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.

The historic reason was, just like the Internet, the international phone network was built on gentlemen agreements by engineers who largely trusted each other.

A big national telco is unlikely to attack its peers, so there was little need for safety measures. As smaller telcos came in to the mix via deregulation, that understanding changed - but it was hard to retroactively fit controls.

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.

If you were designing a modern network, it wouldn't be like this. But international telephony is over a hundred years old and has a huge amount of legacy technology and legal agreements.

That's what's mandated by ARCEP (the French regulator) since the beginning of this year, and now all faked numbers are marked as “hidden caller”, and indeed it helps a lot.

Personally, I'd prefer them to be blocked. If it's important and legitimate, they'll register.