Yesterday I received 12 phone calls. I only answered four of them. The other eight were from the usual suspects…dire warnings that I must act quickly to secure my business on Google, reminders about my car warranty and a call I get every couple of months from “David.” David’s pre-recorded message reminds me that he is the guy who cleaned my windows last year and is in my neighborhood again. I don’t know David; however, I am quite sure he never cleaned my windows as I live in a condominium in a high-rise building and the job of window washing is wisely left to the HOA.
Calls like these are definitely on my top 10 list of most annoying things. Not only are they annoying, the FCC estimates that the “wasted time and nuisance” caused by scam robocalls exceeds $3 billion each year, and telemarketer schemes meant to defraud consumers cost Americans about $10 billion annually. Yet they still persist. In fact, 48 billion robocalls were placed in the US last year, which is 46 percent more than just a year earlier.
Combating Phone SPAM
A lot is being done to combat robocalls. Earlier this year, the FCC adopted new rules requiring implementation of caller ID authentication and verification using technical standards known as “STIR/SHAKEN.” STIR/SHAKEN are acronyms for the Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) and Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs (SHAKEN) standards. With these standards, calls traveling through interconnected phone networks have their caller ID “signed” as legitimate by originating carriers and validated by the terminating carrier before reaching their destination. These rules further the FCC’s efforts to protect consumers against malicious caller ID spoofing, which is often used during robocall scam campaigns to trick consumers into answering their phones. If you have ever received a call with the caller ID eerily similar to your own number, chances are it has been spoofed. That’s because studies show that consumers are more likely to answer a call from a familiar number even if they don’t recognize it. Telemarketers can also spoof numbers to look like calls are coming from legitimate agencies or companies you may do business with.
STIR/SHAKEN is an important weapon in the war against fraudulent telemarketing calls. However, even the FCC warns that we must go farther to combat SPAM on our phone line. Registering your number in the National Do Not Call database is one tactic, but illegal spammers can simply ignore the database.
Since government mandates can’t completely eliminate these annoying calls, the industry has its own approach. Several apps available for iOS and Android, such as Hiya, Nomorobo and RoboKiller, have done a pretty good job of filtering out calls.
In addition, all the major carriers have introduced services to keep unwanted calls from ringing through to recipients. For example, for $4 per month per line T-Mobile will let you choose categories of calls to send directly to voicemail such as calls from political campaigns and charities. These types of calls are generally exempt from telemarketer laws.
All of these solutions are pretty good, but not foolproof. At the end of the day, the most surefire way to avoid taking a call from an unwanted caller is simple: don’t answer your phone.
The Calls We Want
However, there is an unintended side effect of not answering calls from unknown numbers.
Sometimes we ignore calls we actually want to receive.
What happens if the doctor’s office is calling to schedule your MRI? You ignore the call and when you get the message and call back the scheduler is on another line so you start a game of phone tag. What happens if your take-out delivery driver is lost and calling for directions? Or Home Depot promised to call between 10 and 2 to verify that you are home before delivering your new refrigerator.
To frame the problem using a very recent scenario, contact tracers hired by government entities to track down those who may have been exposed to COVID-19 are usually met with voice mail.
According to Dan Teichman, Sr. Manager of Solutions Marketing at Ribbon Communications, “It’s time to undo the damage caused by robocalls that have trained us all not to answer unknown calls.”
Call Trust
Restoring consumer confidence in answering the phone is what Ribbon intends to do with its newly announced Ribbon Call TrustTM. Ribbon Call Trust is a comprehensive solution designed to validate a caller’s identity, intent, and reputation.
Ribbon Call Trust integrates together previously disparate components in the fight against phone fraud and using machine learning develops multi-dimensional reputation scoring to give service providers the most accurate information possible to determine the optimal way to terminate calls.
As one of the world’s leading suppliers of network infrastructure and security solutions, Ribbon already has the capability to form a first line of defense. The first step in combating fraud is done at the network level by examining traffic patterns, call origination and termination data, checking for malformed packets and other signals of malicious intent.
Identity attestation via STIR/SHAKEN is another important component that is provided by the service providers across the network. Ribbon also takes into account service provider databases, such as known subscriber numbers, known scammer numbers (blacklists), and industry and crowd-sourced databases. For example, Do Not Originate lists contain known numbers that will never originate an outbound call (e.g., the IRS).
Simply put, a reputation score answers the question “is this someone I want to talk to?” Once the score is calculated, it’s up to the service provider to decide how calls should be treated. This could be based on subscriber preferences, standards adopted by the service provider, or both.
As noted above, today most providers offer a service to send a suspected fraudulent or nuisance call to voice mail or to block it altogether. But what about those calls we do want?
There are currently no standards in place describing what should be done with these calls, although industry discussions are in the works.
Some carriers today have started tagging suspicious calls with a caller ID of “Fraud Alert” or “Telemarketer,” but is that enough?
Presenting the subscriber with a green checkmark or red X could be another way to go about it, but what exactly does that mean? Different people will have different interpretations of that.
Another possibility is to present a logo of the entity calling. In the case of Home Depot calling with a delivery time, that familiar orange logo should be enough to cue the subscriber to answer the call.
Lots of possibilities exist and this is an area of discovery that the STIR/SHAKEN working groups have already started to consider.
Putting it All Together
Just as with combatting email SPAM, there is not a single magic bullet. Addressing the problem requires a combination of government regulation, industry and crowd-sourced databases, adaptable technologies such as machine learning algorithms, and commercial ingenuity.
Ribbon brings this all together in their Ribbon Identity Hub which is at the core of the Ribbon Call Trust suite of products. Ribbon Identity Hub is designed as an ecosystem with open APIs to feed data into machine learning models, using both real-time and non-real time data.
While there are companies out there providing different pieces of the puzzle, Ribbon feels that their deep heritage in network analytics, along with the ability to feed data to and from the hundreds of thousands of network elements already deployed out there, gives them an edge. Now with Ribbon Identity Hub, they seek to champion an open ecosystem where collaboration is the magic bullet.
