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by unethical_ban
1326 days ago
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I've been a firewall admin for a decade, I'm not entirely naive, and I am now sober. I clearly don't work in VoIP, I only had a one year stint with call center stuff. But I am honestly asking, who uses toll numbers anymore? Why wouldn't phone companies and VoIP providers literally decide not to honor a tool that seems, to me, entirely built for scams? Are there places without Internet but with phones, in such a scenario where a toll number scheme makes sense? Put in general terms, I am saying "don't block the network protocol, end the toll-payout protocol". It would be like us living in a system where scammers could charge you $5 each time you got caught staring at a postcard in your mailbox, and we decided to block postcards rather than stop paying the extortion. On the broader topic of "decentralized servers being abused on the Internet" yeah I get the problem of open DNS and SMTP relays. I do assert that those services being locked down are why we only have 0.0001% engagement. |
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I'm also not being entirely clear when I say "toll numbers". What I really mean is "high cost" numbers. You're a firewall admin, you know there's no limit to the creativity and ingenuity of scammers/fraudsters/etc with a clear monetization path. There's also traffic pumping[0], jurisdictions where the rate decks overly subsidize the cost to a "mobile" vs "landline", high-rate destinations (like Iridium), and again, various destinations with weird rate structures where (somewhat like traffic pumping) there doesn't seem to be any real justification that the billed rate aligns with the actual cost of delivering service but due to corrupt or non-functioning governments/regulators/telcos/etc they persist and are ripe for fraud.
[0] - https://www.fcc.gov/general/traffic-pumping