Australia telco's new technology is so good that they've been blocking as many as 500,000 calls a day.
We all agree that scam calls are an incredible nuisance. But apart from being annoying, scammers also often get what they want by milking money or gleaning passwords from unfortunate people on the other end of the line. Last year, for example, Australians lost about AU$48 million (US$37m) to scammers.
The good news is that Telstra, one of Australia’s largest telecom companies, is working on putting these swindlers out of business. It has recently announced that it is now blocking around 6.5 million suspected scam calls a month, at times up to 500,000 per day, thanks to new filtering technology it has developed.
The new technology targets botnets, trojans, and other types of malware. It’s also able to block phishing text messages that claim to be from government services. “We are doing this to protect our customers and their livelihoods because we know that we can have a significant impact by taking proactive action at a network level,” said Andrew Penn, Telstra’s CEO.
“Blocking scam calls is no mean feat. Our Networks team has built a smart platform that enables us to monitor inbound calls on our network that have suspicious characteristics, and block them before they can ever reach our customers,” added Penn.
"Our efforts will always need to evolve to target new, creative tactics that scammers will use so no technology platform will ever stop scam calls entirely. Customers should always remain vigilant," Mr Penn said. "If you think you are receiving a scam call, our simple advice is: hang up."
Now the major telecom companies in the rest of the world just need to get on with introducing similar technology. Please.