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posted by mrpg on Friday September 28 2018, @03:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the bills-to-pay dept.

FCC Hangs Blockbuster $37.5 Million Fine Over Robocaller Accused of Spoofing Real Numbers:

The FCC has announced its proposal to impose a fine of $37.5 million on a company accused of making robocalls and hiding the calls' origin behind the real phone numbers of consumers. The agency is attempting to show that it's cracking down on the out of control robocall industry, but critics say it's too little, too late.

On Wednesday, the FCC said that it was alerted by a whistleblower about the robocall practices of an Arizona-based company called Affordable Enterprises. According to the announcement, the company "made more than 2.3 million maliciously-spoofed telemarketing calls to Arizonans during a 14-month span starting in 2016 to sell home improvement and remodeling services."

Spoofing is the term for using various techniques to display a different phone number on a robocall target's caller-ID than the number that's actually being used by the caller. What makes the Affordable Enterprises case different is that it's accused of intentionally using phone numbers that belong to consumers. This makes it hard to file a complaint against the company and leads to confused Americans fielding angry phone calls out of the blue.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @03:57PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @03:57PM (#741387)

    in my opinion, the carriers should also be fined since they allow thus practice -- a college student could easily write software to recognize the criminal behaviour and auto alert the fcc -- they wouldn't make money from shutting down these criminals though

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Friday September 28 2018, @09:05PM

    by stretch611 (6199) on Friday September 28 2018, @09:05PM (#741546)

    I used to work for AT&T before they outsourced practically every job overseas...

    Every call record that we collected (I was in international message processing systems) had 3 phone numbers of record. All had to be there or we dumped the record as invalid. From number, to number, and billing number.

    First off, even if caller id is blocked these numbers are always on record with the phone number. That is a fact I specifically remember.

    Even if the from number is spoofed, the accurate one is recorded. On the off chance that there is a way to change this in the phone company records, you know that the phone company keeps accurate billing information... it wants to be paid.

    There is no doubt in my mind that phone companies can stop call spoofing with ease. They just don't care because every call is revenue. And while many people think phone calls are unlimited due to cell phone bills, all carriers still have to reconcile connection fees between the phone company were the call originates from, the destination phone company, and any company who owns the lines in between that carried the call. And while I have not had a land line in over 10 years, I expect that long distance calls are still billed per minute.

    And while I was with AT&T, I know for a fact that these records are standard for all companies. The records were a standard that was decided on by a multi-company and international committee. Not to mention, some of the old legacy systems that used these records were written back before the MaBell split... Many domestic telecoms have these old systems... even if they were replaced, the replacement would need to perform the same functionality and handle the standard record format regardless of how it has changed since I last worked in the industry.

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P