This. I don't understand why we can't catch and prosecute these spammers. Is it that hard for the phone companies/authorities to trace who's making these phone calls?
Good luck prosecuting a scammer in a foreign country. We need penalties for the telecom services providing access. Right know it's trivial for someone to get a ton of numbers and starting making calls over SIP. You shut them off, they'll just go to another provider.
The scammer in a foreign country has to have on-the-record account(s) with some foreign telecom company, directly or via some chain of intermediaries.
Just shut down those accounts, and if the foreign telecom doesn't comply, then block calls incoming from that telecom. Eventually the scammers will start encountering serious resistance to obtaining new accounts and numbers.
They don't necessarily need to use a foreign telecom company. They can buy SIP access directly from a US company (Twilio, SignalWire, etc) and use it anywhere.
You would think so. However, the number of scam/spam calls I receive daily proves otherwise. When I look up these numbers, they are mostly CLEC or mobile numbers. I assume some of the caller IDs are still spoofed, though I thought STIR/SHAKEN was going to fix that.
The reported names can be entirely spoofed, but the telecom engineers know who they are connected to, and the companies they are connected to know who they are connected to ad infinum.
It shouldn't be, but it is. The latest scams all involve calling people from local looking numbers (same area code), since it's more likely victims will pick up.