[kerkeslager]

It may be a surprise to the HN "incentives are the only way to do anything" crowd, but there simply is not an incentive structure that will fix this problem, because nobody knows where the calls are coming from. Not the US, not the telcos, not the countries the calls are coming from, nobody. You can place the tariff on countries, and then the countries just have to accept the tariff because there's not a damn thing they can do about it as long as scammers can spoof phone numbers.

The converse of this is that it's pretty ridiculous to assume that countries have scammers in them because they're just tolerating them.

Sure, we could rush out a technical solution, but then it would run the risk of being broken rather quickly, and further it's important to not compromise the reliability of the phone system. Too many critical services rely on it. It's worth taking the time to do it right.

Last I heard, the FCC was in talks with telcos to finalize a solution, but I would expect it to take at least another year to implement and deploy it.

Until then, I guess we'll all have to deal with annoying scammers and comments by people who don't understand why spoofing makes their pet incentive idea irrelevant.

[fellellor]

It’s not right, that a sensible comment like yours is being downvoted. Spoofing is real, and not easy to track down depending on the resources you have at your disposal. And Indian law enforcement is certainly behind the western world in that regard.

Besides, it’s not like these scammers are paying taxes to the Indian government, so they don’t have any national incentive to facilitate scammers. Tax compliance in countries like India, outside the first world, is very poor. Though the article mentions that Indian authorities are cooperating with Canadian officials, it needs to be understood that this cooperation isn’t based on any incentive structure, other than civilised societies need to crack down on crime. Crime in Canada is a low priority for Indian officials, just like I’m sure it’s the other way around.

Finally, Canada doesn’t even feature in the top 15-20 trading partners for India, last time I checked, so I don’t know what punitive incentive can be hoped for here. If you need a solution, it would be more productive to approach from a more pragmatic, cooperative point of view, rather than being all high and mighty and taking a carpet bombing style approach that affects legitimate business as well. Or, you could do that but it wouldn’t even matter.

Edit: I’d like to add that every day there is news about people, here in India also losing their life savings to these scammers. So it would be wrong to have an impression that authorities and citizens of this country take pleasure in people from richer countries being scammed. I’ve old, not so tech savvy parents myself, who I realise are pretty vulnerable to this evil.

[peteretep]

> Spoofing is real, and not easy to track down depending on the resources you have at your disposal

Mmm, but some Canadian or American legal entity is bridging these onto the phone network, and needs to be doing its due diligence better.

[tempestn]

The problem is that the way the phone system is currently set up, it is not possible to do this due diligence. That is what's being worked on.

[dmurray]

This is mostly true, but it would be worked on a lot harder if the companies involved had a financial incentive to work on it. Currently the scammers pay their bills and the incentives work the other way - it's best for them to say they are working on it but drag their feet.

[kerkeslager]

You think "people are switching away from using the traditional phone system entirely" isn't enough incentive? And how, exactly, does an Indian scammer paying a bill to an Indian telco incentivize US telcos to drag their feet? You can blame the Indian telcos, but they also don't have incentives to tolerate scammers--their business would benefit a lot more if calls from Indian numbers weren't automatically assumed to be scams.

While you don't understand the problem, you can't possibly have anything of value to say about the solution.

There may well be perverse incentives causing certain entities to tolerate scammers, but we shouldn't pretend we know what those perverse incentives are when we can't even trace the calls. On the other hand, it is much more likely that once the spoofing problem is solved, the incentives are all already in place and the vast majority of scam calls will be solved.

If a rational person only knows how to use a hammer, they pause when they come across a problem that isn't a nail. But when the HN crowd comes across a problem that isn't immediately solved by incentives, they argue that the people who actually are qualified to solve the problem with other tools, should be using incentives!

[m-p-3]

Exactly why STIR/SHAKEN is currently being deployed. That's the issue with widespread legacy systems, you can't pull it out and rebuild from scratch without causing a major disruption.

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

Is that entity not a common carrier?

[michaelt]

> nobody knows where the calls are coming from

So is the US telco terminating these calls free of charge?

It seems unlikely you can spoof payments and telcos turn a blind eye to it...

[kerkeslager]

What part of "they don't know where the calls are coming from" don't you understand? Are they supposed to just close down customers at random hoping they close down a scammer by accident?

Do you really think you're smarter than everyone at the FCC, since you apparently think nobody at the FCC thought of this?

[im3w1l]

I'm not in the telco space, but I've seen some signs that the telcos are changing protocols to solve the spoofing problem.