The same type of people who NEVER turn their ringer off.

Or who are too stupid too.

I actually fancy myself to be someone who is at least somewhat tech savvy and my ringer is NEVER (intentionally) on unless I'm eagerly awaiting a call and yet today the thing made noises and vibrated. It usually doesn't. How the hell did that happen? I don't know. I just wanted to throw the phone against the wall.

It wasn't a good time. Hasn't everyone wanted to throw their phone against the wall at some point? I mean if w

Did it actually play the ringtone?

If you set the phone to silent the incoming call is usually still displayed on the screen and on your smartwatch, maybe with vibration.

Even turning the ringer off wouldn't stop calls coming in. You would have to turn the sound off and put it into airplane mode but you would still get alerts in vibration mode.

The best thing to do is to turn everything off. If something important enough to interrupt an interview like that a CEO of a big company would have someone with them or would have someone who knows how to get in touch with them while their phone was off.

Yup. This is BS. AT&T is complicit in this shit, because they profit from it.
This was a stunt to either:

A - Show how much of a problem it is and help them continue to pretend that they can't do anything about it, deflecting any pressure from the FCC, congress, etc.

B - Start the lip service PR "effort" to show that they're trying to combat it. Such an "effort" will probably involve asking for public money to setup systems and tools to combat spam calls. It will assuredly include exceptions for the pow

nothing will change so long as origin, intermediary, and/or terminating telcos make money per call, even though the tech has existed for decades (i.e. since the debut of the feature) to combat 'fake' caller id.

I'm not sure they do. The phone industry group/alliance (can't remember their name) has warned that most people don't answer the phone - which means they don't use them. And if we don't need them - we'll stop buying. And legit businesses will stop spending too and try finding their customers using a different technology (aka "Reminder - you have a doctor's appt tomorrow" or "I'd like to schedule time to fix your appliances"). This discussion was during a news conference on STIR/SHAKEN.

The spammers

Parent poster is absolutely correct.

A database of which carriers can terminate which numbers is already in existence and used every day -- otherwise we wouldn't have phone number portability. It should be easy to determine if calling party identification is legitimate and that the source of a call is legitimate just based on whether you know if it is the termination path for a reversed call.

There are some legitimate reasons for misidentifying a call (call origin does not match call termination path), but t

I manage the telephony at two locations. For a while, I could send whatever caller ID I wished on the PRI at one location but the other location only allowed me to send caller ID from the pools of numbers that were routed to me over that circuit. If every telco enforced this it would cut down on the spoofing dramatically.

(1) Reverse Path Verification (That is, do not accept terminations from a network that could not be the originator)

Not possible, since you only know the networks you are directly connected to... and the network you are connected to may only be just trying to forward you the details it was given itself. There may be any number of reasons that a call that you think should have come from network Y because that's the route that you would have taken to reach it from your network might instead be coming to you

A decent post ruined in the last sentence by a random outburst of homophobia. Come on AC, you can be better than that.

(2) Do not permit originators to set "Caller ID" to a number they have not rented (from the provider).

That's not a "rented phone number". By federal law that's my number. I can take it to another provider. It's like owning a static IP, vs. renting one from your ISP. You get to take it with you.

Which is good, because number lockin was a way to keep people from moving to another provider, and caused rates to go higher.

Not for me— four social security scams, two Chinese consulate scams, but only one or two outright hang ups. Similar situation, same number 17 years.

And for the jackass that screwed up his email address with mine for Mass Goalies, please tell them they need an unsubscribe function! They aren’t as fun as the ones from Irish politicians.

I could be technical problems.

Facebook, Google, and Uber had technical problems recently.

How practical is it to just block all calls except for a specific whitelist?

You could whitelist your friends and institutions like your bank who handily spoof their called ID number to the main switchboard one. Everything else just silently drop the call.

How often does an unknown number make an important call to your phone? Do you want to talk to anyone who doesn't also have your email address to arrange to be whitelisted first?

I've seen it, too.

I changed my phone number a month or so, because after three years it was still on the list for every payday loan and bad credit scheme from the prior owner (texts *always* addressed to the same name).

I still got the robocalls on a never before issued number, but they seem to have stopped.

They had gone through the roof a couple (few?) months ago. Before that, Tmobile usually caught them as "spam likely", and now I'm not seeing them at all again.

I suspect that someone found away around the