[VoiceOps] ANIs flagged as telemarketer/spammer/scammer

[Hiers, David]

Hi Alex,
I have no idea how it is actually done, but there are lots of useful metrics just lying around that one could use.  Things like:

The last time a specific terminating number called a specific originating number
Number of calls
Rate of calls
Ratio of originated/terminated calls
Time of day
ASR
Call duration

Like any kind of dynamic reputation metric (credit score, IP Address reputation, credit card fraud detection, etc), I bet the actual secret-sauce is pretty closely held.  Gotta be some patents in this area, though.

I'll also bet double that you could come up with a wicked method for weeding out the "probably unwanted" calls!



David



-----Original Message-----
From: VoiceOps [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Alex Balashov
Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2018 3:27 PM
To: voiceops at voiceops.org
Subject: [VoiceOps] ANIs flagged as telemarketer/spammer/scammer

Hi,

So, of course, it is a known problem in the legitimate side of the lead engagement call centre, survey, etc. business that ANIs get flagged as "telemarketer" pretty quickly and start showing up that way on people's phones. 

Your normative viewpoint on that may vary depending on what you think of lead gen calls, but regardless, a reasonable person would differentiate
between:

(1) Legitimate outbound dialing operations that are following up with leads who provided their phone number and agreed to be called (at least, as a matter of clicking "accept" on _something_), or for some other legitimate mass-dialing purpose, and who actually own the DID inventory from which they present local-market ANIs and can in fact be reached on those numbers;

(2) Illegal spammers who use fake ANIs and call people who did not in any way consent to being called by them.

I am trying to learn a bit more about how this is done and what a legitimate, above-board business can do about it.

Ignoring the factor of third-party call-screening apps (which most people with a mobile don't use), where is this generally implemented? As I understand it, T-Mobile do it on the network level. I have T-Mobile myself, and probably 2/3rds of unfamiliar numbers, including quite legitimate ones, show up as "Scam Likely" — I know that's come up on the list before. AT&T displays "Telemarketer"; do they do it that way too, or do they use a Google Android feature for that which they enable as part of their carrier defaults for carrier-issued phones? What about other carriers and Android? 

As far as I know, Apple don't do anything like this. Do people with iPhones just not receive this "service"? How does that work?

Asking where the central, or the most influential authority lies and who provides it goes to the heart of the real question, which is: what can a legitimate business do if their number has been blacklisted this way? As I understand it, the maintainers of these lists, along with the criteria for getting on them, are elusive and inscrutable, and there's really no recourse and no appeals process. I furthermore understand that this has led to the widespread approach of rotating ANIs, but that's a losing battle; they get flagged too. I imagine it won't be long before the criteria for "Scam Likely" are just "number appears to call lots of numbers in this rate centre and otherwise hasn't been around very long".

But this is all just conjecture on my part; I really don't know much about how my carrier, anyone's carrier, or some BigCo that's behind my mobile OS decides that a call is a "telemarketer" or "scam" call. If anyone can shed some light on how this really works and what, if anything can be done about it, I would be most appreciative.

--
Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC

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