According to yesterday's article on the same case, the FCC is claiming to also have done just that:
> “Armed with the facts [the FCC] gave phone companies permission to cut off this traffic before going one step further and directing them to block it outright. We got results. Following our action, the number of auto warranty calls fell by 99 percent,” she [FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel] wrote.
It was interesting what Singapore did. Basically all numbers need to be registered, otherwise the default caller ID is "Likely SCAM".
The government gave companies a heads up, but even Singapore Airlines and a few major banks had to send out emails apologizing for their texts being labelled as "Likely Scam" right after the change.
Suffice to say legitimate companies got registered really quickly.
Is it harder to spoof a number in Singapore than in the U.S.?
In the U.S., it's trivially easy to make your call look like it's coming from whatever number you want, so scammers just have caller ID display the real phone number for the bank they're pretending to call from.
The main measure pushed by the FCC under Ajit Pai (so he was not a total waste of oxygen) was SHAKEN/STIR, which is basically cryptographically signed Caller ID. Deploying this went amazingly rapidly by the standards of the telco industry, and specially considering how much legacy there is in the landline phone business where the switch makers Lucent and Nortel went bust 2 decades ago and obviously their software has not seen any updates in that long.
I thought shaken/stir was going to do just this. Does anyone have inside knowledge as to why this hasn't fixed things yet?
It isn't a hard problem. Once we can trace where the call originates, blacklists should be able to snuff this out pretty quickly. Once phone operators start getting penalized for this sort of thing, the problem will get much better.
S/S is working as advertised; it's how the FCC can identify robocall carriers and how telecoms can block their traffic. S/S doesn't have a magic "caller is a robot" bit that would allow for automatic blocking.
My phone can identify spam callers and has been doing so for nearly a year now. Why can't the telco's block them more quickly? I think we all know the answer to this. They aren't going to unless the FCC makes them.
The telcos are killing their own product. I'm using my phone less and less. Most days, it sits in do not disturb mode because 99% of the time, the call isn't relevant.
> “Armed with the facts [the FCC] gave phone companies permission to cut off this traffic before going one step further and directing them to block it outright. We got results. Following our action, the number of auto warranty calls fell by 99 percent,” she [FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel] wrote.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/03/fcc-fines-robocaller-a-rec...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989845