What is a spam likely block, and how to avoid it?

No one likes to receive spam. Remember how many emails are not opened and go to spam. The situation isn’t better with calling. There are a lot of companies, and competition is high, but people are suffering from their tries to win customers’ trust. It turns out the opposite is true: people are fewer answering unknown numbers and using blocking features to not receive suspicious calls.

How does such a block work, and how to get around it to connect with a potential buyer after all? Let’s figure it out.

What are spam and scam calls?

First, let’s clarify the difference between spam and scam calls.

Spam calls are a type of unwanted calls that are made from numbers calling numerous people at the same time. They include calls from telemarketing sales departments and robocalls in which prerecorded voice messages are played.

According to Hiya, around 157 billion spam calls were made to American and European citizens in 2020. So, everyone has 1 spam call every 3 days on average. And it is not surprising that we are annoyed by them and don’t want to answer.

On the other hand, scam calls are made by people with bad intentions. For example, someone wants to steal money or receive personal information. So how to understand that you’ve answered a scam call?

• The phone number is odd.
• The greeting is generic.
• It is common when the caller says there is a problem with a bank account or another account and asks to give him the identification information.
• Another leverage is the time limit. You must decide and do something right now to take advantage of the “best deal.”
• The tone of conversation may become heated, and the caller may threaten you if you don’t want to do what he asks.

How do these calls hurt your business?

If you work in a legal business and use honest ways to earn money, you are not in danger of being scammed. Therefore, you do not have to worry about your numbers being blocked by any scam block feature.

The situation with the spam block is entirely different since most businesses practice cold calls to attract new customers. That is, their sales agents call hundreds of potential customers from several mobile numbers every day. Does your company do this too?

Even if your business uses legitimate robocalls, your numbers are always in danger of getting a spam likely block. And this will have a negative impact:

1. Users who have applications for blocking incoming spam calls will not receive them at all. That is, you automatically lose the opportunity to get in touch with some potential customers.
2. The person will see the “Spam” status even if he receives your call. Statistics show that only 10% of people answer such calls.
3. If you have already communicated with a client using the same phone number before, and he got into the spam block, this can reduce customer satisfaction and ruin your communication.

As you can see, businesses need to avoid a spam blocks. We will discuss this further, but first – a few tips for those whose numbers have already been marked as spam.

What to do if you’ve already been marked?

The fastest way is to change your phone number. But this is only at first glance easy to do because many regular customers already have your number in their contacts, and it is also displayed in your advertisements. That is, you will have to inform each client about the change in your number and change all advertising creatives.

You can do this once, but it is not profitable to do it regularly. So, we recommend choosing one of these tactics instead of changing the number:

1. Report an erroneous blocking of your number to a T mobile or other telecommunication provider for review. The provider will verify your number and remove the Spam status if it is all right.
2. Switch to another communication channel. For example, emailing or messaging on WhatsApp. If it succeeds, you won’t need phone numbers at all.

A reliable way to protect numbers from a spam likely block

You can find many recommendations on the Internet about how to bypass blocking the numbers. But we know only one reliable way – to understand how it works and to follow the rules of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

FCC created a special protocol named STIR/SHAKEN, which is responsible for recognizing spam and scam numbers according to certain criteria. Now all voice service providers are allowed to provide information to their clients about which calls are safe and which are not. So let’s take a closer look.

What is a STIR/SHAKEN protocol?

STIR is short for Secure Telephony Identity Revisited, and SHAKEN is short for Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs. They are working together to verify the call as authentic and safe due to the Caller ID, which has every phone number.

How does it work?

To contact someone through this protocol, your call needs to go through 8 stages:

1. A calling party sends a SIP INVITE to the originating telephone service provider.
2. The provider confirms the ability of the calling party to use this call number. Your call can get one of the three attestation scores:Full Attestation (A) – the calling party was authenticated completely, and the call can go further.Partial Attestation (B) – the service provider has authenticated the calling party, but it couldn’t verify if it has a right to call from this phone number.
3. Gateway Attestation (C) – this status is received by calls from abroad when the service provider is able to determine only the place from which the call is made but cannot determine the caller.
4. The service provider contacts the authentication service to create a SIP Identity header. It includes the following information: Calling number, Called number, Current timestamp, Attestation level, and Origination identifier.
5. All this information goes to the terminating telephone service provider.
6. The terminating provider gives it to the verification service.
7. The last one contains a certificate repository which is used for the verification process. Here SIP Identity header is compared with SIP INVITE for compliance. Also, the public key of the certificate decrypts the data, and the certificate is authenticated.
8. The test results return to the terminating telephone service provider.
9. The call begins, but it can be canceled if the number has a block. Even if it starts, the called party will see the information about the Spam or Scam status of the calling party.

Despite the number of processes, caller verification takes no more than 100 milliseconds.

So, you should give the needed information to enable STIR/SHAKEN and start making legitimate calls.

How to provide the protocol with Ring.io

We can help you with protocol connection. Write to our email and provide the following information:

• Legal Business Name
• Business Address
• Business Type (Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Corporation, co-op, LLC, non-profit)
• Business Industry
• Business Registration Number
• Contact Full Name
• Contact Email
• Contact Title
• Contact Phone Number
• Business website address
• List of Ring.io phone numbers that need STIR/SHAKEN enabled

But we have to warn you that STIR/SHAKEN can only be registered with Ring.io Personal and Company numbers. So if you are using our RingLocal service, we are not able to register the numbers in the pool for the protocol.

The process of creating and approving your profile should take up to 5 business days. We will inform you when you can already make a telephone call without any concerns!

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