of any number in the world, instead of only numbers in the same block...

Any business with multiple outbound lines might find it handy.

There’s probably a better solution.

Think of every company that wants all outgoing calls to show the same phone number. Not just call centers, but also doctor's offices, corporations, and even the mechanic down the street.

No more Skype voip calls, no more business pbxs. Won’t end well.