While the largest national providers are most effective at stopping robocalls, smaller carriers have a harder time implementing the right systems and keeping up.
That’s what John Haraburda — Director Product Management: Identity and Protection at Transaction Network Services (TNS) — told Telecompetitor in an interview last week.
The Technical Side of Stopping Robocalls
Stopping robocalls involves a complex system of authentication, verification, and reputation management. Harburda compared it to a high level of mail service: “When you see that Registered Mail label on an envelope, and the envelope is sealed, addressed, and stamped, you know it’s a safe piece of mail to deliver.”
Services like TNS’ Call Guardian can perform various checks, like verifying that the number is the true originating number, checking the attestation of the call to judge the caller’s reputation (an “A” attestation, like an “A” grade in school, is the highest level), and using AI and machine learning combined with data and analytics to determine the relative risk of a consumer answering the call.
Providers that employ these services can flag those calls for consumers — as Verizon does when my phone receives a robocall or suspicious call, marking it “Potential spam” — or offer deeper services that allow for flags of various kinds. For example, a consumer could choose to have calls flagged when they are from political campaigns, charities, and so on.
A set of standards called STIR/SHAKEN can also be implemented by providers. The James Bond-friendly acronyms stand for the Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) and Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs (SHAKEN) standards.
According to the FCC, STIR/SHAKEN standards mean “that calls traveling through interconnected phone networks can have their caller ID ‘signed’ as legitimate by originating carriers and validated by other carriers before reaching consumers.
“STIR/SHAKEN digitally validates the handoff of phone calls passing through the complex web of networks, allowing the phone company of the consumer receiving the call to verify that a call is in fact from the number displayed on Caller ID.”
Stopping Robocalls: The Next Steps
When it comes to stopping robocalls, Haraburda said it’s a challenge for smaller providers to keep up with larger providers with more resources. But small providers can avail themselves of call validation services even without implementing STIR/SHAKEN for themselves.
For providers that do want to take the next step, Haraburda said it’s simple to get started. Providers can register to be part of the STI Calling Number Verification Service on iconectiv’s website.
“The mechanism is really straightforward,” said Haraburda. “There are certain regulatory hoops, but [the FCC is] trying to encourage providers to do the ‘signing’ [see the description of STIR/SHAKEN ABOVE] themselves.”
Stopping the Latest Robocall Scams
When asked about the latest robocall scams, Haraburda quickly gave four examples:
- Tax scams pop up every spring. A scammer calls offering to file someone’s taxes — all you have to do is provide your W-2s and bank account information. It’s a social engineering scam aimed at gathering personal information. A parallel scam happens in the fall, around open medical plan enrollment periods.
- Cryptocurrency scams are fairly new. Calls try to establish a personal connection with a caller, eventually leading to a crypto purchase for the scammer.
- Elder abuse scams rely on a general lack of skepticism among older adults. Often, scammers will promise to do home repairs or other work for these adults, take a large deposit over the phone, and then never show up to do the promised work.
- Political scams have ballooned since the start of the year. Haraburda said that political robocalls increased by a percentage in the thousands in January. They’ve gone down since then, but in just the last two weeks they’ve risen again by 30%. Currently, they are at about half the level they were in January, but Haraburda expects a big increase in the coming months, leading up to November’s election. These scams often use the recorded voices of real candidates — or AI-generated voices, though the FCC has sought to ban the practice — and people are urged to give money, though the call is not truly coming from the campaign.
These scams are just the latest in a constantly evolving landscape of robocalls. “By nature,” said Haraburda, “spam and fraud is a Whac-A-Mole scenario. The moment you stop this, it generates something over here.”
Spammers find new ways to get to consumers and commit fraud because these efforts still make money. “Creating new ways of fraud will never stop, but we can enable providers to help identify and label that traffic for consumers. Consumers can still answer those calls, but they’ve now been notified,” said Haraburda.
