Why isn't this a problem at all in Europe? I've lived in Switzerland, where I would get 1-2 calls per month trying to sell me some insurance. Now I live in Romania and I don't get any calls like this. And I haven't heard friends complaining about it either.

Most of the EU countries have an opt-in policy: no unsolicited calls are permitted unless the company calling you has your permission.

But that's not the case in e.g. Belgium, where I live. Belgium has a do-not-call register.

Last week, I made a tool to automatically add phone numbers to that list (the do-not-call website API was unprotected,and all I did was automate what anyone could do manually via the website) so that we'd arrive at a de facto opt-in situation, but at 700K numbers the do-not-call website went into maintenance :)

Might have something to do with disposable income disparity. Language barriers also play a role.

They can but they are loosing profits as internet services swallow their market share. They won't do anything that expensive until they legally have to. The best way to fix this is to complain to your government.

The tools exist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

The protocol exists, and is in use in a number of places. [0]

Whilst it isn't widely deployed yet, it is being rolled out across several nations currently - albeit very slowly.

Telstra is rolling it out as well [1], but they've coupled it to their 5G efforts.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tackling-changing-face-our-cu...

Hopefully phone UIs can start showing the check mark with more prominence (and information - it should say ‘not spoofed’ instead of ‘verified number’) since it seems the big 3 US carriers have implemented it.

T-Mobile in the US has implemented it pretty extensively AFAIK and I rarely get spam calls these days.

I actually think the majority of robocalls are from call centers with access to blocks of phone numbers they shuffle around.

I wouldn't even be surprised if phone companies got kick backs in some way too. Very few people are willing to change their cell number to protest.

I get ones with my number but the last 4 digits different - this worked the first few times I got them in 2019 but they’re definitely spoofed and I imagine they have a higher success rate than using real numbers.

It's convenient for them to use spoofed numbers now, but it's not strictly necessary. They'll revert back to using large pools of real numbers soon after auth is enforced.

But then you'd at least know which calls you can most likely ignore based upon whether they're in your contact or not. As of now, I've received more than a few calls from random contacts that turned out to be spoofed car warranty expiration warnings.

Newsflash scammers -- I drive a '98 Tacoma. That warranty has been gone for years now.