OffTopic: Telecom Fraud

Tue Apr 23 20:14:25 UTC 2019

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

On 4/23/19 3:55 PM, Dovid Bender wrote:
> 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
>