recent plague of foreign scam callers

[Dalyha]

In the past, I have been receiving a couple of scam phone calls to my cell number per week, easy enough to deal with. However, starting last week I have been receiving multiple calls per day... today in the 5 hour period between 9:15am and 2:15pm I received a total of 17 calls, all of them showing different numbers and area codes around Canada and USA on my call display. I have set my phone settings to "silence unknown callers", but this is still a major annoyance. On the couple of calls that I did answer, the caller speaks with a very heavy foreign accent, calling themself "Mike" or "John" or "Mary", then proceeds with the standard CRA or credit card or other scam script.

How is it possible that a major telecommunications company either can not or will not eliminate incoming calls from India and China and other foreign countries and continues to enable these scammers? Why is it possible for people to fake their caller ID number? What's the point in even having call display? Is there an option to block all incoming foreign calls? I feel bad for the people who fall victim to these scammers, but there must be some accountability from the telecommunications companies that allow these scam calls to enter the country in the first place.

[Nighthawk · Accepted solution]

If you are using Telus or Koodo for your phone provider, turn on Call Control. It blocks every one of those robocall based scams. If you have another provider, you are likely out of luck.

• https://www.telus.com/en/support/article/call-control-for-mobile-devices-explained
• https://www.koodomobile.com/en/help/call-control

As for your other questions:

• Caller ID technology came out many decades ago and is a global standard, meaning no one telecom can change the standard. The ability to display a number other than the one you are calling from has been part of it since the beginning. It's used heavily by businesses, government agencies, etc.
• Phone companies also aren't going to just block calls from random regions of the planet because not every call coming from those areas is a scam call. Unless the CRTC changes regulations, providers aren't going to be blocking calls like that.
• The extreme majority of the scam calls are using VoIP for phone service, some using services provided by some less scrupulous small Canadian service providers. A common one that pops up on the forums are VoIP numbers owned by Iristel. Look up their Google reviews. CRTC does nothing to stop them. When the scammers use a VoIP provider, they get a local gateway/phone number so it looks like the calls are not coming from overseas. There are other common US based VoIP providers that get used like TextNow, which also can provide Canadian phone numbers to customers/scammers. There are also a few other very small Canadian VoIP providers that seem to provide numbers for scam calls but that are harder to identify.

[Dalyha]

Thanks very much for the information, Nighthawk! I just added Call Control to my Telus Mobility account as you suggested, and hopefully that will eliminate or at least reduce the scam calls. Before I turned on Call Control, my cell's call history was showing another 11 incoming calls between 5:00am and 8:00am today! There have been no incoming calls since I turned it on, so it's looking good!