End Spoofing

The Portland JCC, which also houses the local Jewish Day School, was swatted today.

Elsewhere, the mom of a friend of mine nearly got victimized by a scam where someone used voice-altering software to impersonate her daughter and beg for money after she was "in a car accident".

It's no mystery that these sorts of scams seem to be on the rise, and seem to be increasingly sophisticated. And I doubt I'm giving any hot take when I say that these scammers are absolutely, 100%, the lowest of the low.

One common tactic in these thugs' repertoires is "spoofing" -- basically, impersonating another number when they call you, so it shows up on Caller ID as your doctor or the IRS or a customer support center (or just hides the actual number that the person is calling from). 

I don't know whether spoofing was involved in either of the above incidents. But I'm increasingly of the mind that we might need to just ban spoofing outright.

I'm aware of the legitimate reasons for spoofing. A business wants a call to register as emanating from their main line, not whatever back office is calling you. Or someone working from home still wants to be identified as calling from their company, not their personal cellphone. I even can understand some cases where spoofing may have anti-fraud properties (it lets me know that the call is coming from someone at Aetna, which I may be disinclined to believe if the phone number is the random area code of wherever the nurse went to high school).

But at this stage, I just don't see those real benefits as outweighing the costs. It doesn't seem like the phone companies have any real way to distinguish "bad" spoofing from good. And while I don't actually know the mechanics (so what I say next might be entirely wrong), it seems to me that it would be technologically-easier to simply ban the practice outright -- create no mechanism through which phone calls can "identify" themselves as anything but their unique actual phone number -- than to engage in what seems to be a losing game of whack-a-mole.

And sure, I know in my heart that this is probably a lot more complicated than I realize (though I do genuinely believe that it's one of those things where, if there was some serious government regulatory muscle behind it, you'd see the telecom providers hop to it). But one of the joys of aging is that I get to cantankerously grumble about problems and just demand they be fixed, and I'm leaning in.