> For what it’s worth, whenever one of those “lead generator”-type calls gets past my filters, I take their number and the number of whatever company they’re advertising and sign both of them up to a bunch of those lead generator websites

Don't the spammers spoof innocent people's numbers? If so, you're probably punishing someone unrelated.

Scammers do, but I would be surprised if any of these companies do. It sounds like they're "legit" by the letter of the (current) law if not the spirit, which is why they would care about the FCC banning this. The scammers' operations are just plain illegal.

“ Don't the spammers spoof innocent people's numbers? ”

Oh, they do? I wasn’t aware this was a thing. I’ll only sign up the business from now on.

oh yeah, the whole STIR/SHAKEN thing is because calls and sms are essentially email: the sender just includes metadata saying who they are. Without any additional work you can a given call/message can claim to be whoever you want. This would be fine if carriers actually required it to be correct, but intrinsically if a call comes in to your carrier from another carrier your carrier has to trust the originator actually enforced this. But there are carriers whose primary market is "marketing companies", and so they are not ... careful ... about ensuring the originator isn't spouting nonsense. The FCC just recently told all major US carriers that they were required to drop connections from a couple of such carriers.

I'm sure there's a more complexity in how this actually all works in the real world, but this is my basic high level understanding of it.

Yep. I've received spam texts purportedly from my own phone number before.

Many use phone number validation/verification services that know if it's a personal or business number.

I can assure you that there are many "lead generation" companies that will happily sell businesses data to other businesses for "calling".