UC Network Management Featured Article
Companies and FCC Collaborating to Combat Robocalling and Spoofing
Ribbon Communications earlier this month announced they’ve partnered with Neustar, a leading global information services provider and the exclusive host of the ATIS Robocalling Testbed, to deliver a solution designed to combat robocalling and call spoofing.
Ribbon completed the interoperability testing to support the STIR-SHAKEN industry effort, which is designed to help service providers protect consumers against robocalls and call spoofing.
The U.S. Federal Communications (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai is committed to "working to stop the scourge of illegal robocalls." He has made combatting unlawful robocalls and malicious caller ID spoofing his top consumer protection priority.
According to some industry observers, U.S. consumers received approximately 2.4 billion robocalls per month in 2016. Unwanted calls are the biggest consumer complaint to the FCC with over 200,000 complaints each year.
Ribbon’s session border controller and policy and routing products are working in combination with Neustar’s Certified Caller, a solution offering call authentication, call verification, and certificate management capabilities. Certified Caller enables service providers to quickly detect suspicious calls and notify businesses and consumers of potential illegal robocalls and spoofed calls. The combined Ribbon and Neustar solution will allow service providers to notify their end-user customers of potential spoofed robocalls. The end-users can then choose to either answer or ignore the calls. Currently, the end-user does not receive any indication on the validity of the call.
With the implementation of this partnered approach, Ribbon and Neustar are actively bringing Communications Service Providers (CSPs) together to define this standard as they continue to work to enhance the STIR-SHAKEN framework as a standard.
Kevin Riley, Chief Technology Officer for Ribbon, said “Nearly half of all calls to mobile phones in the U.S. in 2019 will be scam or robocalls and our joint efforts with Neustar are designed to help our service provider customers address this growing epidemic head-on.” He further added, “Our SBC and policy and routing solutions combined with Neustar’s call authentication and identity protection capabilities will deliver our customers a best-in-class solution to mitigate robocalling and call-spoofing.”
Scammers use spoofing to hide their identities which makes difficult for law enforcement to take actions and bring them to justice. Scammers often make robocalls from numbers starting with the local area code and sometimes matches the first 3 digits of the targeted phone number, tricking consumers and businesses into answering those call.
The need to combat robocalls and spoofing has grown over a period of years. Many companies are trying to invent solutions which can help consumers to get rid of them. Verizon is launching an app that blocks the robocalls. T-Mobile is adding its Caller Verified program to combat spammers and robocalls. Other tier-one service providers are also adding ways to block and filter unwanted spam messages.
"Ribbon and Neustar are working closely together to deliver a holistic and seamless STIR-SHAKEN solution that will help our service provider customers better serve the end-user by distinguishing legitimate calls from illegal robocalls," said James Garvert, General Manager and Vice President, Caller Identification Solutions, Neustar. "We are passionately committed to working together to help the industry quickly adopt the STIR-SHAKEN standards, which will ultimately result in higher customer satisfaction and trust, by blocking nuisance calls before they reach subscribers."
The FCC is adopting the solutions needed to combat the robocalls. They aim to create a database that contains phone numbers that have recently been disconnected and reassigned to someone else. This will prevent banks and other companies to dial the wrong customers repeatedly.
Edited by Maurice Nagle