They all usually originate from India, Pakistan or other English speaking poorer countries. Question is, it must cost them to make millions of international calls every year.
I am aware that they use VOIP. So i presume that must make it free. So is rhere anyway that service providers can block these voip nuisance and criminal calls. Why dont they.
What would it take for such calls to lose their appeal to the perps. Other than abolishing voip calls. What else can be done and why isnt it being done
How do you distinguish between a scam caller from India, a legitimate business call center in India, and someone in India who just happens to have friends or relatives in the US? The problem is, you can’t.
Similarly, a lot of the spam on the SDMB comes from Bharti Airtel in India. We can’t block that entire ISP though because we have legitimate users from there as well.
I don’t know about the scam callers, but the spammers constantly change IPs and move around to different providers. I imagine the scam callers do the same thing with phone numbers so that they can’t easily be blocked. It gets to be like whack-a-mole. You ban one number and the scammer just pops up under another number. Block that one and they use a different one, etc.
To do spam VoIP economically, they need to contract with a telephone company on the US side to link from the Internet to the phone network. These companies make money on providing this connection. Ergo they [del]bribe[/del] lobby Congress to not pass laws forcing the companies to crack down on them.
It isn’t all that hard to check for robocallers and to force all megacallers to use legitimate caller ID.
It’s easy to spoof IP addresses and VoIP routing when you have control of some of the infrastructure in a foreign country. Plus caller ID is simply whatever the originator equipment says it is. And in a less technical foreign country with limited resources, chasing down spoofed caller ID’s is the least of the issues facing the authorities.
Because the telecom companies make money from these scam calls. If laws were passed to do something about it, the telecom companies would (1) have to spend money implementing these laws, and (2) would lose these scammer customers, thus costing them more money. So the telecom companies (and their lobbyists) don’t want any effective laws passed.
Bad business, but it’s run in a very similar way to other telemarketing businesses - the people making the call are given a script and instructions to talk the customer through remote installation of some trojan or similar.
I can’t imagine many of the call centre operatives are innocent of the fact that they’re participating in criminal activity, but their choice may be between that, and not working today. Doesn’t morally justify it, but it’s easy to see how it happens.
But these US Internet->Phone system companies have contracts with the robocallers. You can’t spoof a contract. They know perfectly well who they are dealing with and what service they are providing. And they are the ones setting the Caller ID per the client’s request.
I have home VoIP. The form on the provider’s web site has an entry for specifying the Caller ID info including phone number. I can not change it solely by myself. I have to go thru them.
They can trivially inspect that number and block me if, for example, I used the White House number as my Caller ID. They can also monitor and note how many millions of calls a month I make and make sure I’m following the laws on robocalling.
You’re not the customer of telecom companies. Other businesses are. The spammers are their customers. They will do everything they can get away with to maximize profit, and that includes inconveniencing you to better serve shady spam companies. It’s worth it as long as the costs of litigation and bad PR don’t outweigh their earnings from these shady contracts.