One of my real frustrations with this industry is the propensity to talk about issues rather than act. Talk sells, acting costs.
I remember back when we were pioneering research into voice fraud and making it available through open-sourced data and annual reports, this was sought after by large multi-national carriers interested in addressing the problem and we’d willingly share it. It yielded some amazing contacts, spurred conversations with other experts, and I like to think moved the field forwards.
At the other end of the scale were those who liked to “talk”. They’d crib our material to give presentations with no real world experience and one trade association, after asking if they could use our data and being told “no”, stole it anyway, to do half of what we’d suggested they do a decade earlier before going it alone when they wouldn’t. That was the point we stopped sharing so openly, a net loss to the field.
Those same people still sit around in talking shops, chewing the fat about how to address a problem Simwood customers haven’t suffered from materially for well over a decade. They still exchange the wisdom of their collective non-experience and crucially, they’ve still done basically nothing to address the problem. Those lucrative calls we choose to reject, still overflow to the talkers who enjoy supranormal profits by not blocking them; but they’ll say all the right things.
Fast forwards a few years and we’re now in a similar place with nuisance calls. We’re forgoing tonnes of revenue by blocking millions of inbound and outbound calls we believe will be a nuisance to our customers or come from our customers and could be a nuisance to the wider community – same rules regardless of direction. We’re investing in the best protections in the industry to do that so there’s a double whammy at play there commercially – less revenue, extra cost. That is the right thing to do to address this problem and in May alone we took 3.4m calls off the network as a result.
We have lots of data driving this, data we’ve shared with the regulator to a) show them what is possible where they’ve been likely told it isn’t and b) because we’re pushing the bounds of legislation and guidance. We know we could take 38% of calls off the network today by complying to the letter of their rules and that’d include a lot of the kind of traffic they’ve given Tismi a Direction on – we see them on our reports, but we see a lot of others too. The trouble is, if we do that unilaterally, that traffic will just go somewhere else and we’ll be 38% poorer, probably out of business. That is a net loss in terms of solving the problem, so we need others to move along too. We’ve no issue with them being behind but the delta between what we do and what they do is what matters. In doing so, they’ll likely also find that that 38% contains some false-positives due to 20+ years of lazy engineering – legitimate use that the legislation doesn’t capture or, more likely in our experience, a necessary truck roll to make it compliant because the legislation is bang on.
Data shows where this traffic comes from. We can see which operators lack adequate KYC in giving out numbers – they dominate the rangeholder of blocked numbers, even though this may have been a one-time fail with the customers long migrated elsewhere. We also see which operators are unable or unwilling to filter out bad traffic, or simply lack KYC to prevent on-boarding in the first place. As Pete has said before, Ofcom are investigating operators who we rejected in under 30 seconds. We know who took them on after we did – we see where the traffic comes from. That doesn’t mean we’re perfect by any stretch – people lie, good customers go bad etc. – but we make an effort.
Sadly, the best thing we could do is block those rangeholders with no KYC and block those carriers who put profit before morals, but we’re not allowed to (at least until Compliance goes on holiday!). That would break end-to-end connectivity which is a key tenet of our regulatory regime – I get it. And actually, lax KYC doesn’t mean 100% of their customers are bad – there’s a real risk of collateral damage here. In the US they don’t care about that – originators sign calls for STIR/SHAKEN enabling reputation scoring (as we always warned) and prospect harvesting. It may be similarly disallowed but we know that operators are routinely sharing block-lists of known diallers based on a variety of factors, including signing certificate holder, and assembling their own. There’s a moral debate here over whether this is worse than allowing a statistically likely scam call to get through to a victim, but we know our American cousins are more ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ than we are here in the UK. Alas, I digress.
The real point here is that just because someone talks about something – virtue signals, name-drops talking shops, talks the talk, brown noses Ofcom etc. etc. – it does not mean they either know what is going on or are one of the good guys. From the data we have we know who they are and all we can say is be careful: the fox is in the hen house. The Americans would shoot it, sadly we have to put up with it.
We can’t name names but we do want to share what we’re doing and some high level data with those who care about stopping this and protecting their customers – not those who want to learn how to circumvent it – through a webinar. We’re still collecting names for this and will announce some slots when everyone has had an opportunity to express an interest. Please put your name down below if interested.
