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[Chrysalis]

BT charging to block calls that they encourage
funny isnt it.

Im afraid I dont understand what you mean.  We are talking about the same subject ie BT to divert nuisance calls for free

What I mean is BT make money from all these illegal calls, and they clearly dont care much about them as they allow the calls to go through their voice network.

The whole situation is a farce.

Millions of people only have a voice line because its required for broadband and no other reason.
This voice line is abused by cold callers.
BT propose a new service to charge for blocking these cold callers.
BT encourage cold callers by not doing things like blocking clid spoofing and not rate limiting outbound calls from a location.

Hope you understand now.

If a voice line wasnt a requirement for broadband these cold callers would have a lot less live numbers to ring. In turn BT would have less revenue.

[sevenlayermuddle]

@chrysalis, if you only have a voice line because it's required for broadband, why not just unplug the phone?   But I seriously doubt if the number of people inclined to do so would be 'millions'.

And stress, stress again, BT are not 'proposing a new service to charge for blocking'.  They are planning a new service to divert the calls for free, at least according to the Beeb, who's article is being discussed in this thread.

Surely that's in best interests of both customers who get less nuisance calls at zero cost, as well as shareholders if BT can still get the revenue from the call centres, by still terminating the call?

[Chrysalis]

You right I could keep the line unplugged.

BT shouldnt have any charged for service period, and they should be blocking CLID spoofing without needing to be pushed to do so.

Did you read rizla's post at what could be done?

[Dray]

Just to point out they are planning to divert the calls to a junk box, which to me implies you need call minder which is chargeable.

[sevenlayermuddle]

Did you read rizla's post at what could be done?

Have you read mine properly?   I worked in the industry, specifically PSTN signalling, for a decade and a half.   When your phone rings, and the voice says 'PPI reclaims', there is a distinct possibility the call is being propagated by software that I personally wrote.   

Wow, there's a confession.   

Thankfully, other (most) customers put my software to more respectable uses.

[guest]

Now obviously SOMEONE knows who to bill for the calls and that "someone" will be renting capacity from a major teleco. Presenting a fake CLID with an automated dialer should be grounds for instant termination of service but of course none of the UK telecos is willing to take the hit in revenue.

I applaud the decision BT Retail has taken but can't help feeling its going to have a limited effect as it doesn't address the main problem.

Aren't the vast majority of unwanted calls meant to originate from outside the UK? 
OFCOM acknowledges this and also state that they account for a "significant and growing proportion of nuisance calls" when it comes to CLI spoofing.
Overseas calls is where TPS is useless and OFCOM are powerless to act.  

Out of curiosity does the UK telco's benefit from overseas nuisance calls?

I applaud the decision BT Retail has taken but can't help feeling its going to have a limited effect as it doesn't address the main problem.

Ive no idea how spoofing can be stopped.  As you say, the proposals doesn't tackle the whole issue.   But I suppose something is better than nothing.

In a way, it sounds like what BT are doing could be the equivalent of SFS when it comes to forum spam.  SFS isnt fool proof and there are ways around it - such as the Indian guy sat in a cyber cafe working for peanuts.   But even those do eventually get caught.
The spammers are constantly looking for new ids or new (proxy) IPs, but it only takes one member of SFS to report them, then they are flagged for all others.   On the whole it works pretty well.

When it comes to forum spam, I not only access project honeypot database, but have a honey pot running to catch bots and this info is fed to the main database. Over the past few years Ive caught 364125 bots (just checked my stats) which have been added to the central database.     

I suppose this would be the equivalent to catching CLI spoofers.  I wonder if there was any way some sort of honey pot could be set up for CLI spoofing.  Your thoughts on this?

The vast majority of "problem calls" are from "within" the UK kitz but this is only analysed on complaints received and that requres a valid CLID last time I submitted one As to who talks to you if you pick the call up.... could be anyone, anywhere.

TrueCall have a community thing* where you can just basically sub to that (think of it as SpamHaus/RBLs but for CLIDs) and that was a huge success. Given BT licensed part of the TrueCall "IP" for their "callblocking handsets" then it can't have taken long for the beancounters to work it out mmm?

The Do Not Call legislation in the USA is the way to go - they tried everything else possible & you can imagine the lobbying from the industry mmm

*go look at their site, my unit is "too old" for that "feature".

Edit - oh and you have to consider the downside of using a service which will log/filter calls in a completely different way. Just like an email spamfiltering sevice it will "learn" what is normal for your landline and what isn't. Not a hop skip & a jump very far off a police state wet dream mmm?

[sevenlayermuddle]

I think there are a number of things worth re-emphasising.  They are all based on recollections of not too long ago but, I suspect, still relevant...

1). The number seen on a subsriber's caller display is only one of several parameters available for an exchange-side check.

2). When a call arrives in the BT network, and it is lacking a calling party number, BT can send a message back towards the originator, requesting calling party number.  If it is not provided, BT can reject the call.

3). There is a difference between 'CLI withheld' and 'Calling Party Number Not provided'.   If it is merely withheld then it is available, in all its glory, to BT switches... They just don't signal it to the end subscriber.  But they could use it in deciding whether or not to allow a call to proceed.

4). Caller ID 'spoofing' doesn't necessarily mean that calling number was spoofed, the calling number may still be present as well as the spoofed number, but it would be visible only to BT, not the end user.  Thus again, BT could use the real Calling Party Number to decide to ditch the call.

5). All number parameters are accompanied by additional qualifiers, that say whether the number was 'user provided' or 'network provided', or 'network verified', etc.  Again, these are only visible to BT, not their customers.  But could be useful in decision making.

6.), 7.), 8) and more would be provided if I could be bothered digging out old protocol specs.   But I'm retired, and I won't.

For all of above reasons, a properly executed BT diversion process could in theory be infinitely superior to a customer premise call-blocker.  It remains to be seen whether they would or could do so, and whether it would be legal for them to do so, or legal to act as judge and jury in deciding who wins and who loses.

With that, I'm probably withdrawing from this debate.   Glad to see it has stimulated interest.

[aesmith]

My question was how much of that information is presented down an analogue line.  Not much I suspect, and in fact I suspect it's not presented to the called subscriber on ISDN either.

The only part of the PSTN that has been analogue, since early 1980s, is the last hop to subscriber.  The terminating exchange would thus make a decision as to which (digital) signalling parameter should be presented...  'Calling party number' or 'presentation number' or neither.   That is then signalled to the called party on the analogue line, with analogue encoding, as a pre-emption to the 'ring' signal.

But the point is, BT are suggesting they will do diversion within their own network and they can do that entirely on digital parameters, the analogue hop to subscriber is not really relevant

Sorry, maybe I was unclear but my comments were I was referring to Rizla's on-premise call blocker which reported "fake" CLID, and started some questions about how a fake CLID could be determined by such a device.  I think we still don't know, in that context, unless these were simply outside the range of valid numbers.  I think it's understood that inside the network there's more information available.

[Chrysalis]

sevenlayermuddle you have just confirmed BT could have nipped this in the bud already, by never presenting spoofed numbers, and automatically rejecting calls which dont present the number.

But I suspect if they did just that then they would have less revenue as these calls generate revenue.

[guest]

My question was how much of that information is presented down an analogue line.  Not much I suspect, and in fact I suspect it's not presented to the called subscriber on ISDN either.

The only part of the PSTN that has been analogue, since early 1980s, is the last hop to subscriber.  The terminating exchange would thus make a decision as to which (digital) signalling parameter should be presented...  'Calling party number' or 'presentation number' or neither.   That is then signalled to the called party on the analogue line, with analogue encoding, as a pre-emption to the 'ring' signal.

But the point is, BT are suggesting they will do diversion within their own network and they can do that entirely on digital parameters, the analogue hop to subscriber is not really relevant

Sorry, maybe I was unclear but my comments were I was referring to Rizla's on-premise call blocker which reported "fake" CLID, and started some questions about how a fake CLID could be determined by such a device.  I think we still don't know, in that context, unless these were simply outside the range of valid numbers.  I think it's understood that inside the network there's more information available.

Sorry I hadn't realised you were asking me

The Truecall unit doesn't "detect" a fake CLID - I do and its as you say, mainly invalid numbers (last digit left off is flavour of the month) and number ranges not assigned/not released in the UK. I simply label them as "Fake CLID" and that allows stat generation showing percentage of "Fake CLID" on the Truecall control panel.