It goes without saying that scam calls are an incredible nuisance. But apart from being annoying, scammers also often get what they want — getting people on the other end of the line to lose significant amounts of money. Last year, for example, Australians lost about AU$48 million to scammers.
Luckily though, telecoms are working on putting these swindlers out of business. Telstra, one of Australia’s largest telecom companies, has recently announced that it is now blocking around 6.5 million suspended scam calls a month, at times up to 500,000 per day, thanks to the new filtering technology it brought in last year.
The new technology, which has been adopted since last May as part of its fight against scammers, targets botnets, trojans, and other types of malware. It’s also able to block phishing text messages that claim to be from government services.
“We are doing this to protect our customers and their livelihoods because we know that we can have a significant impact by taking proactive action at a network level,” said Andrew Penn, Telstra’s CEO.
“Blocking scam calls is no mean feat. Our Networks team has built a smart platform that enables us to monitor inbound calls on our network that have suspicious characteristics, and block them before they can ever reach our customers,” added Penn.
