The likely outcome is that the phone system becomes massively more locked down. Your phone will only ring if the caller has a number which is backed by a real ID, particularly one from your own country. It will become increasingly difficult to contact someone you don’t have a legitimate connection to.
replyThe banking system will become increasingly fraud resilient with better real time detection of fraud.
Your phone may even have its own AI on your side listening in on the call and sounding the alarm when a number from Nigeria starts using an AI voice pretending to be your son.
You would just get called from an agent (bot) based in your country. There’s no easy way to prevent that. Fraud is massive and it’s becoming cheaper and easier to run at scale.
replyThen when it gets reported the authorities can just look up the owner of that number and arrest them. Vs overseas based operations that are difficult to follow up on.
replyThe authorities already don’t have much leverage over “domestic” spam call centers that are actually located overseas but somehow always manage to acquire domestic numbers to call from.
replyA couple of years ago Australia had a big reform of the laws where sms providers / voip companies had to actually verify their users owned the numbers they send from. Anecdotally before then I was getting a scam text message every day, now I haven’t had one in years.
replyPhone numbers in Australia are also all tied to ID. If there is a will to fix the system, it can be done.