[March 26, 2019] |
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TNS Report Finds Only 10% of High Risk Robocalls Come From Tier 1 Carriers
While the top six U.S. carriers (AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, Sprint,
T-Mobile and Verizon (News - Alert)) account for three-fourths of total call volume,
only 10% of high risk (scam/fraud) robocalls now originate from numbers
owned by these six carriers - according to the 2019
Robocall Investigation Report released today by Transaction Network
Services (TNS (News - Alert)). The low volume of high risk robocalls across top U.S.
carrier networks suggest robocallers continue to capitalize on networks
and numbering resources from non tier-1 carriers.
The TNS
2019 Robocall Investigation Report is a bi-annual update of key
robocall trends that draws from over 1 billion daily call events across
hundreds of carriers and integrates a vast amount of factual evidence
from TNS' network traffic. The report looks at data trends for high risk
robocalls (scam/fraudulent calls which attempt to acquire call recipient
personal information and/or money) as well as nuisance robocalls (which
are not of malicious intent or negligent non-compliance).
While the report finds that nuisance robocalls rose 13%, scam and fraud
robocalls (the highest risk category to consumers) actually decreased 18%
in 2018 from the prior year. The decrease in high risk robocalls
suggests recent FCC (News - Alert) enforcement actions, such as record fines, alongside
proactive carrier and industry efforts that leverage analytics are
starting to have a positive impact.
Additional key findings of the TNS 2019 Robocall Investigation Report:
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Robocallers are spoofing
legitimate customer care numbers. Consumers are
increasingly receiving spoofed calls that appearon their smartphone
display to come from legitimate customer care numbers. More than
two-thirds of the calls from legitimate toll-free numbers are
identified as nuisance or high-risk.
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Robocall spoofers hijacking mobile numbers. 1 in 4,000 mobile
numbers are now being hijacked by robocall spoofers every
month, which is causing 20% of people who have had their number
hijacked to disconnect their phone number.
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Snowshoe spamming is the new neighbor
spoofing. Neighbor spoofing now accounts for 24% of all
negative calls - up 5 percentage points from the prior year. But it
gets worse: sophisticated spammers are spreading spoofed calls over
several telephone numbers in low volume, then rapidly churning through
them to evade detection - a tactic known as snowshoe spamming.
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Negative call traffic from Canada is up more than 100%. Originating
Canadian inter-carrier calls labeled as nuisance and high-risk
increased over 100% from first to fourth quarter.
"Bad actors are launching more sophisticated robocall
campaigns - whether it's snowshoe spamming or using legitimate customer
care numbers to dupe subscribers into answering calls that appear to
come from brands they trust," said Bill Versen, Chief Product Officer at
TNS. "But our 2019 report finds glimmers of hope for the year ahead with
a decrease in high risk robocall volume, a trend that can continue with
carrier deployment of STIR/SHAKEN, further FCC and FTC (News - Alert) enforcement
actions, and more innovative robocall detection and blocking solutions
available to consumers and businesses."
TNS
Call Guardian, TNS' industry leading big-data analytics engine, aims
to suppress nuisance calls to consumers by applying machine learning to
call events, generating insights and reputation to more than 1.5 billion
phone numbers. Additionally, TNS' mobile caller ID solutions have been
shipped to over 200 million mobile devices across more than 500 makes
and models, providing a rich integrated call experience to all mobile
users at TNS' carrier partners.
Please click
here if you are interested in a full copy of the 2019 TNS Robocall
Investigation Report.
About Transaction Network Services (News - Alert)
From small rural operators in the US to the largest multi-national
carriers, TNS has over 500 operator customers and addresses the full
needs of wireless and wireline operators in the US and globally. The TNS
Call Guardian robocall detection solution is used by leading US
wireless service providers as well as US landline providers and is
accessible via numerous types of signaling protocols, can be customized
by the individual operator, and is available to all types of service
providers, including wireless, VoIP, and TDM wireline. TNS analyzes over
1 billion call events across over 500 operators every single day. For
additional information visit here.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190326005227/en/
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