I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit CLID faking and reinjection of apparently local CLID by overseas inputs.<p>I'm assuming there's a technical and/or willpower reason or some counterfactual like VOIP depends on it.<p>Even just flagging it would help. Or, rejecting numbers they can know lie inside their own routing architecture, or asserts within their own number plan where the CLID does not match.<p>Morally it's like BCP38 in the customer facing internet systems: reject customer input they don't pay you to assert.
I used to work at two (UK) telcos. There's a historic reason and a modern reason.<p>The historic reason was, just like the Internet, the international phone network was built on gentlemen agreements by engineers who largely trusted each other.<p>A big national telco is unlikely to attack its peers, so there was little need for safety measures. As smaller telcos came in to the mix via deregulation, that understanding changed - but it was hard to retroactively fit controls.<p>The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.<p>If you were designing a modern network, it wouldn't be like this. But international telephony is over a hundred years old and has a huge amount of legacy technology and legal agreements.
> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number.<p>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.<p>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).<p>I think I just ranted twice, sorry. Thank you!
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.
Showing overseas based workers of Microsoft as another company name on caller ID is a phishing risk.
Just looking at my incoming call list on my phone for yesterday: "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Potential Fraud", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", a real call, "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam"...<p>Phone is set to only notify me for numbers for known contacts - does mean that I occasionally miss calls from other people, but I can live with that.
> The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.<p>For this particular case, do they really spoof the caller ID on an (expensive) international phone call, or do they actually just re-route via a local phone number?
> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number.<p>This is a valid use case, but I’m a bit surprised that the mechanism isn’t better controlled. Surely a better design would be for an actual local entity to forward the call, possibly with an optimization to allow the voice data to bypass the local entity once the call is connected.
The mechanism is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN</a><p>But it is slow to roll out.
Just whitelist the caller ID and have the originating network guarantor<p>The second part is the hard part and requires coordination<p>It wouldn’t be expensive or especially hard to do but there is no payoff for the network. Remember they make money off scam calls too<p>Since as long as I can remember these organisations have been optimised for profit, not for GAF and that’s why they’re being savaged by regulation and OTT competitors now<p>There has been no market forces compelling them to do this and until recently when it got really bad, no political or regulatory forces<p>tl;dr na bro
It's been a while since I did telecoms related stuff but also you might want a different CLI and ANI for forwarded calls so you can preserve the original line being used.<p>Obviously the whole scam call centre has changed how it has to work but we actually had a working system that had quite a few useful features.
> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number<p>I personally don't? Why would I want that.<p>The companies might want to hide that info but I don't think that's a legitimate use case.
Because it is useful for most people to see that they're receiving a call from their bank, insurance company, hospital, whoever.<p>The hospital's call staff might not be in the same building as the doctor - so showing a familiar number is useful.<p>In an ideal world you would be able to trust that number but, as per the above, that isn't always the case.
It's a solved problem. VoIP plus leased trunk lines by the a telco in the market you want to work at. You are limited to fixed set of numbers and you are "local" in the market you want to work at.
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That's why in 2020 the FCC belatedly mandated SHAKEN/STIR to authenticate Caller ID in the US using public-key cryptography. Deployment is still work in progress, and it does not cover SMS/MMS, however.<p>A bigger problem is Russia or Saudi Arabia using the SS7 signalling network to track their dissidents in the US because those legacy telco protocols have basically no authentication whatsoever, and won't blink if a Saudi Telco sends Verizon a MAP message saying "what is the cell location of Jamal Khashoggi's phone?"
> I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit CLID faking and reinjection of apparently local CLID by overseas inputs.<p>Actually, there are several legitimate use cases:<p>• Call divert: Local number calls a number abroad and that one is diverted back a another local number. It's probably rare, but it's a totally legit use case.<p>• 2G/3G roaming: I'm not an expert on this one, but as far as I understood it, roaming calls placed on 2G/3G networks are initiated in the visiting country, and use the local number of the caller.<p>• Getting better rates using VoIP. Whether this is legit or not might be subject to discussion, however I was using a foreign VoIP provider (because they had better rates for local calls than any local providers, for my low call volume) sending out my own local number (had to be validated by them by callback, although that's their own security measure, not the network's one). Now in several EU countries and Switzerland this doesn't work any more, as calls bearing national IDs coming from abroad must be displayed as anonymous. And it's quite annoying that there isn't a way to "authentify" those numbers so the owner can use them as they wish.
Telco networks are sprawling and accurately defining the boundary might be harder than it sounds.<p>Traditionally they have a bias towards "working"/delivering traffic. It's easier to issue a refund than answer a urgent support request.<p>I can also imagine the biggest customers have all sorts of multi-vendor failover plans that may be affected.
> Even just flagging it would help.<p>That's what's mandated by ARCEP (the French regulator) since the beginning of this year, and now all faked numbers are marked as “hidden caller”, and indeed it helps a lot.
Cost. Cost to spam and scam tends to 0 at industrial scale. Meanwhile amount of time and resources telco want to spend on fighting it is Bounded by how much regulators are going to allow them to pass on to customers.
I rely on the ability to set the outbound caller ID but I would happily register it if required.
In India this has been the regulation for several years, and has helped along with the Do Not Disturb (DND) registration by the end user and rules for senders/callers. Anyone sending bulk SMSes, even if the sending is done through a third party provider like AWS from another country/region, will have to register. [1]<p>The entity, the header, content template (which allows two or three variables/placeholders) need to be registered. A Distributed Ledger (DLT) is used to store these. Ad hoc messages without a registered template are expected to be rejected by the telco.<p>[1]: <a href="https://trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders" rel="nofollow">https://trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders</a>
As an Australian, I'm happy to hear this, but also annoyed that a lot of legitimate SMS from companies don't use branded sender ID. I'm not sure why, but my guess is that SMS gateways charge more for it and businesses don't want to pay the extra cent or two.
Alpha codes don't allow replies. As such if you need to reply it has to be from a number
No it costs the same, the reason they do it is that it’s slightly more difficult to spoof a real number sender ID because most gateways will verify ownership by sending you a text on that number before letting you send outbound from it, where as they have no way of doing the same for an alphanumeric sender ID
That will likely change after this goes into effect, otherwise all that legitimate spam will never make it.
As counter measure to text scams the Australian government (actually ACMA which I think is the Au version of the FCC) has introduced a national register of Sender Ids, which comes in to effect on the 1st of July. It requires providers to mark any unregistered Sender Id as 'Unverified'<p>I haven't yet been able to find the full register (if it's even public) but I thought this is an interesting approach.
Singapore does this. Any message that comes from an unregistered sender show up on the phone with “Likely Scam” as the sender name.
Sadly this isn't limited to Australia. RCS the SMS successor does not consider free peering. I believe security is used as an excuse to create a closed ecosystem that surfaces new businesses and therefore innovation.<p>For a community of builders, like this, any barrier to entry will be problem, however we'll intend.
Good move, it's crazy how many scam calls and SMS I receive in Australia. In fact, if I get an SMS or a call, I just assume it's a scam.
The 'Ask Reason for Calling' iPhone feature has completely eliminated scam calls for me. Real callers not in contacts leave a short message and I pick it up. Best iOS feature from the last few years IMO.
Have you added yourself to the Do Not Call register?<p><a href="https://www.donotcall.gov.au" rel="nofollow">https://www.donotcall.gov.au</a>
I don’t think this will cut down on spam so much as fraud.
All spam calls I get don’t have registered IDs
I am sure there are reasons why this won't work, but could it really be so hard to show both the faked number, and where the call actually comes from, so I could choose which one to add to my block list.
India has something similar, and even goes a step further by having last alphabet as an identifier for Promotional, Services, Govt. etc.<p><a href="https://www.trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders" rel="nofollow">https://www.trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders</a>
It is crazy that wasn't something already required. Here local sms-gateways always required paperwork to prove word you want to use as sender name is a brand you own.
Interesting change. If it helps cut down on spam and phishing texts while keeping branded messages trustworthy, it sounds like a step in the right direction.
I welcome this move, enforcing that SMS messages come from who they say they'll come from is important.<p>Personally I think the whole system of replacing the point of origin with a name needs to be overhauled. Allowing a name as well is fine, but the practice of delivering messages that can't be replied to is pretty poor.<p>Rather than have to futz around with a different number or website to go to, I should be able to just reply "STOP" if (for example) Dominos keep spamming me with Pizza offers I don't want.
This sounds connected with their social media restrictions.
Socialist governments always do this in the end..
Governments always want to know everything. They are like the biggest data sniffers now, even more so than e. g. CIA-book (formerly known as Facebook).