It's great that the DNC has worked for you, unfortunately it's not much help for me since all my robocallers are criminals trying to steal from me. Naturally, people unafraid of being arrested for fraud are unafraid of DNC fines.

I've been on the DNC for years, and a couple years ago I decided to change my number, since my old one was getting 4-5 robocalls per day, always from different numbers.

That sounds horrible. I wonder if there is a way to surrender that number to the FBI, so that they could investigate further. Even one call every other day would be too much to report manually for me in terms of effort.

Judging by these comments and my own experience, their investigations are not being held up by lack of suitable victims.

Because "that number" is generally fake.

Caller ID became meaningless once VOIP was allowed to spoof it. Can we build a new system atop ANI?

> Because "that number" is generally fake.

I'm not really convinced this is true, because there are numbers that are categorized as robocallers, and there are others that aren't. You'd think that if they were fake then they'd be random/uniform.

> You'd think that if they were fake then they'd be random/uniform.

They're arbitrary, not random. They switched to that from the old system of just spoofing 000-000-0000 or similar, as people blocked those.

Robocalls I get typically assign a caller ID of my area code (and sometimes prefix) with random other digits.

Most 408-73x prefixes were originally specific to Sunnyvale CA and are therefore easy to distinguish.

Yeah but I'm not sure they're genuinely random. If you try Googling them you see that they're generally listed as robocallers. Whereas if you Google people you know, I don't think you'll see them being listed as robocallers (at least it hasn't been the case when I've tried). That suggests they don't just randomly pick numbers.

> If you try Googling them you see that they're generally listed as robocallers.

I just did a quick check of the last 10 or so I received. None of them were listed as robocallers. They were all legit phone numbers of innocent people who live in my area.

Thanks for checking, I stand corrected then. Whenever I've tried they've usually been listed as robocallers so I guess it's just your luck.

> I wonder if there is a way to surrender that number to the FBI

The number reported by caller ID is entirely meaningless and not useful in terms of investigation. They just spoof random ones from your area arbitrarily.

Sorry, I should have quantified how much (and I can no longer edit my post): two in a month has been the most in a given month, and most months are just zero. Someone else used to have my phone number as well, so I had to politely say that that person no longer has this number, but that was over six months ago now.

I think that this is the first time I've ever heard someone say that donotcall.gov was effective. I know for sure that it isn't for me.