The consumers 'want' it because if they get disconnected and try to recall, by spoofing a local number it costs them nothing/little since it's a local number (maybe toll-free?) instead of a lot for an international call. Of course, they might want a local call centre even more, but spoofing a local number for overseas call centres does have a purpose.

A legitimate company registering an local number, routing its Philippines call centre through it and accountable for outbound calls is not really comparable with a random scammer faking whatever number.

> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. This is a valid use case, but I’m a bit surprised that the mechanism isn’t better controlled. Surely a better design would be for an actual local entity to forward the call, possibly with an optimization to allow the voice data to bypass the local entity once the call is connected.

> The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email. For this particular case, do they really spoof the caller ID on an (expensive) international phone call, or do they actually just re-route via a local phone number?

It's been a while since I did telecoms related stuff but also you might want a different CLI and ANI for forwarded calls so you can preserve the original line being used. Obviously the whole scam call centre has changed how it has to work but we actually had a working system that had quite a few useful features.

> You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number I personally don't? Why would I want that. The companies might want to hide that info but I don't think that's a legitimate use case.

Because it is useful for most people to see that they're receiving a call from their bank, insurance company, hospital, whoever. The hospital's call staff might not be in the same building as the doctor - so showing a familiar number is useful. In an ideal world you would be able to trust that number but, as per the above, that isn't always the case.

It's a solved problem. VoIP plus leased trunk lines by the a telco in the market you want to work at. You are limited to fixed set of numbers and you are "local" in the market you want to work at.

> I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit CLID faking and reinjection of apparently local CLID by overseas inputs. Actually, there are several legitimate use cases: • Call divert: Local number calls a number abroad and that one is diverted back a another local number. It's probably rare, but it's a totally legit use case. • 2G/3G roaming: I'm not an expert on this one, but as far as I understood it, roaming calls placed on 2G/3G networks are initiated in the visiting country, and use the local number of the caller. • Getting better rates using VoIP. Whether this is legit or not might be subject to discussion, however I was using a foreign VoIP provider (because they had better rates for local calls than any local providers, for my low call volume) sending out my own local number (had to be validated by them by callback, although that's their own security measure, not the network's one). Now in several EU countries and Switzerland this doesn't work any more, as calls bearing national IDs coming from abroad must be displayed as anonymous. And it's quite annoying that there isn't a way to "authentify" those numbers so the owner can use them as they wish.

Telco networks are sprawling and accurately defining the boundary might be harder than it sounds. Traditionally they have a bias towards "working"/delivering traffic. It's easier to issue a refund than answer a urgent support request. I can also imagine the biggest customers have all sorts of multi-vendor failover plans that may be affected.

It's not. Together with ongoing global tightening of regulations for permissible caller IDs on phone calls, it's all about fighting fraud. (I work in the telecom industry and am in the middle of all the waves this is causing for legitimate business cases.)