nanog mailing list archives

Re: FCC proposes $10 Million fine for spoofed robocalls


From: Paul Timmins <paul () telcodata us>
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 18:22:06 -0500

On 12/19/19 6:11 PM, bzs () theworld com wrote:
They should be fining the telcos, they're making a lot of money on
these calls.

And if you believe otherwise (e.g., that it's like email spam) you've
been duped by telco PR.

Unlike spam when was the last time a telco failed to bill you for a
billable phone call? Never.

They know exactly who is using their system. And they get paid for
it. And these junk callers are making millions of calls per hour when
they're active.

I work for a phone company in a senior role, and have for years. I've also been saying this for years. These are all half solutions. The people handling these calls know exactly who their customers are, and they'd remove them in hours if a legal mandate came down to provide passthrough penalties for providing service to these people. Legitimate callcenters don't send out tons of traffic with random source numbers that typically match the same first 6 digits as their caller.

It'd take the large and small companies alike maybe a day to run database queries to identify and shut down the callers doing this. But there's money to be made in prolonging the issue - they get to charge the caller for making the calls, and the customers to block them.

(for what it's worth, the problem ones aren't on my network. I checked.)

-Paul


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