That you say it easily doesn&#x27;t mean that it&#x27;s easy to do.<p>The current telephone infrastructure wasn&#x27;t designed. It grew: Verifying a call would involve either tying up an additional channel back (doubling the cost of the infrastructure), or replacing (parts of) the infrastructure with something better designed- like a TTL &quot;ping&quot; packet going backwards to verify the route on the original channel. Getting everyone to change their hardware is hard. Just look at how long it&#x27;s taking to get IPv6 out.<p>Fortunately, tracing a call isn&#x27;t like television: You do not have to &quot;keep him talking&quot;. You can ask the phone company to research the calls made to your number at a specific time, and in the process of reconciling billing, the phone company can find out, and then you can use the judicial arm to deal with people who spoof the calling number.