Scam calls are one of the most frustrating parts of having a cell phone. It seems like not a day goes by where you don’t get at least one or two of them. However, this may change soon, as cell phone providers and manufacturers are both pitching in to help stop the crisis. There are a number of steps that smartphone manufacturers and service providers are taking, but here are four of the most prominent ones.
1. Labeling Numbers Flagged as Likely Scam
If you’ve ever seen a phone call come in with the name “Scam Likely,” you’ve already seen this happen. When a call comes in labeled as “Scam Likely,” it’s because the phone provider you use has seen this number on a list of verified scam callers or has a good reason to believe the number is somehow related to a scammer.
Because no algorithm is 100% accurate, phones will still send a “Scam Likely” call through just in case it’s a real number. If you’re expecting a call, you can pick it up to see whether it’s the call you’re expecting. However, if you’re not, you can instead just reject the call and avoid having to hang up on a scammer in the first place.
2. Ensuring That Calls Are Coming From Real Numbers
STIR and SHAKEN are two standards that can help phone providers avoid serving you a call that comes from a spoofed phone number. STIR stands for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited, and SHAKEN stands for, a bit less intuitively, Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs. They’re both protocols to verify the caller’s right to use a phone number.
When a phone provider implements STIR and SHAKEN standards, they can more accurately determine whether a call is coming from a real number or not. This makes it less likely that you’ll see a scam call coming from a phone number registered to the Social Security Administration. These protocols make it easier to avoid real numbers going along with fake calls.
3. Crowd-Sourcing Lists of Numbers
Some companies, including Verizon, actually crowd-source lists of spam and robot calls. The company has a list of nearly 300 million numbers, and that number is constantly growing as more users report scam and spam calls when they receive them. This can make it easier to tell when a call is a spam or scam call.
These companies can also feed the lists of numbers into algorithms to detect spam and scam calls more easily in the future, even when they aren’t on the list. This crowd-sourcing makes it easier for these companies to detect and avoid spam and scam calls overall, so it’s a good idea to start reporting them if there’s an option.
4. Offering Access to Third-Party Apps
Some companies work directly with certain third-party apps, offering a bit more functionality for their apps, but there are also many third-party apps you can download all on your own to block scams and stay safe. Depending on the app you use, you may have access to a different list, which means it may be better at detecting and blocking possible spam. The free PeopleFinders mobile app allows you to do just that.
With the PeopleFinders mobile app, you can determine whether a call is likely to be a scam, look people up, protect yourself more easily across the internet, and more. It’s available on both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store as well, which means you can protect yourself on both iOS and Android devices.
Conclusion
Smartphone manufacturers, cell phone service providers, and third-party app developers are all working together to keep people safe from scams and spam calls. Everyone knows how annoying these types of calls can be, and that’s why there’s so much money and time being used to try and fix these problems. With all of this help, there is hope that one day the robocall scourge will come to an end.
Image Attribution: ALAN – stock.adobe.com
