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Most of the robocalls you get aren't coming from AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile numbers
Most of the robocalls you get aren't coming from AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile numbers
A new report suggests that the United States' top mobile carriers are making headway in the fight against annoying robocalls.
The data analytics company Transaction Network Services (TNS) released its bi-annual "Robocall Report" on Thursday, and some of the emerging unwanted call trends included an increase in hijacking mobile numbers and a shift to spoofing toll-free numbers.
However, the most promising news for consumers was that only 12% of high-risk calls received during the first six months of 2019 originated from numbers owned by AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.
These carriers account for 70% of the nation's overall call volume.
Bill Versen, the chief product officer at TNS, said in a statement that means top-tier carriers are successfully blocking more robocalls. He added that regulatory and policy action, as well as the adoption of AI and advanced data analytics, have made it "more difficult for bad actors to place scam and fraud robocalls."
Versen also warns that it's too soon to call that a victory.
"The report suggests the need for diligence as the battlefront may shift to smaller regional and rural carriers further behind on their path to a call authentication framework and utilizing call data analytics," Versen said.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:11PM
One nice thing about having a non-local area code is that those "neighbor spoofing" calls they mention in the article are immediately identified. It also helps that it's a different time zone. Yeah, phone call that came in at 6:30 AM and didn't leave a message? I know what you are.
It seems like the low-hanging fruit has barely been picked. Do they even check to see who's making more than N calls to unique numbers each day? I wager that normal people don't place more than 10 calls to unique numbers each day. ie, you might have a nervous mother placing dozens of calls a day to her children, but it's only 2 or 3 numbers and it's the same numbers all the time so we know she's not a robocaller.
I would definitely support some kind of criteria for unique numbers per day being something that puts your number on a list where you have to explain why you need to do that. I don't see that as an invasion of privacy at all, since they'd just be tracking connections, which is kind of fundamental to how a phone company works. Anybody else old enough to remember when long-distance calls were itemized on your bill? It would't be too different from that.
Oh, and get rid of the damned exceptions. No robocalls related to politics. Opt-ins like nixel alerts, yes; but that's it. Killing the political exception is NOT a free speech issue either, since they'd just be stopping the nature of the calls and not restricting content.