Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rusk 2488 days ago
Of course it’s illegal! All developed countries have strict rules about how you can use Telecomms networks. Of course scam artists don’t care about these rules ... Its not hard to find out further information abour this. Check with your local Telecomms regulator, google or even the Wikipedia page!
1 comments
ryanlol 2488 days ago
>Of course it’s illegal?

Fraud tends to be illegal. That’s as far as I’m willing to believe your “of course”.

I do not believe most countries have laws regarding caller ID spoofing.

I know that in my country IMEI spoofing is (Bizarrely!) sort-of prohibited as forgery (as in IDs, documents or “anything of evidential/testimonial(?) value”), but can’t find anything regarding phone numbers.

I know that in the US it’s only illegal to spoof your number for fraudulent purposes.

link
rusk 2488 days ago
> it’s only illegal to spoof your number for fraudulent purposes

Seems like you’re gettig bogged down in semantics sir

link
ryanlol 2488 days ago
How is that semantics? Fraud is already illegal literally everywhere, so spoofing your number for fraudulent purposes will obviously be a part of that crime.

If this is intended to defend your original claim, you’re being utterly ridiculous. You made a specific claim about caller id spoofing, not fraud.

For example, If you’re spoofing a random number for telemarketing calls that’s just not fraud.

link
rusk 2488 days ago
> If you’re spoofing a random number for telemarketing calls that’s just not fraud.

It absolutely is, and in most civilised countries is illegal.

Like, I can totally believe that in the USA where any old lunatic can own an automatic weapon amd nobody gets concerned until he shoots up a school thats the case ye

There’s probably some constitutional argument that you can spoof your number based on something ridiculous like free speech

link
ryanlol 2488 days ago
>in most civilised countries is illegal.

I feel like we’re moving goalposts here and “civilised countries” will sooner than later become “English-speaking countries”, in which case I’m totally willing to concede that you’re probably right.

Very few countries have found it necessary to prohibit CID spoofing.

link
rusk 2488 days ago
> I feel like we’re moving goalposts

More semantics. Yawn. Save it for debate club.

link
vel0city 2488 days ago
Its a common feature for PBX'es to rewrite their outgoing caller ID on forwarded calls to match the origin caller ID. Say you've got an office desk phone that you have set to forward to your cell phone while you're out. Someone calls your desk phone, it forwards the call to your cell phone, what caller ID should be displayed? Technically the call to your phone is coming through your desk phone (well, your office's PBX), but doing that would mask who is actually calling. So the PBX rewrites its caller ID info to appear to be as the origin when it calls your cell phone.

This is technically spoofing caller ID, but is clearly not fraud.

link
rusk 2488 days ago
That’s not spoofing in principal though is it? This just reinforces my point that its very easy to do this with ordinary equipment. There isn’t really any kind of technical safeguards against this stuff, probably just for the convenience of this kind of stuff.
link
vel0city 2488 days ago
It is in the literal sense spoofing caller ID and using the same tech you earlier claimed was clearly illegal.
link