There are perfectly legitimate reasons for providing a caller ID that doesn’t match the line you’re calling from. For instance, calls made from a call-center typically report the main line for reaching the department, not the extension from which the call was placed. Many businesses do something similar - calls from the various desks may report back the company’s main number or the receptionist’s number.
It is already illegal to misrepresent yourself. But you need to prove that. A mismatch between the number of the source and the number reported can not a-priori be assumed to be fraudulent.
If you’re going to start making criminal accusations, you’re going to have to cite proof.
In a world where we can’t trust the originator of the call is who they said it was, it’s not a big deal to lose previously “legitimate reasons” for never blocking the actual line the call is coming from. (Even better would be to provide actual “caller id”, though that would require biometric data to be transmitted. Still, it would cut down on the impersonation of relatives frauds that are popular to attack the elderly.) If the company wants to reroute extension calls to the trunk operator, they can easily do that.
As for criminal accusations, yes, one would have to take them to court. However, just as in failure to provide required safety mechanisms in, say, automobiles, failure to provide appropriate steps to preserve the chain-of-evidence of correct caller-id could be considered prima facie evidence. If you want to preserve the ability of, say, overseas calls from, say, N. Korea or relayed through VPN that do not do this, the phone company can still insert an appropriate flag into the caller id showing it is suspected to be illegitimate, allowing consumers to block such calls (or take them at their own risk). This wouldn’t help with, e.g., N. Korea sponsored laptop farms that allow employee impersonation, though that’s another case where biometric caller-id would be the real solution.
In the US in very limited circumstances.* Otherwise, no. It’s perfectly legal to lie about who you are, eg, in the general course of conversation with someone. In this context, I doubt having a fake number pop up on caller ID is illegal.
*recognizing that “misrepresent” has a broad meaning.
I’ve been interested in how generative AI’s handle various questions. So I put your statement into Perplexity (a TidBITS Talk-designated “answer engine ”). How do you rate its answer?
Interesting, though a somewhat narrow definition of “bribery.”
Bribery refers to the offering, giving, soliciting, or receiving of any item of value as a means of influencing the actions of an individual holding a public or legal duty.
If I’m a phone company (could be a tiny backpages kind of phone company) who has the rep of looking the other way when customers forge callerID, I get more customers! That’s receiving an item of value (subscriptions/ fees), which influences my actions (I know nothing!).
The first paragraph seems completely correct and agrees with my opinion.
The second paragraph appears to be correct, but two of its three sources have nothing to do with it. The paragraph talks about a case of political spam including a deepfake of Joe Biden. The phone company that placed the calls was included in the lawsuit, including a bunch of technicalities regarding whether they knew the caller IDs were fraudulent or not. Neither Perplexity nor the cited article says whether the proposed fine was actually levied against that phone company, but see below (I looked up the result - they settled out of court for half the proposed fine).
The other two articles talk about more generic cases of fraud by telemarketers, including suits and fines, but has nothing to do with the phone companies used to place the calls.
You’re basically saying that “bribery” refers to any situation where someone profits from unethical or illegal behavior. That’s broad enough that it includes literally every act of bad behavior that involves money.
Bribery means that money is given for the purpose of causing an unethical or illegal action to take place. There needs to be intent.
In your example, nobody is paying you to “look the other way”. You’re acting that way entirely on your own (for any reason - you could be lazy or careless, not necessarily sleazy). The fact that it attracts sleazy customers may be many things, but you’re not receiving a bribe.
I’ve had my cell phone number for decades, but spam calls weren’t a major problem until late last year, apparently due to a political donation. For several reasons, I avoid donating to political causes and candidates, not the least of which is the likeliehood of spam after the donation. However, a childhood friend was running for office, and he asked me for a donation. He’s a good guy, so I donated online. He used a well known political campaign organization to handle donations.
Within a day, I was getting spam texts from politicians and political groups affiliated with his party. Not long after, I started getting repeated calls from push-polling groups and legitimate polling operations. A couple of months later, I started noticing small charges (<$2) to my credit card channeled through the “non-profit” that handled my original donation. (I’ve been a victim of credit card fraud twice in my life, decades apart. Both times involved well-known national political fundraising groups.)
By late spring, I was getting unsolicited calls for loan applications, extended warranties for my vehicles, etc. In approximately six months, my phone went from having a tolerable amount of spam to being rendered useless for incoming calls. I spoke with my friend, and he said he had heard a few complaints about the fund raising group, and that investigations were “underway.”
Ultimately, if something is “bribery” or not, is up to a court/jury to decide for the instance at hand. But there is a notion of “passive bribery”, which is what I set up - gaining the reputation of looking the other way in exchange for custom (which may be in excess of market value, or just an increase in business). Although in the past I have seen “entrepreneurs” set up “phone companies” with the explicit promise to allow synthesis of arbitrary caller ID in exchange for routing of calls through their company.
Caller ID was never intended to be authoritative or authenticative. It originated as a convenience feature (at additional cost), an extension of the last-call return feature that’s accessed in the US by dialing *69. That’s why it’s never been secure. I’m sure that, at the time it was first implemented, the idea of people using it to commit phone fraud was either dismissed as a reasonable concern or not considered at all.
When it comes to technology and fraud, the law always has been and probably always will be far behind the curve on what scammers are doing, because technology changes fast and the law changes (relatively) slowly. (Also because a majority of legislators aren’t particularly knowledgeable about technology, especially the most current advances.) It’s easy for us as consumers to look at it and say, “This is fraud,” but writing laws that clearly and unambiguously prohibit the scams while not interfering with legitimate usage of the same tech is a big challenge.
Another point here is that the fraud isn’t limited to the fake CID in these cases: the scammers are using CID to assist them in committing acts that are already legally defined as fraud. So at best, laws about falsifying CID would simply be adding additional charges when (if) a scammer is prosecuted. If they’re not committing or attempting to commit any fraud other than using a fake CID, what crime has been committed? What harm has been done to anyone?
I have been complaining for ages about the inability to write Rules for mail at iCloud. After emptying my iCloud Junk box for the third time today I checked at iCloud, and in the settings for Mail is the option to write Rules! At last. Now if only I could import all my Rules from Mail.app on my Mac… As it is, I have written Rules specifying the main four offenders go straight to Trash.
I have rules at iCloud which send some emails to junk and others to various mailboxes. I’ve had them for many years. They’re less flexible than Mail’s local rules, but they work, and have always worked, perfectly well.
