Three Ways a Business Can Stop Spam Calls on Its Network

Many executives these days wrestle with the question “Is allowing employees to work from home a good idea?” The pandemic, the great resignation, and technology all converged into a plethora of articles and hand wringing on the subject the last couple of years. Think what you will of the debate, but if worker productivity is your jam, then what is your hot take on business spam calls? Is it even on your radar? Because while only certain vocations can even support the work-from-home movement, everybody who owns a phone has to deal with voice fraud over the phone, like it or not — even when they’re on the job.

In this article, we cover:

• Spam and fraud statistics.
• Monitoring and identifying unauthorized brand attacks over business networks.
• What to look for in a reputation management solution.

Consider that more than 3.8 billion robocalls were placed last month. Twenty-nine percent were categorized as telemarketing and 28 percent as scams. That’s nearly 2.2 billion spam or scam calls in 31 days. This sort of malfeasance includes branded emails — 25 percent are phishing attempts and 43 percent of hackers impersonate Microsoft specifically. There was an alarming 381 percent increase in brand impersonation attacks when the pandemic hit, with new domains suspected of brand impersonation rising by 366 percent. These are just some of the trends that have led to more than $44 million in losses resulting from vishing, phishing, smishing (phishing attacks over SMS), and pharming (DNS-level attacks).

How Business Can Stop Fraudulent Calls 

So, what recourse does a business have to stop spam, scams, and other fraudulent calls? The first step is to acknowledge the problem. Just because there isn’t a think-piece every other day about the fight to preserve enterprise identity and reputation against brand impersonation attacks doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve your attention. In fact, it’s the evil you don’t see that will kill you. To help you out, here are three strategies to undertake in your quest to stop spam calls on your network.

1. Monitor the situation
   The best way to deter a bad situation is to gain optics on it. Look for a solution that specifically monitors brand identity over the voice channel. That’s right, the tools exist to observe explicit unauthorized brand name mentions in vishing scams, even implied references to brand relationships. And when trademark infringement or unauthorized brand mentions occur, a business can be notified to gain awareness. Taken a step further, the potential impact of these imposter incidents can be analyzed through call volume of these bad actor campaigns.
2. Properly identify brand fraud
   Now that you can see it, how do you know what you are looking at? The voice channel is the most engaging channel brand attacks occur over because of the personal nature of a voice conversation. Being engaging also makes it the most ripe to exploit. That’s why vishing represents such a huge threat to brands, their customers, and all consumers, particularly when a fraudster’s goal is to steal and identity or someone’s credit card information. To properly identify everything going on over the voice channel, you need cutting-edge technology with inroads to those 3.8 billion robocalls we mentioned earlier. Only by harnessing the power of billions of data points can a business expect reliable fraud identification.
3. Deploy a reputation-management solution
   Enterprise identity and brand reputation management is the intersection where monitoring and identification meet to stop spam calls. Brand protection management solutions — such as YouMail Protective Services — are designed to mitigate the damages caused by brand impersonation over the voice channel and deter the recurrence of brand abuse. You should look for a brand reputation management solution that is comprehensive, including alerts, reporting, and enforcement through litigation as part of its mitigation strategy.

YouMail Protective Services does all this and more. It monitors its network of over 10 million sensors to identify brand imposters and capture evidential proof in the form of audio from bad actor robocall campaigns. We provide this evidence to the authorities so they can stop existing campaigns as well as future recurrences. In fact, we are the only solution provider that the USTelecom Industry Traceback Group (ITG) relies on to perform tracebacks that lead to the discontinuance of unwanted robocalls and removal of bad actors at the source of brand impersonation.

If you need to get up to speed on brand reputation management on your network and how to stop spam calls, start by downloading this free white paper right now.