Stopping RoboCalls

A very common annoyance for many of us.  A new means to address the problem.

How Your Phone Company Aims to Stop Robocalls in Spectrum IEEE

The STIR/SHAKEN protocol will stop robocallers from exploiting a caller ID loophole to spoof phone numbers    By Jim McEachern and Eric Burger

Have you ever received a phone call from your own number? If so, you’ve experienced one of the favorite techniques of phone scammers.

Scammers can “spoof” numbers, making it seem as though the phone call in question is coming from a local number—which can include your own—thereby obscuring the call’s true origin. If you answer the call, you’ll most likely be treated to the sound of a robotic voice trying to trick you into parting with some money.

One of us (McEachern) is a principal technologist for the standards organization Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), and the other (Burger) was until recently the chief technology officer for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. But you don’t need us to tell you that robocalls are a pandemic. According to a report by the caller ID company Hiya, there were 85 billion robocalls globally in 2018.

RoboKiller, one company that has created an anti-spam-call app, estimates that Americans received 5.3 billion robocalls in April 2019 alone, or nearly 4,000 every second. And not only are scam calls annoying, they’re costly. In 2018, phone scams tricked Americans out of an estimated US $429 million. Sadly, these numbers are on an upward trend. ..... 

Spoofing phone numbers is just one way phone scammers trick their victims. Scammers are also very good at reading people, gaining their confidence, and playing to their fears. But spoofing numbers is an often-effective opening gambit. The first thing a spoofer has to do is get someone to pick up the phone in the first place, and people are more likely to answer a call if they think it’s from a local number. So, preventing the abuse of call spoofing, along with making it much harder for anyone to place huge numbers of robocalls, are two of the most important challenges to reining in robocallers and scammers.

The telecommunications industry has been developing a network-based system that would meet both of these challenges. It goes by an unwieldy name: “Secure Telephone Identity Revisited/Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs.” Let’s just call it STIR/SHAKEN, which is a lot easier to remember. STIR/SHAKEN is a technique for providing more reliable call-display information by closing a loophole that scammers exploit in telephony infrastructure.

Today, when you make a call, your phone company, or carrier, knows whether or not you’re spoofing your number to make it appear that the call is coming from a different number. But what the company doesn’t know is if you’re allowed to spoof that number, nor does it have a way to securely send that information to the carrier delivering the call to the person you’re calling (there are legitimate reasons why callers might spoof their numbers; more on that in a moment).

Call for Directions
Calling a friend isn’t as simple as transmitting data from point A to point B. Along the way, the call is routed through telephone infrastructure that may be operated by two, three, or more phone companies, or carriers. These routes are part of the reason it’s so time consuming to identify the points where scammers place their calls.
       
The upshot is that when you see the number of an incoming call, you have no way of knowing if the number displayed on your caller ID is legitimate or spoofed. STIR/SHAKEN will give phone companies a secure method of communicating a caller’s number to a recipient when a call is placed. This capability is vital to establishing the caller’s reputation so that scammers and other bad actors can be reliably identified and blocked before you waste any time on the bogus call. And should an illegitimate robocall still get through, STIR/SHAKEN simplifies the process of tracing a call back to its source. Hopefully, simpler tracing will make it feasible for law enforcement agencies to prosecute scammers for illegal robocalling. The technology will also securely provide information to call-blocking apps, allowing the apps to more accurately identify spam calls and inform you with a notice such as “Spam likely” or “Unverified number” before you answer a call.

If it all works out, robocalls could become as manageable as email spam. You’ll be less likely to be tricked into answering a scam call, and you’ll receive far fewer in the first place.  .... "