Harnesses machine learning and enhanced threat intelligence to track and block robocalls
Brussels – Belgium, 30 June 2021 – International communications enabler BICS has added dedicated robocalling prevention capabilities to its fraud mitigation platform, FraudGuard. The move arms operators with the ability to easily identify and automatically block spam robocalls, protecting their network and their subscribers.
Crowdsourcing global intelligence from over 900 operators and digital service providers, FraudGuard delivers proactive protection and near real-time feedback to fight telecoms fraud. With this latest innovation, operators will now benefit from global robocalling insights and fraud-fighting capabilities, allowing them to tackle a pervasive problem head on.
Robocalling fraud has become increasingly widespread and costly, with the YouMail Robocall Index for May 2021 indicating some 47 million scam robocalls were made every single hour in the US, while the FTC reported approximately $70 million in losses for the first half of 2020 alone. Other geographies are facing similar issues, with Brazil now topping the list and Europe featuring heavily in Truecaller’s 2020 spam call report.
To address the issue, regulators are taking decisive action. From 30 June 2021, the United States’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is mandating the implementation of several measures and controls, including caller identification technology known as STIR/SHAKEN. This is aimed at combating fraudulently spoofed caller identity (CLIs) which facilitates robocall activity. The FCC’s approach shares ownership across the different parties involved in the delivery of calls to subscribers, placing the responsibility to digitally validate the CLI on the call-originating party.
With the enhancements announced by BICS, operators worldwide can ensure that the international traffic reaching them is valid, while safeguarding their networks and end-users from fraud attempts. External data points, together with BICS’ global data analysis across services and machine learning, underpin the threat intelligence database, automatically blocking robocalls, as well as identifying suspicious traffic. FraudGuard’s data-centric platform has proven instrumental in combating telecoms fraud, successfully blocking 1.3 million fraudulent calls and saving operators over €2.4 billion to date.
“Intelligence sharing is one of the most powerful weapons in the fight against telecoms fraud,” said Katia Gonzalez, Head of Fraud Prevention and Security, BICS. “With the advancement of our FraudGuard platform, we have augmented our threat intelligence capabilities to give operators greater insights into the fraud and security landscape to significantly mitigate the impact of robocalling attacks. We’ve seen the success of this approach for other types of fraud time and time again – and, by combining our expertise in fraud and international communications with extremely focused and curated threat intelligence on robocalls, we can help operators to enhance protection for their network and, crucially, for their customers.”
Industry comment on FCC’s STIR/SHAKEN:
“The FCC’s mandating of caller identification will be instrumental in combating the pervasive and costly issue of robocalling fraud. It’s encouraging to see such decisive action to protect subscribers from robocalls, which have become the FCC’s top complaint each year. With robocalling and spoofing fraud presenting a global problem, other regulators should urgently look to follow the FCC’s lead.
“However, regulation cannot work in isolation. To mitigate telecoms fraud, it is critical that operators share intelligence with one another to take a joint approach to fraud, and that the telecoms ecosystem collaborates as a whole to remove the loopholes that fraudsters can exploit.”
- Katia Gonzalez, Head of Fraud Prevention, BICS
