Ah, Christmas. For many people, it’s the most wonderful time of year. Businesses, on the other hand…

Frantic customers. Last-minute requests. An enormous rush to get everything done before businesses close up for the year. Not to mention the higher-than-average call times, strain on customer support staff and, wait for it, increase in pesky spam calls.

That’s right. With such an influx of calls, the floodgates are opened and it’s harder than ever to keep scammers and nuisance callers at bay.

Unfortunately, that comes at a cost for businesses. Not very holly and jolly, is it?

Putting unwanted callers on the naughty list

No business wants to waste its time and resources answering and blocking spam calls. But with 28% of UK calls being spam, it’s safe to say they’re getting trickier to avoid.

In the past, one way to detect potential unwanted calls was to look for a single number being used to make large volumes of short calls. These days, though, it’s easy for nuisance callers to change their number frequently — and when it comes to blocking them, the perpetrator is likely to have moved to a new number by the time the issue’s been flagged.

It also makes tracing more difficult, as the number won’t have been assigned to the caller.

So, it’s annoying. But whilst many of these may end up being silent or abandoned calls, there’s also been a dangerous shift from nuisance to scam calls.

Cyber criminals are always looking for clever new ways to get people on the phone. And as scammers have learned that employees are more likely to pick up if they recognise the number, they’ve taken to number spoofing, using a false caller ID to hide their identity or mimic the number of a real company or person.

Once their victim is on the line, scammers will use phishing and social engineering tactics to steal information like bank account details, passwords and personal data.

Phishing is a means of retrieval and spoofing is a means of delivery — both are bad news for businesses…

‘Tis the season to combat caller fraud

Invosys is passionate about improving call security nationwide — and we believe our resellers should be, too. That’s why we’ve created several tools to bolster the safety and quality of your customer’s business calls.

Built into our best-selling Number Manager platform, Invosys Call Shield identifies fraudulent or spam calls based on their location, call source, number presentation and the volume of concurrent calls.

So, what are the Invosys Call Shield categories used to identify the potentially suspicious characteristics of a call?

 

  • Significant entity: the caller will attempt to deceive businesses into believing the call is coming from a known financial institution, government agency or other significant entity.
  • International spoof: this call will originate from overseas with a number presented as UK-based.
  • Mobile spoof: This caller will be presented as a mobile number originating from a UK landline or trunk number.
  • Public phone box: a call that arrives from a known list of UK public phone box numbers — or so businesses may think.
  • Simultaneous mobile: two active calls are already in progress from the same mobile number.
  • Premium number: a call presenting a number from a UK premium rate number range (e.g., 09 ranges).
  • Unallocated number: this call arrives at the platform from a range OFCOM hasn’t yet allocated to a UK telecoms operator.
  • Known bad actor: the call arrives from a number that matches a list of known fraudulent numbers from a national database maintained by the Telecoms UK Fraud Forum.

Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can extract and analyse the metadata of every single phone call, profile it and establish whether or not it has the characteristics of a spam call.

Although not every category is designed to defend businesses against fraudsters, they still allow companies to intelligently route calls depending on their origination characteristics — putting users in control and keeping dodgy calls at bay.

The gift that keeps on giving 

Think unwanted callers can get past us? Think again.

Number Manager’s handy caller exceptions feature allows our customers to upload specific nuisance numbers in order to block or flag them. This enables your customers to define a workflow for handling scam calls and ensure they have proper security processes in place.

Invosys is also working on a savvy new feature that lets agents intercept malicious calls whilst they’re happening — barring the caller from getting in touch again (even if they hide their number) and protecting staff from malicious callers.

So, when you supply your customers with Invosys Number Manager and our integrable

Call Shield solution, they can keep their business operations running smoothly, safely and scam-free for the festive season and beyond.

Want to keep your customer’s details out of the hands of fraudsters? Keen to learn more about Invosys’ Number Manager and Call Shield solutions? We thought so. Get in touch today at +44 (0)161 444 3333 to book a demo.