telephone hackers - can we upload something?

On 22 Jul 2018, "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote
in alt.windows7.general:

Oh, you get faked CLIs in the US too, do you?

Isn't faking CLI illegal?

If it is, aren't the telco.s participating in the crime? I don't
think they can claim "common carrier" immunity; sure, any that
_relay_ it maybe can, but the ones where the call _originates_
must know it isn't coming from the line it pretends to be. (And if
they're from abroad, then it's the one that handles the call where
it enters the country.)

I've been led to understand that most of the fake calls are coming from
offshore (often India, China, Africa, or elsewhere), or the internet
calls are routed through offshore facilities so they're untrackable. I
think it's very difficult to control that sort of thing. They are
already operating as criminals, and I suppose the legality of faking
Caller IDs is low on their list of concerns.

But, yeah, I'd say close to 100% of the junk robocalls are using fake
CLIs.

I mentioned before that I keep a log of all junk calls, going back to
2012 (you could legitimately say that I have too much time on my hands,
but whatever...) I sometime call back the (ostensive) caller number -
here if you precede the call with *69 your own Caller ID will be hidden
- and I almost always find that the number is invalid, that is, faked.