Phishing and telemarketing telephone calls

Mon Apr 27 18:34:06 UTC 2020

On 4/27/20 11:12 AM, Jon Lewis wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Apr 2020, William Herrin wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 7:32 PM Matthew Black 
>> <Matthew.Black at csulb.edu> wrote:
>>> Good grief, selling a kit for $47. Since all robocalls employ Caller 
>>> ID spoofing, just how does one prove who called?
>>
>> You don't. AFAICT, that's the point of Anne's comments. Finding them
>> is good enough. Paying off anyone who both finds them and appears well
>> connected with the law is cheaper than allowing the legal system to
>> become aware of their identities and activity.
>>
>> Blackmail 101 dude. Find someone with a secret and demand payment for
>> your silence. The best part is that if you're legitimately entitled to
>> the money because of the secret then it's not technically blackmail.
>>
>> Presumably the meat of the $47 kit is about how to tease out enough
>> clues to search public records and identify them.
>
> In my experience, the caller-id is always forged, and the call center 
> reps hang up or give uselessly vague answers if I ask what company 
> they're calling from.  I suspect the only sure way to identify them is 
> to do business with them, i.e. buy that extended warranty on your car, 
> or at least start walking through the process until either payment is 
> made or they tell you who you'll have to pay.  I wonder, if you agree 
> to buy the extended warranty, solely for the purpose of identifying 
> them, can you immediately cancel it / dispute the charge?
>
> Then there are the 100% criminal ones calling from "Windows Technical 
> Support" who want to trick you into giving them remote admin access to 
> your PC.  I assume that's a dry well and the best you can hope to do 
> is waste as much of their time as yours and see how foul a mouth they 
> have.
>
On the IETF list, I've been making the case that a DKIM-like solution 
for SIP signalling would in fact give you the way to blame somebody, 
which was DKIM's entire raison d'etre. Who cares what the actual fake 
e.164 address is and whether the sending domain is allowed to assert it 
or not? That is rather beside the point. All I care is that the 
originating domain is supporting abuse, and I know what the domain is to 
complain to, ignore, etc.

Mike