Sadly this isn't limited to Australia. RCS the SMS successor does not consider free peering. I believe security is used as an excuse to create a closed ecosystem that surfaces new businesses and therefore innovation.
For a community of builders, like this, any barrier to entry will be problem, however we'll intend.
I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit CLID faking and reinjection of apparently local CLID by overseas inputs.
I'm assuming there's a technical and/or willpower reason or some counterfactual like VOIP depends on it.
Even just flagging it would help. Or, rejecting numbers they can know lie inside their own routing architecture, or asserts within their own number plan where the CLID does not match.
Morally it's like BCP38 in the customer facing internet systems: reject customer input they don't pay you to assert.
I used to work at two (UK) telcos. There's a historic reason and a modern reason.
The historic reason was, just like the Internet, the international phone network was built on gentlemen agreements by engineers who largely trusted each other.
A big national telco is unlikely to attack its peers, so there was little need for safety measures. As smaller telcos came in to the mix via deregulation, that understanding changed - but it was hard to retroactively fit controls.
The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.
If you were designing a modern network, it wouldn't be like this. But international telephony is over a hundred years old and has a huge amount of legacy technology and legal agreements.
> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number.
The company that has offshored it's support to the Philippines might want that, but I doubt any consumers want that. That shouldn't have happened, but regulation comes (20+ years?) after harmful business profit decisions have been made and implemented.
But, thank you for the explanation. I have heard similar explanations before, and it has always sounded to me like a situation where the telcos are able to offer a service for a profit for the customers to hide the origin of their offshore call centres (that mostly nobody wants to speak to anyway).
The consumers 'want' it because if they get disconnected and try to recall, by spoofing a local number it costs them nothing/little since it's a local number (maybe toll-free?) instead of a lot for an international call. Of course, they might want a local call centre even more, but spoofing a local number for overseas call centres does have a purpose.
My electric company gave me a number (UID, not phone number) to resume a call if the issue wasn't fixed within 24 hours, and I'm pretty sure internet operators have the same protocol (at least used to).
> My electric company gave me a number (UID, not phone number) to resume a call if the issue wasn't fixed within 24 hours
What planet do you live on ?
Seriously. Where I am it is guaranteed that a utility company would never even consider such a concept let alone have the technical competence to actually implement it.
> I've never seen an hotline where you can call back and resume the call you were doing.
Assuming they even accept inbound calls to the CLI number in the first place.
I frequently encounter companies where I miss a call due to $reason, I then try to call back the CLI number and it just says "This was $megacorp trying to call you, we will try again later".
Or, if you're really lucky, the CLI will just dump you into IVR-hell which, of course, is "AI powered" today, so you have to spend 30 minutes telling the stupid robot they mis-intepreted your voice.
The call centre for my Australian bank's KYC is seemingly backed by a single person. I've spoken to her a few times now... so calling them back more or less does work, though you might have to wait on hold again.
Just looking at my incoming call list on my phone for yesterday: "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Potential Fraud", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", a real call, "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam"...
Phone is set to only notify me for numbers for known contacts - does mean that I occasionally miss calls from other people, but I can live with that.
Yes, was just relating my experience - it's just go the the point where I personally opt to play safe. Like everyone I do get calls from people who aren't in my contact list but it was getting silly so I've defaulted to ignoring them and it works for me. Anyone serious is going to be happy leaving a message - which suits me anyway as I spend a large part of my work day in Teams calls.
> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number.
This is a valid use case, but I’m a bit surprised that the mechanism isn’t better controlled. Surely a better design would be for an actual local entity to forward the call, possibly with an optimization to allow the voice data to bypass the local entity once the call is connected.
Just whitelist the caller ID and have the originating network guarantor
The second part is the hard part and requires coordination
It wouldn’t be expensive or especially hard to do but there is no payoff for the network. Remember they make money off scam calls too
Since as long as I can remember these organisations have been optimised for profit, not for GAF and that’s why they’re being savaged by regulation and OTT competitors now
There has been no market forces compelling them to do this and until recently when it got really bad, no political or regulatory forces
It's a solved problem. VoIP plus leased trunk lines by the a telco in the market you want to work at. You are limited to fixed set of numbers and you are "local" in the market you want to work at.
That's why in 2020 the FCC belatedly mandated SHAKEN/STIR to authenticate Caller ID in the US using public-key cryptography. Deployment is still work in progress, and it does not cover SMS/MMS, however.
A bigger problem is Russia or Saudi Arabia using the SS7 signalling network to track their dissidents in the US because those legacy telco protocols have basically no authentication whatsoever, and won't blink if a Saudi Telco sends Verizon a MAP message saying "what is the cell location of Jamal Khashoggi's phone?"
> I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit CLID faking and reinjection of apparently local CLID by overseas inputs.
Actually, there are several legitimate use cases:
• Call divert: Local number calls a number abroad and that one is diverted back a another local number. It's probably rare, but it's a totally legit use case.
• 2G/3G roaming: I'm not an expert on this one, but as far as I understood it, roaming calls placed on 2G/3G networks are initiated in the visiting country, and use the local number of the caller.
• Getting better rates using VoIP. Whether this is legit or not might be subject to discussion, however I was using a foreign VoIP provider (because they had better rates for local calls than any local providers, for my low call volume) sending out my own local number (had to be validated by them by callback, although that's their own security measure, not the network's one). Now in several EU countries and Switzerland this doesn't work any more, as calls bearing national IDs coming from abroad must be displayed as anonymous. And it's quite annoying that there isn't a way to "authentify" those numbers so the owner can use them as they wish.
That's what's mandated by ARCEP (the French regulator) since the beginning of this year, and now all faked numbers are marked as “hidden caller”, and indeed it helps a lot.
Cost. Cost to spam and scam tends to 0 at industrial scale. Meanwhile amount of time and resources telco want to spend on fighting it is Bounded by how much regulators are going to allow them to pass on to customers.
As an Australian, I'm happy to hear this, but also annoyed that a lot of legitimate SMS from companies don't use branded sender ID. I'm not sure why, but my guess is that SMS gateways charge more for it and businesses don't want to pay the extra cent or two.
No it costs the same, the reason they do it is that it’s slightly more difficult to spoof a real number sender ID because most gateways will verify ownership by sending you a text on that number before letting you send outbound from it, where as they have no way of doing the same for an alphanumeric sender ID
As counter measure to text scams the Australian government (actually ACMA which I think is the Au version of the FCC) has introduced a national register of Sender Ids, which comes in to effect on the 1st of July. It requires providers to mark any unregistered Sender Id as 'Unverified'
I haven't yet been able to find the full register (if it's even public) but I thought this is an interesting approach.
It is crazy that wasn't something already required. Here local sms-gateways always required paperwork to prove word you want to use as sender name is a brand you own.
There are good reasons to allow unregistered telecommunications. If you don't like it, you can always block it your end; given that we can all expect many other people to do the same (and it'll likely be a feature built into many phone operating systems), the social pressure you're after still exists.
Interesting change. If it helps cut down on spam and phishing texts while keeping branded messages trustworthy, it sounds like a step in the right direction.
I welcome this move, enforcing that SMS messages come from who they say they'll come from is important.
Personally I think the whole system of replacing the point of origin with a name needs to be overhauled. Allowing a name as well is fine, but the practice of delivering messages that can't be replied to is pretty poor.
Rather than have to futz around with a different number or website to go to, I should be able to just reply "STOP" if (for example) Dominos keep spamming me with Pizza offers I don't want.
It's not. Together with ongoing global tightening of regulations for permissible caller IDs on phone calls, it's all about fighting fraud. (I work in the telecom industry and am in the middle of all the waves this is causing for legitimate business cases.)
Governments always want to know everything. They are like the biggest data sniffers now, even more so than e. g. CIA-book (formerly known as Facebook).
Sadly this isn't limited to Australia. RCS the SMS successor does not consider free peering. I believe security is used as an excuse to create a closed ecosystem that surfaces new businesses and therefore innovation.
For a community of builders, like this, any barrier to entry will be problem, however we'll intend.
I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit CLID faking and reinjection of apparently local CLID by overseas inputs.
I'm assuming there's a technical and/or willpower reason or some counterfactual like VOIP depends on it.
Even just flagging it would help. Or, rejecting numbers they can know lie inside their own routing architecture, or asserts within their own number plan where the CLID does not match.
Morally it's like BCP38 in the customer facing internet systems: reject customer input they don't pay you to assert.
I used to work at two (UK) telcos. There's a historic reason and a modern reason.
The historic reason was, just like the Internet, the international phone network was built on gentlemen agreements by engineers who largely trusted each other.
A big national telco is unlikely to attack its peers, so there was little need for safety measures. As smaller telcos came in to the mix via deregulation, that understanding changed - but it was hard to retroactively fit controls.
The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.
If you were designing a modern network, it wouldn't be like this. But international telephony is over a hundred years old and has a huge amount of legacy technology and legal agreements.
> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number.
The company that has offshored it's support to the Philippines might want that, but I doubt any consumers want that. That shouldn't have happened, but regulation comes (20+ years?) after harmful business profit decisions have been made and implemented.
But, thank you for the explanation. I have heard similar explanations before, and it has always sounded to me like a situation where the telcos are able to offer a service for a profit for the customers to hide the origin of their offshore call centres (that mostly nobody wants to speak to anyway).
I think I just ranted twice, sorry. Thank you!
The consumers 'want' it because if they get disconnected and try to recall, by spoofing a local number it costs them nothing/little since it's a local number (maybe toll-free?) instead of a lot for an international call. Of course, they might want a local call centre even more, but spoofing a local number for overseas call centres does have a purpose.
I've never seen an hotline where you can call back and resume the call you were doing.
My electric company gave me a number (UID, not phone number) to resume a call if the issue wasn't fixed within 24 hours, and I'm pretty sure internet operators have the same protocol (at least used to).
Is that to restart the call to the same person or a case id that gives details of your request and that could be passed to anyone?
> My electric company gave me a number (UID, not phone number) to resume a call if the issue wasn't fixed within 24 hours
What planet do you live on ?
Seriously. Where I am it is guaranteed that a utility company would never even consider such a concept let alone have the technical competence to actually implement it.
I'm jealous. ;)
> I've never seen an hotline where you can call back and resume the call you were doing.
Assuming they even accept inbound calls to the CLI number in the first place.
I frequently encounter companies where I miss a call due to $reason, I then try to call back the CLI number and it just says "This was $megacorp trying to call you, we will try again later".
Or, if you're really lucky, the CLI will just dump you into IVR-hell which, of course, is "AI powered" today, so you have to spend 30 minutes telling the stupid robot they mis-intepreted your voice.
The call centre for my Australian bank's KYC is seemingly backed by a single person. I've spoken to her a few times now... so calling them back more or less does work, though you might have to wait on hold again.
Showing overseas based workers of Microsoft as another company name on caller ID is a phishing risk.
Showing workers of companies other than Microsoft as Microsoft on caller ID is a phishing risk.
Just looking at my incoming call list on my phone for yesterday: "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Potential Fraud", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", a real call, "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam"...
Phone is set to only notify me for numbers for known contacts - does mean that I occasionally miss calls from other people, but I can live with that.
I often get calls from people I don't know for legitimate purposes.
Spam calls happen but I'm not interested in social credit ratings for callers.
Yes, was just relating my experience - it's just go the the point where I personally opt to play safe. Like everyone I do get calls from people who aren't in my contact list but it was getting silly so I've defaulted to ignoring them and it works for me. Anyone serious is going to be happy leaving a message - which suits me anyway as I spend a large part of my work day in Teams calls.
> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number.
This is a valid use case, but I’m a bit surprised that the mechanism isn’t better controlled. Surely a better design would be for an actual local entity to forward the call, possibly with an optimization to allow the voice data to bypass the local entity once the call is connected.
The mechanism is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
But it is slow to roll out.
Just whitelist the caller ID and have the originating network guarantor
The second part is the hard part and requires coordination
It wouldn’t be expensive or especially hard to do but there is no payoff for the network. Remember they make money off scam calls too
Since as long as I can remember these organisations have been optimised for profit, not for GAF and that’s why they’re being savaged by regulation and OTT competitors now
There has been no market forces compelling them to do this and until recently when it got really bad, no political or regulatory forces
tl;dr na bro
It's a solved problem. VoIP plus leased trunk lines by the a telco in the market you want to work at. You are limited to fixed set of numbers and you are "local" in the market you want to work at.
That we can do better now isn't important to why something existed to be grandfathered-in in the first place.
Call centres were getting outsourced before e.g. Skype was a twinkle in the eyes of Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn.
> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number
I personally don't? Why would I want that.
The companies might want to hide that info but I don't think that's a legitimate use case.
That's why in 2020 the FCC belatedly mandated SHAKEN/STIR to authenticate Caller ID in the US using public-key cryptography. Deployment is still work in progress, and it does not cover SMS/MMS, however.
A bigger problem is Russia or Saudi Arabia using the SS7 signalling network to track their dissidents in the US because those legacy telco protocols have basically no authentication whatsoever, and won't blink if a Saudi Telco sends Verizon a MAP message saying "what is the cell location of Jamal Khashoggi's phone?"
> I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit CLID faking and reinjection of apparently local CLID by overseas inputs.
Actually, there are several legitimate use cases:
• Call divert: Local number calls a number abroad and that one is diverted back a another local number. It's probably rare, but it's a totally legit use case.
• 2G/3G roaming: I'm not an expert on this one, but as far as I understood it, roaming calls placed on 2G/3G networks are initiated in the visiting country, and use the local number of the caller.
• Getting better rates using VoIP. Whether this is legit or not might be subject to discussion, however I was using a foreign VoIP provider (because they had better rates for local calls than any local providers, for my low call volume) sending out my own local number (had to be validated by them by callback, although that's their own security measure, not the network's one). Now in several EU countries and Switzerland this doesn't work any more, as calls bearing national IDs coming from abroad must be displayed as anonymous. And it's quite annoying that there isn't a way to "authentify" those numbers so the owner can use them as they wish.
Telco networks are sprawling and accurately defining the boundary might be harder than it sounds.
Traditionally they have a bias towards "working"/delivering traffic. It's easier to issue a refund than answer a urgent support request.
I can also imagine the biggest customers have all sorts of multi-vendor failover plans that may be affected.
> Even just flagging it would help.
That's what's mandated by ARCEP (the French regulator) since the beginning of this year, and now all faked numbers are marked as “hidden caller”, and indeed it helps a lot.
The Sitbon family didn't lobby hard enough to prevent this.
Cost. Cost to spam and scam tends to 0 at industrial scale. Meanwhile amount of time and resources telco want to spend on fighting it is Bounded by how much regulators are going to allow them to pass on to customers.
I rely on the ability to set the outbound caller ID but I would happily register it if required.
As an Australian, I'm happy to hear this, but also annoyed that a lot of legitimate SMS from companies don't use branded sender ID. I'm not sure why, but my guess is that SMS gateways charge more for it and businesses don't want to pay the extra cent or two.
No it costs the same, the reason they do it is that it’s slightly more difficult to spoof a real number sender ID because most gateways will verify ownership by sending you a text on that number before letting you send outbound from it, where as they have no way of doing the same for an alphanumeric sender ID
Alpha codes don't allow replies. As such if you need to reply it has to be from a number
That will likely change after this goes into effect, otherwise all that legitimate spam will never make it.
As counter measure to text scams the Australian government (actually ACMA which I think is the Au version of the FCC) has introduced a national register of Sender Ids, which comes in to effect on the 1st of July. It requires providers to mark any unregistered Sender Id as 'Unverified'
I haven't yet been able to find the full register (if it's even public) but I thought this is an interesting approach.
It is crazy that wasn't something already required. Here local sms-gateways always required paperwork to prove word you want to use as sender name is a brand you own.
Singapore does this. Any message that comes from an unregistered sender show up on the phone with “Likely Scam” as the sender name.
The Australian one will label them as Unverified.
Personally, I'd prefer them to be blocked. If it's important and legitimate, they'll register.
There are good reasons to allow unregistered telecommunications. If you don't like it, you can always block it your end; given that we can all expect many other people to do the same (and it'll likely be a feature built into many phone operating systems), the social pressure you're after still exists.
India has something similar, and even goes a step further by having last alphabet as an identifier for Promotional, Services, Govt. etc.
https://www.trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders
Good move, it's crazy how many scam calls and SMS I receive in Australia. In fact, if I get an SMS or a call, I just assume it's a scam.
Have you added yourself to the Do Not Call register?
https://www.donotcall.gov.au
I don’t think this will cut down on spam so much as fraud. All spam calls I get don’t have registered IDs
Interesting change. If it helps cut down on spam and phishing texts while keeping branded messages trustworthy, it sounds like a step in the right direction.
I welcome this move, enforcing that SMS messages come from who they say they'll come from is important.
Personally I think the whole system of replacing the point of origin with a name needs to be overhauled. Allowing a name as well is fine, but the practice of delivering messages that can't be replied to is pretty poor.
Rather than have to futz around with a different number or website to go to, I should be able to just reply "STOP" if (for example) Dominos keep spamming me with Pizza offers I don't want.
This sounds connected with their social media restrictions.
It's not. Together with ongoing global tightening of regulations for permissible caller IDs on phone calls, it's all about fighting fraud. (I work in the telecom industry and am in the middle of all the waves this is causing for legitimate business cases.)
Governments always want to know everything. They are like the biggest data sniffers now, even more so than e. g. CIA-book (formerly known as Facebook).