According to a source at AGCOM, Italian users would be harassed (and exasperated) by the constant calls they receive from illegal call centers
Calls from call center operators inviting us to change phone operator, electricity and gas supplier, buy water purifiers or sign contracts for online trading are now a daily experience for many users and can be annoying. But they are usually completely legal and, hopefully, also correct.
Usually, but not always. According to what the newspaper La Repubblica reports, in fact, the Guarantor Authority of Communications has received a report from the Postal Police and some prosecutors: in recent times there have been many complaints about calls from irregular call centers, with camouflaged phone number, by operators often aggressive and that, in some cases, attempted real phone scams. Among these calls there were some in which the operators passed themselves off as employees of the same Communications Authority.
What is Cli Spoofing
This phenomenon is called "Cli Spoofing", that is "Caller ID Spoofing" (falsification of the caller's number) and consists in using technical tools that show the caller a phone number different from the real number of the caller.
In this way the caller is protected and can do whatever he wants, because he can't be traced or reported to the Postal Police or Agcom by the person who received the call. The Italian law, instead, provides that every call center must be identifiable and recallable: if it is not so, then the company that called us is playing dirty.
The responsibility of the telephone companies
According to the Authority, among other things, the telephone companies would be perfectly able to identify the calls coming from these fraudulent call centers and, therefore, they should intervene to block them. The companies, however, turn a deaf ear, saying that identifying call centers that try to scam users is not easy and that, basically, is a task of the Postal Police and not theirs.
What is certain, however, is that on many modern smartphones calls from call centers, regular or not, are reported directly as "Possible spam call" and the user is also given the opportunity to block any call coming from that number.