Calller ID spoofing needs to be abolished because it is used far too often for scams and has no legitimate uses. Why do phone companies even allow it to begin with?
One potential legitimate use: you’re a large organisation using a blend of several different telecommunications technologies (let’s say PSTN, mobile and cloud-based VOIP), operating across a broad geographical span.
You want your operators to be able to call your clients directly (i.e. not reliant on any common hub), but you want your clients to perceive you as a single entity - so if they call back, they are routed to a single switchboard.
Some degree of masking/spoofing is necessary (albeit in this case, spoofed to a number that you actually own).
And once that genie is out of the bottle, then less legitimate uses of the same technologies tend to hop along for the ride.
In my experience many large companies have programmed their systems so that calls from within the number pool seem to come from a central switchboard number. Calls to a number often don’t show a name. This is done to prevent cold callers from collecting names. It happens - when my daughter was in high school she had a job doing this for a sleazy headhunter.
So the exemption you kind of propose - allowing renaming to an owned number of company, sounds reasonable. And I suspect a contract telemarketing service with ties to a specific company should be allowed to use that company’s name also.
I have caller ID blocked on my cellphone. I will not unblock it, ever. I occasionally need to call someone regarding a business matter when I am not at work. If they block calls from callers with blocked ID it is a legitimate workaround.
It seems like the sort of thing that ought to be possible to regulate and restrict to legitimate usage, and prevent from being abused, but I think it’s probably not so simple in a multiplayer market where there is no absolute monolithic authority. If anyone can be a telecoms provider or reseller, there’s a lot more scope for bad behaviour to flourish.
Yeah. I’d guess the calls from India come over VoIP, and I’m not sure how you could regulate or block those. Though tagging them with country of origin might help somewhat.
I think it’s similar to the problem with the ‘from’ addresses in emails - the system has been built without authentication, and now it’s established, it’s a hard thing to retrofit without breaking a lot of things.
Caller ID is intentionally spoof-able and blockable. Automatic number identification (ANI) which existed well before caller ID was never extended to consumer phones due to the inability to mask or change it. The best idea is to just never trust Caller ID, in the same way you should never trust the “From” in an email.