Dallas, TX – Have you been getting a lot of spam calls on your personal phone in recent months? It’s not your imagination, and you’re not alone. During elections, spam calls reach record highs with some cities receiving upwards of 200 million spam calls in a single month. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the 30.5 billion robocalls Americans received in 2017 alone.

Spam isn’t a new problem, and many people ignore those random number calls they get on their personal cell phones each day. But when it comes to a business that relies on the phone as a source of revenue, ignoring an unknown number is simply not an option.

Aside from disrupting business operations and skewing marketing data a business collects from the phones, phone bills tend to increase dramatically during high spam months — especially election season. “Spam impacts all of our bottom lines,” said Konrad Eysink, Lead Telephony Technician at Car Wars. “Car Wars recognized this early on and as such has aggressively fought spammers. Through the implementation of sophisticated processes, we identify spam calls and can stop them dead in their tracks before our clients are impacted.”

Most people know what spam is, but many do not understand how people are using it to game the system and add billions to phone bills every year. Bad actors profit from spam by forming small telephone companies and collecting the fees paid by legitimate phone providers on toll-free numbers. Many use robo-dialers to call across state lines and avoid prosecution from state governments, pushing the burden of catching spammers to the national government. Although many laws exist to combat spam, a law is only as strong as its level of enforcement allowing spam to run rampant as federal agencies struggle to keep up. Because the public expects to receive political calls during campaign season, spammers have the perfect cover to hit more numbers than usual and attack the phone lines without being caught. Many of the “political recordings” you might hear on your personal cell phone are not from political campaigns at all; they’re just fraudulent recordings from spammers taking advantage of this public belief.

Car Wars uses a proprietary algorithm based on call patterns to preemptively detect and block spam before it even hits a business’ lines. The algorithm, which has had years of success in blocking calls of this nature, looks at call origin, call termination, time of day, call volume, repetition, and in-call activity to predict which originating phone numbers are likely spam. Call origin, for example, is a valuable factor in flagging spammers, due to the frequent spam tactic of placing calls across state lines. Machine learning refines Car Wars’s model for spam detection, allowing Car Wars to keep up with sophisticated spammers whose methods are constantly changing. These processes work together to add spam numbers to a blacklist, blocking them from future attempts.

Aside from protecting clients, Car Wars works to proactively stop spam at a larger scale by advising national-level agencies on spam patterns and deterrence. Car Wars is a trusted partner of the FBI and FCC on matters involving telephony violations.

Although technology has enabled bad actors to take advantage of the system, it has also evolved to better combat them. Car Wars is constantly implementing new methods to ensure that progress in stopping spam moves faster than it does for those creating it.

Links:
Car Wars