Saturday, December 30, 2017

Forgive my ignorance, but...

Can't the Phone Companies do something about the increasing use of spoofed phone numbers? Especially in "SWAT"ting cases like the one I wrote about 2 posts below this?

I mean, it is bad enough that they allow "Suzy from Credit Card Services" to spoof their telephone number...no one gets hurt, only annoyed. But "SWAT"ting and other crimes like this should lead to jail time. Murder charges if someone killed...There should be penalties for this behavior.

But people have been injured and killed by cops that thought they were arriving on the scene of a murder, or a hostage situation (which doesn't excuse the injuries or shootings, IMO, but does lead to some leniency due to the situation). The telephone lines used, be they land lines or cell lines, have specific connections that should not be untrackable. The Phone Companies SHOULD be able to fix this.

Why don't they?

Perhaps the NSA needs to step in and tell us who is responsible....

(I'd bet I could put together a lynch mob for the telemarketers though....if I cared to....)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Quite recently I had this very conversation with Verizon. I spoke with five different V employees including their fraud unit (or whatever it is called as I do not remember the exact name) and senior IT persons at their HQ. The end result was they verified these were spoofs yet then claimed they could do nothing about spoofing.

I suppose as some type of consolation they offered to block certain phone numbers. I said great and provided a list of the top fifty repeat callers. Verizon said they could only block thirty numbers. I asked, you mean just for this time? They replied, no, forever.

I continue to get multiple spoof callers (nearly ten per day) yet Verizon will not block any further numbers. The most important problem this creates for me is that all the spoofs feature my area code and prefix. This makes me hesitant to answer a call which means I miss important calls.