Illegal Robocall-Blocking Tech Seen Increasingly Stopping Legit Calls

Consumers have a mushrooming array of options for blocking or otherwise avoiding unwanted robocalls, but legitimate callers are increasingly caught up in those nets, robocall service vendors said Monday at an FCC/FTC expo on illegal robocall technology. Legitimate callers "are getting Heismaned" by robocall-blocking tech, said Deirdre Menard, Transaction Network Services director of product management.

Chief of Staff Matthew Berry told us FCC enforcement actions focused on spoofed robocalls, and spoofed calls almost surely are fraudulent ones. "If your doctor or the power company has a legitimate call to make to you, there's no reason they should be spoofed," he said.

Carrier interest in anti-robocall and spam messaging solutions took off after the FCC's 2015 decision allowing telcos to block such messages at customer request, Menard said. Vendors said industry interest is particularly pronounced on the wireless side, somewhat muted on wireline. Menard said that's due to wireless inherently coming with screens that make such solutions easier. FTC CoS Svetlana Gans said commercial options for consumers exploded since her agency in 2012 launched a $50,000 contest for robocall-blocking technology (see 1210190045). Carriers are particularly interested in robocall blocking as a means of restoring "confidence" in voice services, said John Ayers, First Orion vice president-business and corporate development. It makes call blocking and screening apps for consumers and private label apps for carriers.

Nomorobo founder Aaron Foss said this year likely is an inflection point where consumers are becoming generally comfortable with robocall-blocking and adoption takes off. He said the move to all-VoIP networks in a few years will turn all calls into data and dealing with illegitimate robocalls far easier. Foss testifies Friday at the House Digital Commerce hearing (see 1804200041). He said the current regulatory regime for call blocking stems from 1990s technology and needs to be reworked with a consumer opt-in option allowing calls from particular sources. That approach would make blocking unwanted or illegitimate calls easy, Foss said.

Menard said another issue the telco industry is increasingly trying to grapple with is "neighbor spoofing" -- use of NPA-NXX data so robocalls have the same first six digits as the recipient. "That's huge," she said. Neustar Senior Director-Product Marketing Jonjie Sena said the industry is particularly focused now on Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs and Secure Telephone Identity Revisited authentication of calls. He said call authentication is in the testing phase, with two to three years before broad deployment and use.

The event featured displays and demos of robocall blocking and alerting services, such as T-Mobile's Scam ID and Scam Block, Hiya's Caller ID & Block, and call management hardware for landlines such as Digitone Communications' ProSeries Blocker. It followed up on a forum the two agencies held in March (see 1803230056) and other joint events are likely, Berry said. "Both agencies understand the American people are demanding action." Berry -- whose prepared remarks are here -- said there's no simple regulatory or technology fix that will address the issue since technology has made robocalling easy and cheap.