CRTC Asks For Your Input To Stop Telephone Number “Spoofing”
If you’ve ever heard the phone ring, look at the call display and seen what you thought was a legitimate number on the display, then picked up the phone to find a telemarketer or scammer on the other end of the line, you’ve been a victim of spoofing. In the telephone sense, it’s when a telemarketer or scammer uses a fake number on your call display to entice you to pick up the phone. It isn’t all that hard to do as there are many services out there that are just a Google search away to facilitate this. This isn’t helping to keep a telemarketer or scammer at bay and the CRTC wants to do something about it:
Canadians can participate in this consultation by sharing their views on:
- the technical solutions available to help them manage unsolicited or illegitimate calls
- barriers they may face to adopting or using these solutions, and
- new and innovative solutions that could help them manage unsolicited telecommunications and illegitimate telemarketing calls.
The CRTC is asking the telecommunications industry to provide a summary of current options and features to block these sorts of annoying calls by Sept. 4. The public consultation is open to comments until Oct. 16. We’ll see what happens beyond that. But this is a good first step with hopefully more to come.
July 23, 2015 at 6:21 pm
The last telemarking call uses my telephone number as their CLID. I am surprised the telephone companies do not block such misuse. I am surprised that the signalling interface to the telephone comapnies’switching offices is not subjected to more precise criteria as to what data should be acceptable.
If the rules are violated, the telemarketer should be fined. Another possibility is to charge a telemarketer line per call, and increase such charge if the telemarketer violates the rules of interconnection. I blame all these “spoofing” on the telcos not providing a good interface/barrier.