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richarmetoday at 10:36 AM1 replyview on HN

In my personal experience basically all spam calls in France come from a fixed set of number prefixes. [0]

So phone companies could just offer to block those prefixes - it would be a trivial solution to the problem. But it's not an option [1], so either they make good money from those calls, or there's some other hurdle or legal issue.

Either way the new law could (in addition to making it illegal for companies to make spam calls) also simply have mandated that network operators block the known ones. Too bad.

[0] https://lemagdelaconso.ouest-france.fr/dossier-2418-demarcha...

[1] https://communaute.orange.fr/t5/mon-telephone-par-internet-e...


Replies

daneel_wtoday at 10:46 AM

No, that's a bad idea. There's no hurdle or legal issue, and money isn't behind it either. Those "prefixes" (area codes) are all the same segments of this or that national numbering plan that are also allocated by legitimate businesses both for placing legitimate outbound calls to their customers and for numbers that connect e.g. switchboards/IVRs to serve customers who are calling in.