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If you are old enough to remember the Spy vs. Spy comics in Mad Magazine, you’ll also remember a time when the phone rang, you just answered it. No robocalls to worry about. With the advent of VoIP, we inadvertently created the robocall. The TRACED Act mandated STIR/SHAKEN, and you’d think the aggressive illegal robocallers would be a thing of the past. Instead, it has become a game of Spy vs. Spy.
TelcoBridges is hosting a LIVE EVENT: Will STIR/SHAKEN solve the Illegal Robocall Problem? on July 27, 2021 at 2:00 PM with Gerry Christensen from YouMail Inc.
Illegal robocalls continue to be a significant problem for consumers and businesses of all sizes. Despite the best efforts to implement STIR/SHAKEN, illegal spam calls persist, wasting time, clogging up phone lines, and in some cases, perpetrating phishing attacks. Join us as we discuss current best practices that businesses can use with existing SIP Trunks, IP-PBXs, and UCaaS services to mitigate illegal robocalls. Get back to being productive with AI-powered robocall mitigation.
In this session, we’ll:
– Discuss the state and role of STIR/SHAKEN
– Why Robocall Mitigation is Required
– PBX, IP-PBX, UCaaS and CCaaS Integration
– How to Get Started
– Save some time for live Q/A
Every time I’m in a social setting and I get asked about what I do for a career, the subject of illegal robocalls always dominates the discussion. “What are you doing to stop them?”
I clearly remember a series of meetings with service providers a few years back, pitching them on solutions to the illegal robocall problem that could be solved with session border controller software. They could not care less about the problem. As much as consumers complained to the FCC about the problem, there was little that service providers could or would do about the problem. They were getting paid to transit the calls and had little motivation to fix the problem. It was someone else’s problem.
All that changed with the TRACED Act of 2019.
The TRACED act included a number of new tools and mandates:
Caller ID Authentication requiring the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN – this forced originating service providers to attach an Identity Token to the header of the call, with origination traceback information and an Attestation field that indicated whether the call could be trusted.
Call Blocking – prior to the TRACED act, service providers had to pass all traffic, essentially preventing them from screening call and preventing illegal robocalls from being delivered to consumers. The Act allowed service providers to block suspicious traffic and indemnified them from prosecution for failing to delivering what they felt was a suspicious call.
Scam Call Protection – required the FCC to explore means to prevent One Ring Scams and protect hospitals from illegal calls.
Enforcement – the Act increased penalties, extended statute of limitations and other tools to help find and charge those generating and passing known illegal robocalls.
The first big milestone of the TRACED Act is almost upon us. Service providers in the US are required to file their Robocall Mitigation Plans with the FCC by June 30th 2021. The penalty for not filing a plan is having their traffic blocked by other providers after September 28th, 2021.
So all of a sudden, service providers are interested in dealing with illegal robocalls.
We discussed this in more details during a Cloud Communications Alliance webinar titled “Robocall Mitigation Compliance”, explaining the details of filing and impact of not filing a plan.
The network manager for a large retail chain (who asked to remain anonymous), came to us with a problem. His agents at an inbound call center were wasting time answering calls from illegal robocallers and it was costing him dearly. He was looking for a means to reduce, if not eliminate, the robocalls altogether. In this case, the contact center was responsible for taking product orders, so the agents valuable time was wasting fielding calls rather than facilitating purchase fulfillment. Continue reading Robocall Mitigation for the Contact Center
Now available on YouTube, our “Complying with the TRACED Act – Five Things You Should Know” video where we examine the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal and Deterrence Act and what service providers can do to achieve and maintain compliance. Watch the video here.
8 Things to Watch in Telecom during 2020
By Alan Percy, CMO at TelcoBridges
5G, new FCC rules, Robocalling, 9-1-1 access, TDOS attackers, the Cloud and more in 2020 – a list of 8 things to watch in the upcoming year. Continue reading
Here’s question #3 from our “Session Border Controllers – TOP 10 FAQ” webinar, the 10 most frequently asked questions about SBCs. This video asks and answers the question can an SBC help stop Robocallers?
The SIP Network Operators Conference meeting was held in Herndon, VA this last week, bringing together roughly 100 service providers, suppliers and government regulators. This year’s conference allocated one entire day to dig deeper into the #1 issue in telecommunications – Illegal Robocalling.
The magnitude and urgency of solving the issue was reinforced by keynote presentations from both Eric Berger, CTO of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Ian Scott, Chairman and CEO at the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Both presentation implored the service providers and their suppliers to move quickly to fully deploy the STIR/SHAKEN framework by the end of 2019.
by Harry Wakefield, Marketing Communications, TelcoBridges
TelcoBridges executives were in Chicago this week for the 2018 IIT RTC Conference and Expo. Our own Alan Percy sat down and recorded a podcast with FCC Chief Technology Officer Eric Burger, discussing one of our favourite subjects, robocalling fraud and actions the FCC is taking to protect consumers.
If you are old enough to remember the Spy vs. Spy comics in Mad Magazine, you’ll also remember a time when the phone rang, you just answered it. No robocalls to worry about. With the advent of VoIP, we inadvertently created the robocall. The TRACED Act mandated STIR/SHAKEN, and you’d think the aggressive illegal robocallers would be a thing of the past. Instead, it has become a game of Spy vs. Spy.
By Alan Percy, TelcoBridges