Cybersecurity Policy Report, T-Mobile Tallies Declining Robocall Trend, (Feb 22, 2023)
Organizations Mentioned:T-Mobile US
By Jeff Williams
Saying that scammers are “continuously upping their game to find new tactics and targets,” T-Mobile US, Inc., has reported that while robocall attempts rose 75% between 2021 and 2022 and then hit a record monthly high of about 5.2 billion in January 2022, the calls generally “declined steadily” throughout the rest of the year.
T-Mobile attributed the rise in robocalls in January 2022 to a “surge of caller retries” resulting from the introduction of the 608 SIP (session initiation protocol) code that notifies callers that their calls have been blocked because they are highly likely to be illegal robocalls.
The factors that contributed to the decline included "ongoing improvements to scam protection technology like T-Mobile’s Scam Shield, agility by mobile operators to implement new prevention tactics and regulator intervention,” the report said.
Vehicle-related calls accounted for 22% of robocall scams, while the next most common were health-related and financial-related scams at 18% and 16%, respectively, followed by Social Security scams at 13% and Medicare scams at 11%, the report said.
Consumers in Texas, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, and Oklahoma were the most frequent targets of scam robocalls, the report said.
T-Mobile reported its Scam Shield identified and blocked more than 25 billion calls in 2022, an increase compared to the 21 billion the company said it blocked in 2021.
T-Mobile's Scam Shield, launched in 2020, includes free flagging of scam calls and free optional blocking of such calls, as well as other features, such as enhanced caller ID with identity verification where available and a free second phone number to keep personal numbers private.
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