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How to Know Your Customer And Monitor Telephone Number Behavior On Your Networks Through Robocall Mitigation

Many telecom providers use KYC (Know Your Customer) software, and some also invest in monitoring telephone number behaviors. But a true push for robocall mitigation means you can’t just use one or the other. In fact, there is a third element you need, and they all should be integrated into one coordinated defense.

In this article, we cover:

 

Why Should I care About Robocall Mitigation?

It’s obviously why your end users care about robocall mitigation … no one wants a flood of spam calls. This annoys them, and makes the providers look bad. This ultimately costs you business, and your brand suffers.

But it goes far beyond that. As most in the telecom provider field have heard, the FCC has made robocall mitigation a major priority. Most of the required effort has been pushed down to voice service providers.

All voice service providers must file certifications in the Robocall Mitigation Database, documenting how they fight robocalls.

Consequences are dire. It’s not just fines your company might face. On November 22, 2022, the FCC actually disconnected a voice service provider from other networks, and threatened six others with imminent disconnection.

You mitigate robocalls. Or you get shut down.

Know Your Customer Software

Subscribers need to trust that a caller is who they say they are. Having trust in the Caller ID reduces scams via spoofed calls. So it’s obviously critical that a service provider can authenticate who their callers are, so consumers (and law enforcement) can more easily identify and avert fraudulent calls.

The FCC has ruled that most providers must implement and use STIR-SHAKEN set of standards to verify that a call which has travelled through many interconnected phone networks can have it’s called ID “signed” as legitimate and validated along the way by other carriers.

While these requirements aren’t in place for every provider until mid 2023, it IS required that a robocall mitigation plan is in place.

KYC solutions are often handled internally by a service provider, but work significantly better with additional information, such as call monitoring.

Call Monitoring

 

Monitoring telephone number behavior via content-based analytics provide an efficient and effective means of supporting KYC.

In the battle against illegal robocalls, it is important to note that analytics approaches may be defined by two broad categories: (1) Event-based analytics and (2) Content-based analytics.

Content-based analytics relies upon inspection of the actual telephone call content to describe what has occurred.

In contrast, event-based analytics relies upon network signaling such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) messages and other call related data. Data from signaling, switching, and handset resources such as answer seizures and/or call duration rates is used for event-based analytics because algorithms are attempting to predict outcomes based on an assessment of the data presented.

In the case of YouMailPS, the content-based analytics portion relies upon audio content associated with unwanted robocalls received by the public. YouMail has billions of datapoints from messages left by robocallers to its popular YouMail app.

Integrated Robocall Mitigation

Bad actors are constantly changing their tactics including the telephone numbers and prerecorded audio that they use to perpetrate unlawful calls.

And so while Know Your Customer (KYC) and call monitoring are both critical elements to robocall mitigation, even more can — and needs to be — done.

Today’s providers need a future-proof solution that provides zero-hour detection and response.

With YouMailPS Robocall Mitigation, a collection of technologies leverage patented AI algorithms to analyze communications content. These algorithms first accurately identify unwanted calls. Secondly, unique digital fingerprints are created and matched with associated telephone numbers used by bad actors. Fingerprints often follow bad actors wherever they go – across spoofed telephone numbers and multiple originating service providers. YouMails adaptive algorithms are effective regardless of attack duration, frequency, and other tactics.

Combined with the billions of datapoints from the YouMail app, and decades of focus on fighting robocalls, there is no more effective solution today.

YouMailPS offers three primary solutions for communication service providers and vendor integration:

Score: Telephone number scoring as a service derived via content-based analytics. Score provides a probability of telephone number association with three important categories of unwanted robocall behaviors: (1) Spam, (2) Unlawfulness, and (3) Fraud.

Watch: Telephone number behavior as a service via content-based analytics. Watch provides visibility into usage behaviors including identification of audio content from unwanted robocalls that may be associated with telephone numbers of interest.

Clear: Traffic analysis as a service via a combination of CSP data analysis and content-based analytics. The service represents a fully integrated network solution that analyzes every communication instance handled by the CSP with comparative analysis to data independently captured by the YouMail Sensor Network.

Read more on how YouMailPS supports communication service providers with robocall mitigation here >

 

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