Tollring’s Scam Protect Helps Telcos Defend Against Scam Calls

Uxbridge, UK – 6th July 2021: Tollring launches Scam Protect, a cloud-based solution to help telecoms providers to reduce risk from scam calls, protect their network and customers, and meet regulatory obligations.

Data from the UK’s National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) has revealed that over £373 million was lost by repeat victims of fraud in the financial year 2019/20.  Scam calls are major contributor to this figure and, with over 30% of all UK call traffic estimated to be scam calls, phone companies are being asked to do more to stop fraudulent calls.

Leading the way is the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) which has introduced a compulsory code of practice (Dec 2020) requiring telcos to establish processes to monitor their networks, block scam calls and share evidence with other telcos and ACMA.  The UK is due to have its own regulatory requirements in place by 2022.

Scam Protect gives providers of cloud-based calling platforms an easy and quick way to identify and protect against scam calls. It uses intelligent algorithms to analyse call traffic automatically, to identify irregularities and potentially fraudulent activity. Downloadable data enables CSPs to block future calls from designated A-Party CLIs and ultimately prevent future recurrences.

By capturing information at a network level, the software protects against international call spoofing, ensuring a call’s CLI is relevant to the required IP address, or country trunking group. It also protects against robocalling fraud, ‘smishing’ (SMS and phishing) as well as ‘Wangiri’ calls, where victims receive a missed call, then are likely to return the call, which is inv call a number back which is an expensive premium-rate number.

Tony Martino, CEO of Tollring says, “Scam calls are a blight on families and businesses, with scammers becoming ever more sophisticated and threatening. The cost is huge, both on a personal level and financially. And now with more people working from home and more telephony conversations taking place across IP networks, the demand for protection is growing.

“We are helping providers to take control of call traffic as they face mounting pressure from customers and regulators to mitigate the problem.  Whilst this is all about protecting customers, it is also about protecting the brand reputation of those delivering services.”

Delivered securely via the cloud, the platform-agnostic system is fast to set up and scalable, with the ability to monitor millions of endpoints. It uses comprehensive behaviour profiling based on the latest scam calling intelligence to provide insight into the call traffic on a network. It detects, reports and alerts on call traffic so that providers can understand their exposure, enhance their own rules and tolerance thresholds, and ultimately take action.