State Attorneys Urge FCC To Combat Neighborhood Spoofing (biglawbusiness.com)

Attorneys general from 35 states are urging the Federal Communications Commission to allow telephone companies to block illegally manipulated calls that appear to come from consumers' neighborhoods. From a report: The rule change could help reduce "spoofed" calls from numbers with the same area code as the consumer, or even calls from the consumer's own number. Combating junk marketing calls has been a top consumer protection priority for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. The FCC last November adopted a set of robocall rules that allowed telephone companies to proactively block calls from invalid, unassigned or unused numbers. The agency then sought public comments on empowering telephone companies further. The attorneys general want to the FCC to create new rules specifically targeting neighborhood spoofing, they said in comments filed Oct. 9 with the agency.

Comments

Re:Why not block all unverified POTS spoofing?

[110010001000]

I don't think call centers care about more regulations, they already ignore the ones in place. There would need to be a technical solution. We would need to get rid off spoofing numbers. The arguments for spoofing aren't good enough to allow the system to be abused.

Re:Why not block all unverified POTS spoofing?

[EvilSS]

The problem isn't the spoofing itself, that's not going away, it can't. Companies don't have 1:1 physical lines to extensions, and the numbers assigned to the physical lines usually don't route since they are never actually used in the company phone system. The problem is the phone company systems allow the customer to set any number they want, not just numbers assigned to them. That's the part that needs to change. They need to force the phone companies to start to apply some damn security to the process and prevent assigning numbers not assigned to the customer from being used. Yes it's going to cost money so they won't do it by themselves. They also need to require VOIP companies with outbound calling gateways in the US to log outbound calls and assign to the customer making the calls. Make them financially liable if the customer can't be identified.