alt Hacker NewsHard disagree on the scam phone calls. It would be trivial to eradicate them almost completely if the phone operators did the bare minimum to fight against it. At any point in time, any given US phone number is handled by exactly one phone carrier. There is nothing stopping that carrier from requiring name and address to issue that phone number. They already do for 99.99% of their legitimate customers. It would be very easy to make it so that every single phone call originating from the US, including all VOIP calls made with US phone numbers, can be traced back to a specific business or person that can later be sued or prosecuted.
And no, number spoofing isn't an excuse either. We literally solved the much harder problem of email spoofing already. There are, what, 3 carrier networks in all of US? And they cannot do with each other what DMARC did for the hundreds of thousands disjoint organizations that comprise the internet? Please.
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>It would be trivial to eradicate them almost completely
Absolutely true, but droning their data centers might have some policy repercussions.
You are not wrong. They don't do this because they make money from the scammers.
I have posted about this before. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191971
Yeah 100%. It's criminal that this is not already done.
KYC just for a phone number opens the door for societal ostracization and essentially blacklisting of people from infrastructure. This is on par with being unable to open a bank account if the capability is matured. I'd advise that you think long and hard about the consequences of this system being applied against you maliciously before signing on the dotted line.
Number spoofing is not a solved problem because some carriers, which appear legitimate in all other respects, make a business out of routing your traffic over TDM trunks that don't support caller ID verification, and will claim it's extremely expensive to upgrade these to VOIP.