I live in the US and we’ve got elections coming up. Every day for the past several months, I get 3-8 text messages from political campaigns per day. I block them every time, yet they keep coming in.
My question is NOT how to stop them, but what happens to those numbers that I, and surely hundreds and maybe thousands of other people have blocked? What if an actual person gets that phone number and needs to call people? What happens then?
Because on a long enough time line, all numbers will have been used for spam.
What is this technique? I could perhaps send real looking messages from a bank and gets tons of money. Or somebody I’ll intended could spoof my number to create issues between me and my family. How could telecom companies keep it happening?
STIR and SHAKEN are two tools to authenticate calls originate from the telecom they are officially registered with. The adoption of these attestation systems has been quite slow though.
It’s frustrating that most cell phones don’t have a way of blocking calls that don’t have this attestation built in. But after adding a spam filter to my android that does, the number of spam calls that make it through are much, much lower.
Occasionally, I get a small business that doesn’t have their PBX configured correctly and they can blocked. But it’s few and far between.
It’s possible, but not always that easy to do. Banks and Telecom companies do put some systems in place to try and prevent bad things from happening but it’s a game of cat and mouse… Whatever you do, scammers will try and find tricks and other ways around it.
Do bear in mind that a LOT of people think, “Oh, I know, I’ll scam to make money.” And a LOT of people put in a LOT of time and effort to do so. I’m not saying you won’t outsmart them if you try, but consider that you’re going up against a shitload of experience in scamming. If they’re not doing something, it probably isn’t workable. Probably. Not necessarily. People do come up with new stuff to try all the time.