OffTopic: Telecom Fraud

Hi All,

I am wondering if a bit of public shaming may help. I every so often get calls from the “verizon wireless fraud prevention dept”. It’s scammers calling me (and others) telling them there was fraud on their account. This gets people worked up and fooled into giving out data that they normally wouldn’t. This allows the fraudsters to then order devices under the victims name. They spoof their caller ID to that of Verizons. I understand there is currently no fix (though lets hope that SHAKEN/STIR fixes it one day). but at the very least why can’t Verizon drop these calls at their edge. If they see the B-Number as being their client and the A number being theirs but coming from elsewhere why can’t they just drop the call?

If anyone has any insight I would love to hear it.

TIA.

Regards,

Dovid

Probably for the same exact reasons why BCP38 isn't more widely deployed.

I guarantee you that if carriers were made civilly or criminally liable for allowing robodialers to operate on their network, this sort of issue would end practically overnight. Robodialer calling patterns are obvious, and I'd imagine any tech could give you a criteria to search for in the CDR streams to identify them and shut them off in hours.

Problem is, they're lucrative to provide services to, and there is immunity on the carrier's part to these sorts of issues. SHAKEN/STIR nonwithstanding (I don't think we'll see widespread adoption of this within a decade, even with a government mandate as there's still a massive embedded base of switches that can't support it and never will).

It may be incredibly frustrating, but there's plenty of money to be made in prolonging the problem.

-Paul

That was my thought as well. From what I heard last 50% of the calls are fraud. That’s a lot of money that they are collecting on origination. I also saw this https://www.multichannel.com/news/comcast-and-att-test-anti-robocalling-tech and did a test. A client owned a Comcast number and had ATT. I set the CLI to the Comcast number and it showed up on the ATT phone as I set it. You would think if ATT had the tools in place at the very least it wouldn’t display the number.

Dovid,

You are correct that your message is off topic. I respectfully ask that you honor the rules of this mailing list and refrain from off topic posts. They simply add noise to an otherwise useful and highly germane experts resource.

-mel beckman

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