Branded Calling Is a Welcome Addition, but It Can’t Stop There

For the past few years, I’ve been complaining to almost anyone who will listen about the high number of spam/scam calls I receive every day. Somehow, my contact information made it to the dark web, and I have been getting 10 calls or more per day from scammers in India looking to steal my personal, financial, and medical information. They pretend to be from Medicare, my electric or cable TV service provider, lawyers looking to settle my non-existent car accident claim, debt reduction firms, auto and life insurance companies, Amazon, credit card issuers, or other businesses. They’re using illegal robodialers and phone number spoofing to hide their identities and make it seem that the calls are coming from the 917 area code (reserved for cell phones in New York) to improve the chances that I’ll answer the call.

I’ve registered both my cell and landline phones on the National Do Not Call List, but the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement against violators has been a joke at best. I got rid of my landline phone entirely because it didn’t make sense for me to pay $40 or more per month to talk to dozens of these scammers every week. So now I only have a cell phone, and it has been a target for scammers for far too long. I quickly became one of the 72 percent of American adults who ignore calls from numbers they don’t recognize, but the calls still went through and disrupted my day.

Thankfully, I recently got a new iPhone 16e recently, and the latest version of its operating system (iOS 26) has a feature that allows me to screen and filter out these scam calls. Once a call from an unknown number comes in, the system asks the caller for a name and reason for the call, and if none is provided—these auto-dialed calls can’t do that—the call is silenced, sent to voicemail, and displayed in the recent call list, but it never rings to my receiver. Problem solved to some degree.

Other help is on the horizon, though, as we highlight in this issue’s cover story, “Why Branded Calling Is Critical for Outbound Outreach” (page 14). Branded calling, it explains, addresses the scamming problem head-on by allowing legitimate businesses to display rich call data, including their verified names, logos, and sometimes even the reasons for the calls, right on phone screens when they make outbound calls. Branding is delivered only when the caller has passed a rigid authentication, reputation checks, and carrier analytics. If those conditions are not met, branding is suppressed or the call is labeled as spam or blocked entirely.

Sounds great, and I certainly welcome the technology. If it keeps even one bad actor out of my call log, I will gladly embrace it whole-heartedly.

I also believe that one measure alone is not going to be enough and that the industry needs a multi-vector approach to combatting fraud. It’s a point on which even providers of the branded calling technology can agree:

Branded calling “works most effectively as part of a comprehensive approach to fighting scam and spoof threats to the voice channel,” warns Mike Schinnerer, vice president of enterprise product management at Transaction Network Services (TNS), a leading provider of branded calling technology.

And that multi-vector approach needs, more than anything, to involve law enforcement. Thus far, the FTC has been unable or unwilling to do anything to go after the Indian call centers where roughly three-quarters of the scam calls originate. That needs to change. U.S. federal law enforcement needs to work with the Indian government to identify the call centers where these calls are originating and bring them to justice. This is a criminal endeavor, and without strict civil and criminal penalties, there is little deterrence for these call centers, and they will just continue to develop ways to thwart any measures in place.

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that it is just a matter of time before the scammers devise a work-around to branded calling, as they’ve done with every other scam-blocking measure that has been implemented thus far.

Leonard Klie is the editor of CRM magazine. He can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.

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