Definitely. There's also the same sort of issue with gazelles and cheetahs. Both are fast, but for the cheetah to get its dinner, it only has to be faster than the slowest gazelle. I'm sure some of the phone companies are reasonably fraud-resistant, but securing a whole industry is harder.
Well, in that case the companies just have to not be the slowest gazelle, right? That doesn't seem like much effort involved, so the problem is probably in knowing what the other companies are doing so you're not the mark.
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The problem with stopping fraud is that people generally do not fight fraud as hard as fraudsters fight to keep their income.
Definitely. There's also the same sort of issue with gazelles and cheetahs. Both are fast, but for the cheetah to get its dinner, it only has to be faster than the slowest gazelle. I'm sure some of the phone companies are reasonably fraud-resistant, but securing a whole industry is harder.
Well, in that case the companies just have to not be the slowest gazelle, right? That doesn't seem like much effort involved, so the problem is probably in knowing what the other companies are doing so you're not the mark.
I think in this example the slowest gazelle is the sucker that has to pay exorbitant international calling fees for a service they did not receive.
The companies themselves have little incentive to change things if it costs them money to do so and there's limited downside for doing nothing.