Scam calls

Please take this one seriously. I have had a flurry of extremely abusive calls to my work mobile because someone has had automated fake calls that were using my number as their caller ID.

They were too thick to listen to or comprehend any rational explanation as to why the caller ID was fake and just kept ranting at me.

Hopefully the authorities aren't stupid enough to actually follow up a complaint like that, but reporting people to call blocking services or publishing their number online is only causing serious hassle for a 3rd party with nothing to do with the call at all and who have been the victims of identity theft basically.

These calls need to be dealt with by the use of authenticated Caller ID. Where a caller ID is dubious, the network should be able to replace it with just "UNKNOWN" or "UNVERIFIABLE" that would reduce the volumes.

There shouldn't be any possibility of displaying a number you don't own. For example, a call coming in from some random VoIP platform shouldn't be able to present an Irish mobile number. They've no legitimate business doing so, so the caller ID shouldn't be passed through.

There are use cases like office systems and so on, but responsible VoIP providers don't let you just set any outbound caller ID, only numbers you have rights to use.

It needs to be cleaned up, as it's causing mayhem and must be trawling in serious amount of money too.

They possibly don’t at present, but the capability needs to be developed.

Caller ID is generally pretty simple. There’s metadata sent along side phone calls, one field of which contains the originating phone number and a flag that tells you whether or not to display it.

In the past, only telephone exchanges, belonging to big phone companies, could connect to those networks and directly send data, but nowadays we’ve a vast array of small VoIP providers interconnected and in some jurisdictions, they’re totally unregulated and can just send anything. Without any regulation, you can send anything you like in the caller ID field and the system at the far end will just display it.

The problem is the protocol never envisaged a world where there were untrustworthy sources of Caller ID. It’s a system that dates from the 1980s and 90s, the technology is modern but the protocol and design concept isn’t.

It depends on your network. I think 3 Ireland always displays incoming calls in full +353 format, while Vodafone and Eir don't.

I just got a call from a number with the prefix (038), it said Ireland, I answered and there was nobody on the other end.

Presume it’s a scam but where even is 038 in Ireland, not sure that exists as a prefix?