It's My Number

Ideally, illegal robocalls would be stopped at the source. That would completely remove the burden and frustration from the end-users. The regulators have diligently attempted to stop the most egregious abusers, but the limited data available, plus the obfuscation (such as caller-ID spoofing) used by the perpetrators and the circuitous paths taken by the calls makes it extremely difficult to identify the point of origination with current technologies and procedures.

Our solution is a “mash-up” of crowd-sourcing (200,000 complaints to the FTC each month plus 20,000 more to the FCC) and big data (the extensive call signaling records captured by the telephone companies) with straightforward analytics to identify the sources of these illegal calls. In near-real-time, we take complaint data, as well as data from our own “honeypot” numbers, and automatically track the calls to their origin using detailed carrier-by-carrier signaling data. Once we know unequivocally where the calls are coming from, validated by multiple complaints pointing back to the same source, we can use laser-focused enforcement techniques to stop the illegal activity. Within a day or two of a new robocaller cropping up (potentially even faster), we can find it and shut it down. Ultimately, this serves as a huge deterrent to illegal robocalling in the first place.

This is an “industry solution,” depending on cooperation of carriers and regulators. We leverage the complaints ALREADY being filed by those end-users that voluntarily do this today, and data ALREADY captured by carriers. But ALL end-users, complainants or not, benefit from a wholesale reduction in illegal calls. We don’t require universal cooperation, but the greater carrier participation in our effort, the more completely we can eradicate this scourge. With regulatory “encouragement” from the FCC, we believe that we can drive carrier participation to a high level.

This solution is called “It’s My Number” because we are allowing end-users to take back their phone numbers from the law-breakers that have made, in some cases, US phone service more burdensome than beneficial.