Marketplace has been exposing these scam companies for years. They even traced their location in India multiple times.
Canada needs to secure our telephone systems. It is way too easy for a scammer to get a Canadian VOIP number or to spoof phone numbers. Scam calls lately are have been spoofing my number to call me.
Punitive tariffs, quotas, bans get applied to every kind of product -- counterfeits, contaminated foods, polluting vehicles. I never heard any government agency suggest applying it to countries that are the overwhelming source of scam calls.
The converse of this is that it's pretty ridiculous to assume that countries have scammers in them because they're just tolerating them.
Sure, we could rush out a technical solution, but then it would run the risk of being broken rather quickly, and further it's important to not compromise the reliability of the phone system. Too many critical services rely on it. It's worth taking the time to do it right.
Last I heard, the FCC was in talks with telcos to finalize a solution, but I would expect it to take at least another year to implement and deploy it.
Until then, I guess we'll all have to deal with annoying scammers and comments by people who don't understand why spoofing makes their pet incentive idea irrelevant.
Besides, it’s not like these scammers are paying taxes to the Indian government, so they don’t have any national incentive to facilitate scammers. Tax compliance in countries like India, outside the first world, is very poor. Though the article mentions that Indian authorities are cooperating with Canadian officials, it needs to be understood that this cooperation isn’t based on any incentive structure, other than civilised societies need to crack down on crime. Crime in Canada is a low priority for Indian officials, just like I’m sure it’s the other way around.
Finally, Canada doesn’t even feature in the top 15-20 trading partners for India, last time I checked, so I don’t know what punitive incentive can be hoped for here. If you need a solution, it would be more productive to approach from a more pragmatic, cooperative point of view, rather than being all high and mighty and taking a carpet bombing style approach that affects legitimate business as well. Or, you could do that but it wouldn’t even matter.
Edit: I’d like to add that every day there is news about people, here in India also losing their life savings to these scammers. So it would be wrong to have an impression that authorities and citizens of this country take pleasure in people from richer countries being scammed. I’ve old, not so tech savvy parents myself, who I realise are pretty vulnerable to this evil.
So is the US telco terminating these calls free of charge?
It seems unlikely you can spoof payments and telcos turn a blind eye to it...
> In a press release issued Sunday, Delhi police said they had arrested 32 “white-collar criminals” and seized 55 computers along with dozens of cellphones, internet routers and “illegal software” being used in what they described as a “swanky international cheating scam call centre targeting Canada citizens.”
> All of those arrested are residents of India and between the ages of 18 and 38, according to the statement.
> The Delhi police alleged the scheme has been targeting Canadian citizens by claiming their social insurance numbers had been compromised.
Here's another: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
> LONDON: British Police service on Monday said it had shut down two sophisticated criminal call centres in Kolkata, instrumental in defrauding thousands of victims in the UK alone, with the cooperation of Indian police.
> The call centres were raided by 50 officers from the Cyber Division of Kolkata Police last week as part of a worldwide four-year operation conducted by the UK police and Microsoft.
The VoIP providers are getting paid (by the scammers), your cell/phone company is getting paid twice (by both you and the VoIP provider). It's not like customers are switching to the other spam-less phone option, or giving up having voice service entirely.
I hate to be cynical about it, but literally all the players in a position to track and shut these calls down via technical means have absolutely no tangible incentives to do so.
Saying "oh there's no way to know where the calls come from" is just lame excuses. CallerId spoofing is one thing, but POTS has other systems.
If you get spam calls, your carrier is liable unless they can point to the source of the disruption. If they can't point to where they got it from, they are liable, and so on. If they can identify them but they're unwilling to pay out, their link to you is still liable.
Eventually, the buck has to stop somewhere.
-You forward your office phone to your cell phone. You want the number of the original person calling to show up on your cell phone. This means that the office phone system needs to spoof the original caller's phone number. This could be a local call, an overseas call, etc.
This is not a simple update issue. How does the telco know that this is a legitimate spoof? Further, if this is blocked and the number is rewritten to the billing telephone number, the client will complain that they are answering outside calls, thinking it is their office calling.
-How the carriers are integrated, how do they trust the incoming call info from another carrier? Blacklists and whitelists are impossible to keep up as scammers are randomizing the data.
This is an expensive problem, and one that carriers would love to solve - there isn't a lack of incentive either. I've seen a few solutions out there, but I am not convinced they work as advertised.
It is the same problem as with finance transactions wrt money laundering really, which is a solved problem. The only cover bad actors have is finding a sovereign state willing to cooperate.
The calls are coming from Canada. These guys are buying Voip and dialing over the net.
For more than a year wife had calls from both the IRS and FBI, and some unknown lawsuit threatening to come after her.
We must be really good at hiding because the FBI never found us and just gave up calling!
They all matched the area code and prefix of my number but the last four were always different. Block one another calls 12 minutes later.
I’ve had this number for 13 years, have ported it across carriers and it’s long been known by friends and family as the default way to find me. This problem was a mild nuisance years ago. It’s a plague now.
It may be time to finally give it up.
After months I answered and it was obviously a call center but it was from my bank. I'm in Canada and TD spammed me with phone calls for months every day just to ask if I wanted a travel credit card.
Even supposedly legitimate calls can be annoying and stupid.
Perhaps so, but to what extent and for how long? How many other mules are there, and how long will it take them to find replacement mules to replace those arrested?
I hope they throw the book at the mules, but I don't expect this to be a real solution to the problem.
> "Police have since worked with Indian authorities to carry out a flurry of raids against suspected illegal call centres in the country. Canadian officials said Friday they know of 39 call centres, in the New Delhi and Noida area, that have been shut down.
"Ogden said still others will face police scrutiny and that he anticipates more arrests and charges "in the next few weeks."
It's really good, and they traced it all the way back to the call center (with an insider)! But of course, no one was arrested. Sadly, I don't think the punishment will fit how much annoyance and time wasted.
His wife is wanted too, but instead of going to where she is, they just call her and ask her to turn herself in?
By publicizing the arrest, the police likely killed their change to get the mule to lead to higher-up takedowns, no? Or have the police completely given up on shutting down the overseas operations?
Do you really think you're smarter than everyone at the FCC, since you apparently think nobody at the FCC thought of this?
If you facilitated criminal to directly connect with me - you’re liable.
Telcos should be liable for “call laundering” similar as banks as for money laundering.
If you don’t know identity of person calling me - you’re responsible for damages.
Problem solved.
However, I don’t expect any urgent calls from anyone outside of my contacts so I was able to fix the problem by enabling iOS’s Silence Unknown Callers feature.
But of course, then twilio is only doing this to keep scammers off their own platform. Since the telcos don't validate anything, there are plenty of less scrupulous providers that don't validate anything.
So all the telcos need to do is require anyone providing access to their networks to validate their caller ID numbers.
I actually deal with (part of) this problem from the other side: I maintain text messaging for the biggest company in our sector.
Within the last few months, we've been running into issues where our phone numbers are actually being stolen by these third parties.
Service providers are SUPPOSED to receive letters of authorization before porting a number. I.e. if I want to use my phone number on Twilio, I need to provide a letter showing ownership of the number (or blocks of numbers) I wish to provision on their platform.
Twilio, BTW, is one of the good guys on this. But FWIW, if the number's already provisioned they can't really tell you when a number's been hijacked, you won't know till you try to use it and Twilio's API gives errors.
Anyway... big takeaway is our numbers keep winding up 'stolen' by another provider (not Twilio). Every time we email them, they release the numbers back to us, but asking for LOAs to see how this happened gets crickets. Oh and this process leaves the numbers unusable for 1-3 business days.
Mmm, but some Canadian or American legal entity is bridging these onto the phone network, and needs to be doing its due diligence better.
While you don't understand the problem, you can't possibly have anything of value to say about the solution.
There may well be perverse incentives causing certain entities to tolerate scammers, but we shouldn't pretend we know what those perverse incentives are when we can't even trace the calls. On the other hand, it is much more likely that once the spoofing problem is solved, the incentives are all already in place and the vast majority of scam calls will be solved.
If a rational person only knows how to use a hammer, they pause when they come across a problem that isn't a nail. But when the HN crowd comes across a problem that isn't immediately solved by incentives, they argue that the people who actually are qualified to solve the problem with other tools, should be using incentives!