It's not just a social problem, it's also a technical problem as you can't tell if a number is legit, as they can be spoofed or hijacked. There could be something like SSL for phones where you would get a green lock and the company/parson name when someone calls. It wouldn't work with analog phones, it's funny actually, that it's just one small part of the chain that is analog, the rest is digital, we could easily get rid of the analog part, I believe. Still, there are no SSL in popular messenger apps, where you can be any person if you just know their username/password, same for e-mail. We need to have private keys controlled by the users for second factor and end-to-end encryption.
Yeah, a lot of the issues with security on the phone (both spoken and text messages) seem to have to do with backwards compatibility. I mean they add layers on top of the old ones (e.g. to allow higher call quality) but somewhere you can still call someone using just dial tones.
I hope they're working on a new standard for telecom that allows unspoofable caller verification. That, and secure / verified e-mails. But that too is a standard challenged by 60 years of legacy (I had to do a quick wikipedia check).
