Unless you’ve been living under a rock or smashed your phone with one then you likely know how prevalent robocalls have become in the last couple of years. According to YouMail, a company specializing in blocking robocalls, US consumers have received just under 22 billion robocalls in the first five months of this year, on pace to hit over 52 billion robocalls by the end of 2021. Whether it’s your auto warranty expiring or that student loan that you never took out, you’ve probably stopped picking up the phone to avoid hearing another spam caller.
The change to beat back robocalls is a technology called Stir/Shaken and the deadline for major U.S. telecom providers to implement it is just around the corner – June 30. This deadline was set in December of 2019 with the passing of the TRACED Act, requiring all voice service providers to crack down on verifying where calls on their networks are coming from. This June deadline only applies to providers with more than 100,000 customers, however, smaller networks will likely have to quickly follow suit ahead of their June 30, 2023 time limit for implementation. Especially considering the FCC has stated that there’s evidence a large volume of illegal robocalls is coming from a subset of smaller providers.
Stir/Shaken is actually a two-part acronym standing for the technical protocol and framework in which calls will be verified (no, it has nothing to do with 007). ‘STIR’ stands for “secure telephone identity revisited,” and ‘SHAKEN’ for “signature-based handling of asserted information using tokens.” Essentially what this means is that any call routed through a voice network will have its real information verified against the caller ID provided by the caller. This will, in theory, help cut down on the use of ‘spoofing’ software that is typically used by scammers to localize numbers and make them more likely to be picked up by unsuspecting targets.
As these guidelines come into effect, we will have to see if they help reduce the number of spam calls coming through our phone networks. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr warns that this change might not be the ‘silver bullet’ necessary to end spam calls and many large networks have already begun implementing these changes for robocall deterrence ahead of the June 30 deadline (with little change apparent from the consumer side). There is also more legislation currently in the works in Congress to take additional measures to curb this nuisance, such as the DO NOT Call Act.
