Are Anonymous International Calls Allowed ?

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Asterisk Users 2 Comments

Hello,

These questions crossed my mind this morning :
In general, are anonymous international calls allowed (ie calling from one country to a number in an other country while hiding your own caller id) ?
Are there special rules in Europe for this ?

Best regards

2 thoughts on - Are Anonymous International Calls Allowed ?

  • Le 17/01/2019 à 10:38, Olivier a écrit :

    Hi

    Please define an anonymous call ? Is it as CID ?

    Rules are provider specific: some let’s you change your CID other not
    (remember Freephonie in France, they didn’t allow changing CID). I know other providers -especially in the UK- who are changing the CID if the caller has an CID which is not a UK one and the call is going abroad.

    In Europe, most countries are asking to have an address in the country. France is asking but not checking. Germany and Italy are checking the postal address you gave.

    Anyway, Anonymous can be a name, people not speaking English will not know what it means. And for the number, I think putting something like
    0123456 could be enough, so far I tested, nobody is asking you to put the number is international format. Even, some Telco replace your DID
    with the one you have by them in national format doesn’t matter if you’re calling abroad !

    —
    Daniel

    —

  • In theory yes. There are some countries where you are not allowed to block your callerID. For the most part when you block your callerID your carrier will still pass or just a header saying your callerID should not be displayed. In cases where the caller sends no callerID at all most carriers will have a default number they use since most tier1 carriers won’t take a call with no callerID at all.

    Now if things weren’t confusing enough there are several “areas” where these is different pricing based on the callerID. The EEA recently (a few years ago) mandated that carriers charge lower rates for inter EEA calls. The carriers didn’t like this and raised the rates where the callerID is not with in the EEA. This is causing a lot of shady routes that will set your blocked call or American callerID with local callerID to save money. South Africa is another example where the rates went up by 10x if the call is not originating in South Africa. The same with Switzerland. Since they aren’t in the EEA and they are in Europe they saw a spike in their call costs. To offset that some Swiss carriers are chatting a lot more where the call has an EEA based callerID.