It’s not enough to look at the phone number that is calling you to determine whether it might be a robocall, and to look at how many other calls have been made by that number and how long those calls lasted, there is new technology that looks at the content of calls to identify patterns and characterize the content of robocalls.
Called SnorCall, it records all the incoming robocalls on 60,000 monitored phone lines, and then transcribes the call using a tool called Snorkel. The transcription allows for the purpose of each call to be identified and for calls with similar audio patterns to be grouped together. The tool then labels each call or number to indicate whether it pertains to a specific company or government program, whether it solicits personal information of the people being called, or requests funds.
Nearly half of the calls analyzed involved a strategy known as the “callback number.” When a consumer picks up the phone, the representative on the other end describes a serious situation — an arrest has been made or is about to be made, utilities are about to be disconnected, etc. — and rather than solicit a payment, instructs the consumer to call another number to make a payment and take care of the situation.
“We’ve developed a tool that allows us to the characterize the content of robocalls,” said Brad Reaves, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University. “Although telephone service providers, regulators and researchers have access to call metadata — such as the number being called and the length of the call — they do not have tools to investigate what is being said on robocalls at the vast scale required.”
Keeping calls from being blocked or labeled as spam is a neverending battle for companies in the accounts receivable management industry. It’s important to know what tools are being used to block or label calls so that companies can make the necessary adjustments to ensure that legitimate calls are not caught up in the net.
“Our findings demonstrate how illegal robocalls use major societal events like student loan forgiveness to develop new types of scams,” says Sathvik Prasad, a Ph.D. student at NC State and first author of the paper. “SnorCall can aid stakeholders to monitor well-known robocall
