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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: 5, Informative) by shortscreen on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:38PM
If robocalls were all I had to worry about I might still answer calls from unknown numbers like I used to in the previous millenium. If I picked up the phone and heard a recording I would instantly know that it was BS that could be safely ignored and the amount of wasted time would be minimal. Calls from actual people eat up a bunch of time in determining who they are and WTF they want. The majority of calls being from scammers, salesmen, or beggars has basically obsoleted the telephone as a contact method IMO. Since none of the entities that insist I give them a phone number in the course of a transaction ever specify what number they would be calling FROM, none of them will ever get me on the line anyway. Better send an email instead.