Hacker News Reader

Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

So it’s possible to show a local number when the call is arriving from another part of the world? That seems strange or rather insane, but would explain how the problem happens ;)

View on HN

Sometimes they show up spoofed to a local area code. Sometimes they show up as from the 800 area code, which is not specific to any geographical region in the United States and is also used by legitimate call centers. My bank's customer service number is an 800 number, for example.

I don't know if easily spoofable phone numbers are unique to the US. But even if they are not, international scam-calling operations are going to predominantly target English speakers since English offers lower language-understanding barriers and a lot of high income potential victims.

Yeah, but when the call is originating from outside the US? Why would that be allowed?

Do you know what an Indian call center is?

A huge amount of international phone traffic comes to the US every day

Hm, guess that would be the pro/con with us not being able to easily set up virtual numbers here. But otoh I wonder why the UK doesn’t seem to suffer in the same way. Same lack of easy virtual numbers?

I might be mistaken but are not mobile numbers in the UK in their special area code/exchange so calling them costs extra? Calling landlines does not seem to be profitable anymore (my home landline gets almost 0 calls now, my work phone gets maybe 3-4 calls a week) so the scammers only want to call mobile numbers and in the US it's not different from calling a landline while it might cost extra in the UK.

They'll buy tons of phone numbers from all over so they always have local numbers to call from. They just use VOIP software to route it to wherever the call center is located. As far as their provider is concerned, they're probably just a local business. Or, at most, a local number for a foreign company.

As I said in another comment, why allow international numbers to spoof national numbers?

In the parent's description, it's not spoofing at all. They've purchased real american (local) phone numbers, and are routing calls through them through other means (like internet...). There's no telephone network level trickery or spoofing going on.

Ah. Any idea why it wouldn’t be a problem (from what I’ve heard) in the UK then?

Not always. They will spoof legitimate numbers that they don't own. If you call them back you'll usually get some very confused person who just got a bunch of calls accusing them of making spam calls.

Phone numbers can be spoofed, anyway. If you call back a robocall spam number, you'll reach a very confused human. And I've received a bunch of robocalls from my own number.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com