FCC proposes $10 Million fine for spoofed robocalls

Thu Dec 19 23:22:06 UTC 2019

On 12/19/19 6:11 PM, bzs at 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