Did the headline grab your attention? Good. The US telecoms industry is broken in many ways but it is especially annoying that the failure to protect the American public from scam calls keeps being dressed up as success. There is endless gaslighting in the form of pseudo information that is seemingly about bad calls being traced back to bad actors who then supposedly get shut down. This alleged enforcement strategy is a con; sanctioning a company means nothing if the people who run a company remain free to recreate the same crooked business models over and over. It is also worth questioning the arbitrary nature of who gets sanctioned. Small businesses that originate scam calls become the subject of breathless announcements from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about the urgent need to take action. This then gets treated as proof that the US telecoms industry, as dominated by its biggest telcos, is doing everything possible to protect the public. In contrast, the big well-known telcos that originate scam calls are somehow exempt from any criticism, never mind any actual punishment.
To illustrate my point, let us compare the recent attention paid to four different telcos near the top of the charts for the latest US traceback transparency report, which covers the first quarter of 2024. The report shows that 46 calls were traced to Veriwave Telco LLC, placing them ahead of all other telcos. Twilio, Vonage and Verizon were the three biggest brands that were also ranked among the 10 most common originators of calls traced during the quarter. A simple search of social media shows that expert after expert after expert wanted to draw attention to Veriwave’s bad behavior and to give praise to the FCC for issuing a cease-and-desist letter telling Veriwave to stop originating scam calls. Examples of this social media activity can be seen here, here, here and here. That is quite a lot of attention for Veriwave, given that the 46 calls traced to Veriwave is one-third lower than the total of 68 calls collectively traced to either Twilio, Vonage or Verizon. Why should Americans feel protected from scams by the actions taken against businesses like Veriwave when so many other scam calls are being traced to big US carriers? None of the clique who pretend the US industry is successfully curbing scam calls have anything to say about the number of bad calls that should be blamed on some of the industry’s leading players.
Even the narrative that US consumers mostly suffer scam calls because of the inadequacies of foreigners is falling apart in the face of relentless data that says the opposite. The top foreign originator of traced scam calls during the quarter was a Canadian business called Mash Telecom. Eight calls were traced to Mash, a figure that is well below the number of calls traced to the worst US telcos. The world has been told that Canada and the USA have a deep collaborative partnership in fighting scam calls, begging the question of why North Americans lecture the rest of the planet on how to protect consumers from scams when their supposedly effective and cooperative methods of tackling scam calls keeps pointing them towards more and more bad calls originating within North America. Deutsche Telekom had topped the charts for tracebacks to a foreign originator during previous quarters, but there were only five calls traced to the German operator during the first quarter of this year.
The extent to which Americans are gaslighting each other was highlighted by how many scam calls come from businesses that impersonate comms providers. 204 tracebacks during the quarter fell within this category. Comms providers should be setting an example for other businesses by doing a superior job of identifying themselves when calling customers, and thus making it almost impossible to successfully impersonate them. The fact that criminals prefer to impersonate comms providers tells its own story about the inadequacies of the US comms industry. Debt reduction scams were the next most common type within the traceback sample, with 188 instances, followed by 131 calls involving order scams, and 123 calls that impersonated Amazon.
Perhaps the most telling statistic from the latest transparency report is the one that our team has to calculate because the traceback consortium chooses to omit it from their reports. At least 343 calls that were traced during the quarter were subsequently found to be legal. This can be deduced from gaps in the sequence because the reporting of a trace is suppressed if the call was legitimate. As a portion of the whole, 28 percent of the traceback efforts were devoted to calls that appeared suspicious to the people who selected them for investigation, but which were actually fine. That level of performance is significantly worse than the roughly 20 percent average for legal calls that were traced in previous quarters. The amount of effort wasted by the traceback consortium on calls which are legal begs serious questions about the US telecoms industry’s supposed proficiency at identifying and tackling crime.
Regular readers will already know the US traceback transparency report is only in the public domain because its publication was mandated by legislators, and not because of any choice made by the FCC or its cronies. They have consequently persisted with issuing the report in a deeply unhelpful format. They also choose to use labels and descriptions that are meaningless to outsiders. Commsrisk is not a billion-dollar enterprise like the companies which belong to the traceback consortium, but we have to transform the report into a spreadsheet in order to analyze its contents so we might as well share that spreadsheet with you too. See it below, or click here to open it in a new window, where the menu includes options to download the data in various formats. Masochists can also obtain the original PDF version on the FCC website here.
