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AT&T ramps up its fight against robocalls with Call Validation feature
The Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have been trying, at least in theory, to stop the robocalling scourge from spreading for many years now, but even though a recent survey estimated a mind-blowing 200 million unwanted calls go through every single day in the US, the nation's major carriers are finally taking action against the thing that threatens to kill the enjoyment of using a mobile phone in this day and age.
Well, at least two of the "big four" American wireless service providers are making a concerted effort to clean their networks of spammers, scammers, and number spoofers, as AT&T follows T-Mobile's suit in implementing the SHAKEN/STIR standard to offer its customers a little more peace of mind when receiving a call from someone they don't know.
[...] Unfortunately, both Call Protect and Call Validation are currently only available on three high-end Android devices. Namely, Samsung's Galaxy S10 and S10+, as well as the LG V40 ThinQ. If it makes you feel any better, you don't have to do anything special to get the newly released feature enabled on the aforementioned smartphones. You will simply start seeing a green checkmark and the words "Valid number" on your handset's display when an incoming call is authenticated. That's a small step forward for one carrier and... an even as a whole.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Thursday December 19 2019, @09:59PM
No, not really.
These are not the call centers of old, with brick & mortar buildings, 66 blocks, PRI, etc. Everything has been updated with brand new technology, and is far more cost efficient.
200 million calls per day. If they were at retail rate, those scammers would be out of capitol in literally minutes. Not to mention, with physical locations to track back to, very vulnerable to law enforcement.
The problem is not with the major carriers at all really, and is sourced at the fringes of the PSTN network. Those fringes are major VoIP providers using the SS7 protocol to tunnel all of their traffic to Tier 1 carrier like AT&T. They do have large catalogs of DIDs, and it's at this level where a phone number is actually "owned". The end user simply has a right to forcibly migrate the DID between providers. In some cases, that migration doesn't even move the DID at the Tier 1 level at all. It's still resides with the same upstream provider that's been white labeled 3 times downward.
Finding a provider on the fringe willing to take your traffic is not all that difficult at all. When you negotiate prices in 1 million minute calling blocks, it's pretty cheap actually. Cheap enough that the percentage of people contacted versus the percentage that convert into "sales" is wildly profitable.
All that traffic you think the Tier 1 carriers are profiting off? At the beginning are being sold wholesale at very cheap rates. Why do you think nearly every minute plan that exists went unlimited? Same with texting? It's because they figured out how to charge for the bandwidth, and not the service. That's not been good for their bottom lines, but it was inevitable since communications largely moved to Internet protocols, and away from the carriers platforms.
I can purchase a 1 million minute block right now, and probably for less than 1/10th a penny. I think I can safely estimate that the profit major telecoms get from scammer traffic is a drop in the bucket, and not nearly worth the hassle it causes.
The equation of Greed you're looking for is:
cost of customer dissatisfaction and damages < cost of developing authenticated and secured network
What changed?
cost of developing authenticated and secured network < cost of US Senators fucking pissed they could be heard by a fucking German security company (and anyone else with skills)
That's why SS7 is now being secured, and calls within the network are authenticated from endpoint to endpoint.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.