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Answering the Call to Stop Robocalls
One cannot ignore the high volume of unwanted, sophisticated call cons delivered daily. Consumers' lack of trust is on the rise and VoIP is providing scammers with an easy and cheap way to continue robocalling. Lightpath will soon be answering the call to provide our customers with a solution to help mitigate this epidemic.

But first some alarming stats:

• 47.8B robocalls in 2018, a 57% increase from 2017
• Nearly half of all calls to mobile will be a scam in 2019
• $1.48B reported to FCC as lost to call scams in 2018, a 38% increase over 2017
• 60% of consumer complaints to FCC are about robocalls
• 75% of consumers report missing important calls
• Contact centers have reported a 20% decrease in answer rates over the past few years and having to field 10-20% of their inbound calls as scams

Regulatory authorities are flexing their muscle with heavier fines, new regulations, and demands for carriers to protect consumers and businesses against robocalls. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has put rules in place that allow phone companies to block certain types of likely fraudulent calls or mark them as spam. Further, the FCC has urged that call authentication standards be adopted to prevent caller ID spoofing, where fraudsters alter the caller ID to mask their identity.

To help protect our subscribers and business customers, Lightpath will be implementing a new robocall mitigation solution that will apply an advanced call analytics model. It will compute a per-call fraud score based on a broad range of authoritative data sources that support the FCC rules for blocking invalid and unassigned numbers. The Caller ID display will be updated based on the robocall score. So, if the call is suspected as dangerous, a prefix like ‘SPAM?’ will be attached in front of the Caller ID to warn subscribers.

In addition, we will be implementing the industry caller authentication standards known as STIR/SHAKEN. This is a solution that will employ the use of digital certificates on phone calls, similar to how online web transactions are authenticated, to detect and warn of caller ID spoofing.

For more information on ways that Lightpath is helping to address robocalls, please contact your Account Executive.