The USA's implementation of caller ID does not require telephone providers to verify that the caller ID provided to them is real (prior to this order).

It also lacks the regulatory structure to "trace" (prosecute/fine) calls through the various interlocking copper, cellular, and internet telephony networks, even when each provider in the chain has data.

It also lacks the legal experience in knowing how (and the political will) to prosecute an individual who dials random phone numbers with an app on a cell phone using a prepaid SIM card and conferences whoever they're calling into a spam line to disguise the spam line's phone number.

Finally, our regulatory system is captive to politicians who depend critically on spam calls for political purposes, and continue to fight to have those calls exempt, making it vastly more difficult to stop all robocalls because some are legal and others aren't.

Every time this topic comes up on HN, someone asks that same question.

Then there's a bunch of responses that are lots of suppositions.

Then several people from small European countries chime in saying they've never had a spam call.

Then a bunch of Europeans from large countries show up saying they get spam calls, too, and it's not just an American thing.

"Why is this problem unique to the USA?" is pretty much a meme at this point.

Also...

You start with "Why is this problem unique to the USA?" Then follow immediately with, "I'm not saying I never get spam calls" which means it's not unique to the USA. So your first sentence is invalid.

In the UK, I get the occasional spam call ("I'm calling with regards to the recent accident that wasn't your fault..."). At its peak, I got about one such call per week. It's been months since I've had a spam call.

In France, I got zero. In the 7 years I lived there, I got exactly zero.

Every time I go to the US, I get 2-5 per day ("last chance to renew the extended warranty on your car").

As is often the case, things are bigger in the US.

I used to get occasional spam calls on my rarely-used old Polish number, but since beginning this year they somehow stopped (late effect of GDPR perhaps?)

It's not. Who told you it was?

Experience reports are still useful and interesting.

Europe is also a big pot of honey. But people speak all sorts of different languages, so you'd have to redo the scam in a bunch of different languages, which increases the effort needed to operate it.

China has way more people all speaking the same language, but relatively less wealth per person, which reduces the potential payoff. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if China has already closed off most the holes people exploit to operate these scams, because they seem less inclined than the US government to fart around about silly crap like this for literally decades on end.

Latin America has scads of people all speaking the same language, too, but they're split up among a whole bunch of different countries, which I'm guessing also makes the scam more expensive to operate at scale than it would be in the English-speaking bits of North America.

This means they'll exploit the most profitable targets almost exclusively. It doesn't have to be much more profitable, just the most.

If they were victim limited, they'd expand the pool of targets to include the most profitable N until they became resource limited again.

The problem described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22742976

Is precisely why US get so many Spam calls, and very little in many other developed countries on earth.

And judging from that, it is also no wonder why SMS passcode hijacking is much common in US as compared to many other places.

It reality it really is an US thing, much like how rest of the world have public health care ( Good or not ), and it wasn't until ObamaCare did rest of the world realise public health services is not a standard practice in the wealthiest nation on earth.

Starting back in 2018 or so there has been a big problem in Australia with scam robocalls claiming to be from the Australian Tax Office. The area code on the phone number said it came from Canberra (Australia's national capital) which made it look more legitimate–even though in reality the call was coming from an overseas call centre. The robocall started out by saying that you owe a tax debt and the government was about to commence legal action against you. I got several, most people would hang up realising that the tax office would never do that. (It is illegal for them to discuss your tax affairs without confirming your identity first, so they would never begin a call by saying you owed them money.) But, some people (many of whom were older/vulnerable people), stayed on the call until the live operator connected. The live operator would then pressure them to go to a store and buy thousands of dollars of gift cards (such as Apple iTunes gift cards) and then read the gift card details out over the phone.

So this definitely is not a problem unique to the US. And other countries have been taking action, see e.g. in Australia – https://www.zdnet.com/article/acma-proposes-three-point-acti...

(Definitely the incidence of these fake calls appears to be falling, in my personal experience, so I think the Australian authorities'/industry's attempts are producing some results.)

a) it's a large market with a large penetration of internationally chargable credit cards. Several countries in the EU have their own payment systems including a bunch on a push model --- it's hard to scam germans over the phone because it's going to be hard to get them to send you funds without a german bank account; and if you have a german bank account, that's going to get you caught. Everywhere can process US visa and mastercard though.

b) large community that can be addressed with a single language; yes, there's a lot of people who would prefer another language, but they can probably be scammed in English (Although, with a bay area number I do get a good amount of scam calls in Chinese).

c) last, but probably most important; outbound calls to the US are incredibly cheap, as long as the number is not in Alaska. It's easy to find retail voip offers for less than 1 cent per minute to US numbers; and it doesn't matter if it's a landline or a cell phone. Calls to most EU mobile phones are at least 10 cents, but many countries are closer to 30 cents. That adds up quickly.

Most US spam calls originate outside of the US, though.

* Carrier maintainer blacklists and other tools have also been used by providers for a long time.

* My provider, Voip.ms, enforces a provenance whitelist by default. This block all SPIT calls coming from unspoofed caller ids. That may not sound like a lot, but yes, many of those calls are just random poeple picking their phone or mobile apps using the real phone number. Having regulation to track internal sources of SPIT (and enforcing it) helps too.

* In Canada, you can subscribe to a non-telemarketing list. That doesn't help for scammer, but it helps for unsolicited ads, political spam and private surveys. This works when enforced with actual penalties for all parties involved.

Would you decide to set it up to call over 40 different countries in europe? Each with their own way to show phone numbers.. each carrier attempting to block spam calls in different ways.. each country virtually speaking a different language.. most countries having some different banking/credit card systems..

Or would you target the united states which everyone in the country has the same phone prefix, pretty much all speak one language, banking/credit card system is the same, etc.

It just makes sense for scammers to target the US. You can target hundreds of millions of people the exact same way.

That and you know.. breaking the law has actual consequences for both spammers and telcos.

Back in the early 2000's I remember doing the same thing you're describing: startling spammers by telling them that I was on the list. But today, the people calling don't care because they aren't inside of the US.

If you're being called from a local number, then this should mean (and outside of USA actually means) that there's somebody who's subject to local law and fully responsible for ensuring that the spam laws are met. If you're a telecoms operator sending in calls to the nework, then you ensure that the fines get paid - the spammers are, naturally, liable, but if you enable access to scammers in an unreachable jurisdiction or insolvent shell companies, well, it's coming out of your pocket and it's your problem on how to recover these losses. In USA, however, telecoms who specialize in providing such access to phone spammers have a legal and profitable business model. This needs to change.

CID spoofing is when you tell the network to display a different caller ID value than the actual originator. This never had any sort of authentication in the US (until the announcement in the OP)

Most of the spam calls in the US aren't CID spoofed, but some egregious scams are. This is usually used for things like scammers displaying "SOCIAL SECURITY" on the caller ID.

The US just generally doesn't make carriers liable for the crimes of their users. We don't need to change that, and I don't think it's a good idea either because of the unintended affects that could have on accessibility. We just need to require controls that authenticate proper use of the network. The announcement in the OP is one step towards doing that.

But preventing CID spoofing alone is not going to stop spam calls from local numbers, because VoIP.

How does this help with a spoofed call from India?

Until this HN post it never occurred to me that you could spoof phone calls. While landlines used to get lots of spam calls, perhaps I've had just two of these calls to my mobile in my life. Each time I typed the number into google and found reports of that number being spam. And maybe less than 20 spam sms's.

Does this mean that other countries (such as Australia) do not allow spoofing of numbers?

I assume it's simply more worthwhile to create a fraudulent scheme aimed at a larger population with more potential marks.

It's the price we have to pay for Freedom (TM).