Robocalls spike in October to an all-time high
The numbers are in, and they show that robocall activity spiked in October 2019 to an all-time high. Here’s an overview.
YouMail estimates there were 5.7 billion robocalls placed in the U.S. in October. RoboKiller puts their estimate at 5.5 billion. These estimates are made by extrapolating robocall reports among their users.
Robokiller reports that, in addition to the usual assortment of unsolicited offers and scams, many robocalls were healthcare offers motivated by health insurance open enrollment.
In YouMail’s list of the top 100 robocallers in October, 7 of the top 10 robocallers by call volume were from debt collectors. This trend continues, augmented by healthcare insurance robocalls.
Here were the cities that received the most robocalls:
- Atlanta
- Dallas
- New York
- Los Angeles
- Chicago
Telephone service providers have been given the green light to block robocalls more aggressively, and a coalition of 12 companies have announced their plans to do so.
STIR/SHAKEN is rolling out across the industry. TransNexus has over two dozen customer/service providers using it today. While it won’t prevent robocalls, it does prevent caller ID spoofing, a common robocall tactic. The framework also makes it much easier to trace robocalls back to their origin.
And with caller ID verification powered by STIR/SHAKEN, robocall prevention methods will become even more effective.
TransNexus solutions
We offer STIR/SHAKEN solutions in our ClearIP and NexOSS software products. Our customers are using them in production today. In addition to the usual authentication and verification capabilities, these solutions also provide flexible policy controls that enable you to manage calls however your subscribers would like.
To our knowledge, these are the only solutions available that support Out-of-Band SHAKEN, which enables SHAKEN Identity tokens to be sent for verification across the internet, thereby avoiding issues in today’s telephone network that would otherwise cause failure.
As far as we know, these are also the only solutions that support Rich Call Data, which builds upon the STIR/SHAKEN framework to enable callers to send information about themselves to introduce their call. This will be a game changer for enterprises trying to reach their customers by telephone.
Contact us today to learn how quick and easy it is to deploy STIR/SHAKEN, robocall prevention and Rich Call Data in your telephone network.
