[edent]

I used to work at two (UK) telcos. There's a historic reason and a modern reason.

The historic reason was, just like the Internet, the international phone network was built on gentlemen agreements by engineers who largely trusted each other.

A big national telco is unlikely to attack its peers, so there was little need for safety measures. As smaller telcos came in to the mix via deregulation, that understanding changed - but it was hard to retroactively fit controls.

The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.

If you were designing a modern network, it wouldn't be like this. But international telephony is over a hundred years old and has a huge amount of legacy technology and legal agreements.

[BLKNSLVR]

> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number.

The company that has offshored it's support to the Philippines might want that, but I doubt any consumers want that. That shouldn't have happened, but regulation comes (20+ years?) after harmful business profit decisions have been made and implemented.

But, thank you for the explanation. I have heard similar explanations before, and it has always sounded to me like a situation where the telcos are able to offer a service for a profit for the customers to hide the origin of their offshore call centres (that mostly nobody wants to speak to anyway).

I think I just ranted twice, sorry. Thank you!

[brainwad]

The consumers 'want' it because if they get disconnected and try to recall, by spoofing a local number it costs them nothing/little since it's a local number (maybe toll-free?) instead of a lot for an international call. Of course, they might want a local call centre even more, but spoofing a local number for overseas call centres does have a purpose.

[realusername]

I've never seen an hotline where you can call back and resume the call you were doing.

[traceroute66]

> I've never seen an hotline where you can call back and resume the call you were doing.

Assuming they even accept inbound calls to the CLI number in the first place.

I frequently encounter companies where I miss a call due to $reason, I then try to call back the CLI number and it just says "This was $megacorp trying to call you, we will try again later".

Or, if you're really lucky, the CLI will just dump you into IVR-hell which, of course, is "AI powered" today, so you have to spend 30 minutes telling the stupid robot they mis-intepreted your voice.

[orwin]

My electric company gave me a number (UID, not phone number) to resume a call if the issue wasn't fixed within 24 hours, and I'm pretty sure internet operators have the same protocol (at least used to).

[arethuza]

Is that to restart the call to the same person or a case id that gives details of your request and that could be passed to anyone?

[embedding-shape]

Can literally be a "Desk ID" basically, so using that would reach the phone next to the agent. Used to work both with outgoing cold calls and incoming customer support, had a setup that worked like that for the latter.

[orwin]

Didn't use it, it was fixed, so I don't have more details, sorry.

[traceroute66]

> My electric company gave me a number (UID, not phone number) to resume a call if the issue wasn't fixed within 24 hours

What planet do you live on ?

Seriously. Where I am it is guaranteed that a utility company would never even consider such a concept let alone have the technical competence to actually implement it.

I'm jealous. ;)

[orwin]

Enedis is basically a state owned company (to be clear, they aren't the one selling electricity, they are the one in charge of the network and the distribution, so I'm not sure if it counts as utility).

[brainwad]

The call centre for my Australian bank's KYC is seemingly backed by a single person. I've spoken to her a few times now... so calling them back more or less does work, though you might have to wait on hold again.

[jojobas]

A legitimate company registering an local number, routing its Philippines call centre through it and accountable for outbound calls is not really comparable with a random scammer faking whatever number.

[abc123abc123]

This consumer couldn't care less about where the person is actually sitting as long as the tasks are done and the problems solved.

[generic92034]

"As long as" does a lot of work here, considering language barriers and (in my experience) generally less knowledge in off-shored centers.

[alexjurkiewicz]

Showing overseas based workers of Microsoft as another company name on caller ID is a phishing risk.

[jstanley]

Showing workers of companies other than Microsoft as Microsoft on caller ID is a phishing risk.

[arethuza]

Just looking at my incoming call list on my phone for yesterday: "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Potential Fraud", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", a real call, "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam"...

Phone is set to only notify me for numbers for known contacts - does mean that I occasionally miss calls from other people, but I can live with that.

[nephihaha]

I often get calls from people I don't know for legitimate purposes.

Spam calls happen but I'm not interested in social credit ratings for callers.

[arethuza]

Yes, was just relating my experience - it's just go the the point where I personally opt to play safe. Like everyone I do get calls from people who aren't in my contact list but it was getting silly so I've defaulted to ignoring them and it works for me. Anyone serious is going to be happy leaving a message - which suits me anyway as I spend a large part of my work day in Teams calls.

[magicalhippo]

I too, but I never take them before I've looked up the number. If it's important they'll take my call or call back.

[petre]

If some unknown numbers calls me and they're not a courier or the bank (which rarely calls) I immediately assume it's a scammer.

[nephihaha]

I don't because I run groups and get calls for legit business reasons.

What I normally do is answer the phone but let them speak first.

[anitil]

Same, except I have family that work in healthcare and so _very occasionally_ they'll call me from a private number, and it'll be important.

I still don't answer them, but I get to enjoy a tiny bit of stress every time I see a private number

[ithkuil]

I guess the signal-to-noise ratio matters.

In the last 3 months I received 700 spam/scam calls to my phone, my wife received about 400. We can't turn off ringing for unknown callers and we're getting mad. A few days ago I vented to one of those call-center people trying to sell me a cheaper power utility for the Nth time, and told her to find another job or something like that; she actually called me back yelling at me that "any job is worth", and yelled at her that I cannot fucking receive sometimes up to 20 calls in a day, sometimes at quite annoying times of the day! It's getting ridiculous.

EDIT: I know not everybody is having the same experience in my country. Some people are only getting a few calls per week; I registered our phones in https://registrodelleopposizioni.it/ and also I'm using android's spam filter which filters out additional hundreds of calls automatically.

EDIT 2: I sometimes wonder if we're being harassed by somebody ; I cannot tell. The voices are often quite similar, but it might be the albanian accent that makes them sound similar.

EDIT 3: caller id numbers are always different

[hellojesus]

> I vented to one of those call-center people trying to sell me a cheaper power utility for the Nth time, and told her to find another job or something like that

I threaten to kill and rape them all the time, but that usually doesn't do much.

I've found that politely asking them to kill themselves elicits much more engagement, and I hope it at least implants some lasting memory.

[ithkuil]

I assumed they are used to people being exhausted by those calls, so I was frankly surprised when she actually called again to complain

[amluto]

> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number.

This is a valid use case, but I’m a bit surprised that the mechanism isn’t better controlled. Surely a better design would be for an actual local entity to forward the call, possibly with an optimization to allow the voice data to bypass the local entity once the call is connected.

[edent]

The mechanism is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

But it is slow to roll out.

[amluto]

As far as I know, STIR/SHAKEN doesn’t do this at all. See, among other things, the very first entry in the Wikipedia page’s limitations section.

[rusk]

Just whitelist the caller ID and have the originating network guarantor

The second part is the hard part and requires coordination

It wouldn’t be expensive or especially hard to do but there is no payoff for the network. Remember they make money off scam calls too

Since as long as I can remember these organisations have been optimised for profit, not for GAF and that’s why they’re being savaged by regulation and OTT competitors now

There has been no market forces compelling them to do this and until recently when it got really bad, no political or regulatory forces

tl;dr na bro

[realusername]

> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number

I personally don't? Why would I want that.

The companies might want to hide that info but I don't think that's a legitimate use case.

[edent]

Because it is useful for most people to see that they're receiving a call from their bank, insurance company, hospital, whoever.

The hospital's call staff might not be in the same building as the doctor - so showing a familiar number is useful.

In an ideal world you would be able to trust that number but, as per the above, that isn't always the case.

[WhyNotHugo]

> The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.

For this particular case, do they really spoof the caller ID on an (expensive) international phone call, or do they actually just re-route via a local phone number?

[Affric]

It's been a while since I did telecoms related stuff but also you might want a different CLI and ANI for forwarded calls so you can preserve the original line being used.

Obviously the whole scam call centre has changed how it has to work but we actually had a working system that had quite a few useful features.

[freefaler]

It's a solved problem. VoIP plus leased trunk lines by the a telco in the market you want to work at. You are limited to fixed set of numbers and you are "local" in the market you want to work at.

[ben_w]

That we can do better now isn't important to why something existed to be grandfathered-in in the first place.

Call centres were getting outsourced before e.g. Skype was a twinkle in the eyes of Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn.