For years now, US carriers have been doing their best to protect their customers against scam callers. It has gotten so bad that the government has even implemented rules against it and encouraged carriers to take the concern seriously. As their response, companies have rolled out their own security measures to safeguard their customers against these callers. The latest to take action is T-Mobile with its Scam Shield protection.
And today, T-Mobile revealed that they are the first US carrier to work with the other major networks to implement STIR/SHAKEN protocols as a way of fighting number spoofing. The Un-Carrier has started working with Charter Communications’ Spectrum Voice, making them the first US carrier to partner with all major networks in the country to deliver number verification to customers. With the partnership, T-Mobile is able to authenticate calls from various network providers in the country.
Apart from Spectrum Voice, T-Mobile has partnered with AT&T, Comcast, Verizon Wireless, UScellular, Altice USA, Clear Rate, Google Fi, Bandwidth, Brightlink, Intrado, Inteliquent, Twilio, Peerless, and Magicjack. By partnering with these companies, T-Mobile has fully adhered to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s June 2021 deadline to implement the protocols throughout the industry.
Mike Sievert, T-Mobile CEO says:
“T-Mobile was first to implement number verification in 2019 because protecting customers against scammers and spammers is one of the most important things we can do as an industry. To date, T-Mobile has protected over 80 million customers from more than 33 billion suspect calls — and counting. With the combination of Number Verification, free Caller ID and the scam blocking tools in Scam Shield, and by working with network providers of all sizes, we are providing the industry’s most comprehensive scam and spam protection for free to all our customers and working every day to make scammers jobs impossible.”
T-Mobile launched Scam Shield last summer as a comprehensive set of tools designed to protect its customers against robocalls and scams. Through this, both T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile customers get automatic and free scam call warnings, the ability to block scam calls completely with Scam Block, and free Caller ID. It is free to use by all T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile customers. Ever since the tool was launched, T-Mobile’s network has been 30% better at detecting scam calls.
Source: T-Mobile