The phone companies standardized on a hopelessly insecure protocol in 1975, and have no financial incentive to fix it.

If the FCC mandated a $1/spam call fine for cell phone providers (automatically paid as an unbounded rebate to subscribers), I suspect they would fix it in under 12 months.

More reading on the protocol (Signaling System 7) is here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7

The fundamental issue is that is assumes 100% of global telephone exchanges are trustworthy.

> The phone companies standardized on a hopelessly insecure protocol in 1975...

I vaguely remember an interview with somebody involved in early ARPANET standardization efforts stating pretty definitively that the prevailing direction for network protocols was source based routing. Anybody who has ever had to write an email address parser has seen vestiges of this (multiple @, ! and : symbols). Supposedly a representative from the NSA helpfully "suggested" they abandon that line of thinking and just mimic the PSTN's approach of trusting the next hop to do the routing.

I wonder how accidental it is that SS7 was implemented in such a plainly insecure manner.

It’s a lot of work and honestly the telcos don’t care. Even if and when you do find them, what can you do? They’re calling from halfway around the world - so “impersonating a us government employee” is not a law you can enforce on a citizen of another country.

Why can't the telcos be held liable for routing these calls? If you get scammed and could sue the phone company, they'd very quickly find real solutions.

I suspect it's that pesky "rule of law" thing. We need to change the laws to make them liable.

Most of the scam/spam calls originate from overseas, while using American phone numbers:

"Five U.S. states, Costa Rica, Guatemala, India, Mexico and the Philippines are where most robocalls originate."

I imagine it's much more complicated to prosecute robocallers that live overseas, as you're now dealing with having to extradite people.

Around 99% of calls I receive, total, are spoofed to my local area and exchange. The discrimination tech is clearly not being used. Sprint/TMO.

A quick fix could be that you require that the phone number matches the country the call comes from.

Won't solve everything but maybe a little bit.

Then every time I travel overseas I cannot use my phone or a US phone number? What about living close to Canada, Mexico, Caribbean…etc and you pick up international towers?

It’s an easier fix, but not really a solution.

The reality is that everyone wants fairness but no one really wants government regulation (Russia is a great example of this where your phone number is essentially treated like an assault rifle. Registered, monitored, and geo-tracked).

But that would be roaming, not a us number originating from a non us phone line.

Prior to VoIP it was easier to trace the source of a call. With VoIP, the call could come from anywhere. Also, that VoIP service may have been resold several times and the end of that chain might look like a shady foreign entity with fictitious names. You kill one shady reseller and 3 more pop up.

Can I sue my carrier for breach of contract?

They are providing me a phone but most callers are spoofed and it can't be answered any more in the way a reasonable person would expect a phone to be useful.