alt Hacker News> 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!
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This consumer couldn't care less about where the person is actually sitting as long as the tasks are done and the problems solved.
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.
Showing overseas based workers of Microsoft as another company name on caller ID is a phishing risk.
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.