Teraquant 'No Fluff' Blog

If you’re a communication services provider, you’ll know how infuriating robocalls are to your customers. In 2019, Americans received more than 29.3 billion robocalls. Both sides of the house decided that enough was enough and the Pallone-Thune TRACED Act was signed by the President.

Now, you’re legally required to have robocall mitigation measures in place. In April 2020, the FCC will introduce new anti-fraud regulations. One result of this is that VoIP providers need to introduce the STIR and SHAKEN protocols to prevent VoIP fraud.

You might be waiting to put these measures into place but doing it sooner rather than later has big benefits. Your customers are thinking “Whenever we call an AT&T or T-Mobile wireless number, our call is marked as spam!” . Perhaps they want to get out in front of this issue and have their calls certified. Certified calls will be answered by people who want to answer them. This also avoids your customers’ calls being blocked by consumers.

We’re going to show you how implementing robocall mitigation can help your customers, what the new standards involve, and how Teraquant can help.

Ready to find out more? Keep reading.

What Are Robocalls and Are They All Illegal?

The definition of robocalls is simple. When you pick up your phone and hear a recorded message instead of a real person, that’s a robocall. A lot of these robocalls are linked to scams and if you’re getting robocalls that are trying to sell you a product, they’re probably illegal robocalls.

Robocalls are a plague for businesses and individuals. They distract you from work, take up your time, and have the potential to scam vulnerable customers.

Not all robocalls are illegal. The FCC allows informational robocalls, come from debt collection agencies, robocalls to promote a political candidate, some robocalls by healthcare providers, and messages from charities.

Until now, the consumer has only had two options for aiding the fight against robocalls. They can report robocalls to the FTC and invest in call-blocking solutions. With the new regulations, the onus is no longer on the consumer to protect themselves, but for the Service provider to protect the customer.

New Laws and STIR/SHAKEN

Robocall mitigation is now an essential offering for all communication providers. The new TRACED Act has put an 18-month deadline on VoIP providers to implement the STIR/SHAKEN standards. Legacy TDM call providers need to implement their own effective robocall mitigation solution.

The FCC also needs to bring out new standards to protect parties from one-ring scams. The deadline for this measure is tighter at 120 days since enactment or April 30th.

One important part of these new measures against spam calls is that call blocking will be allowed against Unauthenticated calls and telcos will be protected against liability for unintended blocking.

What is STIR/SHAKEN?

Any VoIP companies with an OCN and unregulated cloud VoIP services that have bought their numbers will need to comply with STIR/SHAKEN. In essence, STIR/SHAKEN is a pair of standards that require VoIP services to authenticate the origin of callers and to verify the certificate contained in the incoming call is genuine.

Some other parts of these standards include:-

1.    Seamless certification via tokens

2.    Verification that checks the tokens on the inbound, terminating side

3.    Blocking net calls from external DIDs

4.    Building a database of robocall numbers

5.    Number reputation assessment and attestation

6.    Traffic analysis

If you offer SIP VoIP services, you’ll need to comply with these standards soon.

How Does This Affect Legacy Systems?

Non-VoIP systems aren’t unaffected by this act. TDM SS7 calls need to be verified and certified too. Follow the industries Out Of Band (OOB) STIR initiative which is a well thought out and simple method of certifying and verifying calls in a non-SIP environment.

Teraquant is developing a unique non-intrusive system to help Legacy systems stay compliant. Our system will use inbound verification to alert customers of a potential spoof call. It can also tell them when a call has been verified as legitimate.

The message displayed can be changed to whichever message you prefer. If you’d like to talk with us about your requirements, you can click here to get a consultation.

VoIP Fraud Prevention Measures

The TRACED Act isn’t just taking action on robocall mitigation either. One section of it revolves around Wangiri, otherwise known as one-ring scams. A scammer will call a target phone, ring once and then hang up.

The target sees that they have missed a call and will then ring them back. Sometimes, Curiosity gets the better of us and victims are enticed to call the number back. This number is typically being a premium-rate phone number which racks up a huge bill for the caller.

We’re experts in protecting customers from Wangiri scams. We know the flaws in using Call Detail Records, which can take up to 20 minutes to detective Fraud attack. We know that some Wangiri protection systems are imprecise and result in unintentional call blocks. We also recognize the futility of just letting a customer know that they’ve been defrauded after the fact.

Our systems give your customers FCC-compliant protection which you need here now in 2020.

Don’t Wait for the Deadline to Initiate Robocall Mitigation

The TRACED Act has been expected for some time and it is fair to wait until the regulations have been drawn up to put the protection in place. Now that the details have been released, there is no reason to wait any longer to make your systems TRACED-compliant. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons to put robocall mitigation in place today.

You Will Need It Anyway

Complying with the TRACED Act is not optional. If you are a communication services provider, you will need to put these standards in place soon, so why not get it done now? We will only be more in demand as the deadline approaches, which means it could take longer to put them in place.

A Better Experience for Customers

The TRACED Act is all about giving customers and businesses a better experience. If you put these in place before your competitors, you may be able to get more happy customers, who are glad to get out ahead of this. You are also helping us all get our telephone service back which has been abused by these Robo callers.

There’s No Need to Upgrade Your Infrastructure

We work with your existing infrastructure to create a solution that works with the TRACED Act without you having to upgrade your network. A simple non-intrusive modification to your SBC is all that’s required.