Hopefully the FCC imprisons them
"I am not sure if this is possible, but what I would like is for the phone providers -- whether landline, mobile, or VoIP -- to provide us an option to automatically block all VoIP numbers that originate outside the country. For instance, if I am in the United States and a VoIP call is made whose source IP is from India, block the call."
Not helpful. The greasy Indian scammers are based in India (probably) but the massive assholes running the VOIP are almost all Florida-based. I am all for cutting Florida off from the PSTN though.
"One thing that would make a much larger dent in their operations is a caller ID system which does not allow forged numbers"
I suggested that a few years ago in the FCC's robocall contest -- if the caller ID does not match the routing info for that number (i.e. it's says it's a local number, but it's coming in from Florida) -- block the call. Cell phones and phone numbers that have been ported from one part of the country to another, the calls already are routed properly, so those can be handled too. As a fallback, if it turns out running these checks on every call is too resource-intensive, then run the check after 5 or 10 calls. The thing that won the contest was one of about 50 submissions for a box that shows caller ID, and lets calls be blocked based on caller ID (useless really, since the robocallers falsely and fraudulently rotate their caller ID, I have gotten some where I the same # is reused months apart, but the 8-10 a day I get from these fucks are all from different numbers.)
Ironically, the current solution being rolled out is to authenticate the caller ID -- don't know if they saw my suggestion or not. SHAKEN/STIR is using DIAMETER (a successor to RADIUS apparently) to authenticate caller ID. VOIP providers can whine about it if they want, but if they don't implement SHAKEN/STIR they will be cut off from the telephone network.
The big change now is the FCC has decided they will quit giving companies "warnings", and when they fine these companies thea are actually going to enforce it! FCC of the past was assuming they were dealing with businessmen, not criminal greasy scammer shitheads. So, they would give them a warning, kindly ask them to cut it out, ask them kindly to cut it out again, then levy a fine (after a year or more) -- BUT!! -- they then would let these shitheads self-report their assets, so the FCC would fine someone like $100 million, but since they would falsely and fraudulently claim they had no assets, would let them pay this fine off at like $10 a month or something. And, they have not imprisoned the bad actors in Florida (like Adrian Abramovich; the FCC will put in an injunction saying they must not keep doing what they are doing, but not arrest them for violating the law or the injunction. They will just close an illegal robocaller company and immediately move the same equipment (which the FCC failed to seize, either for being used in a crime, or simply as assets to help pay off that fine) to another illegal robocaller company.
"Genuine callers will say "hello?" into the silence, robocallers will wait about 10 secs for a response and then hang up, and as I understand it will mark my number as non-responsive and not try it again." Nope! I never say "hello" to it, in an effort to do exactly this. No reduction in illegal robocalls whatsoever. I get TONS of 10 second illegally abandonded robocalls, they don't let up; and the assholes here even dial out faster than the recordings can play, so sometimes the recording is all choppy (just like you'd expect if you have a system that can play like 60 calls trying to play 80).
Hopefully the FCC can imprison some of these assholes.