Preventing Unwanted Activities on Your Numbers

Overview

CallTrackingMetrics takes reports of unwanted calls, chats, messages, forms, or faxes very seriously and we work vigilantly to protect our customers and combat unauthorized or fraudulent use of our platform.

CallTrackingMetrics phone numbers may receive activities from outside users, just like any other phone number. When a customer purchases a phone number in CTM, it is their number and not used by any other CTM customers.

To help protect against activities that aren’t intended for that customer, whenever a phone number is released, we typically reserve it for a minimum of three months before it can be purchased again so that the former owner can update their records. In addition, we monitor each reserved number until it reaches an acceptably low number of activities before re-releasing it.

Dealing with Unwanted Activities

If you are getting unwanted calls, chats, messages, forms, or faxes from abusive parties, you have several features you can use to help combat it:

1. Blocking: Use CTM’s “block caller” feature in the activities log to create a blacklist and make sure that your account won’t receive nor be charged for activities from those numbers. You can block contacts by clicking the “flag” button in the far right column of the activities log and then choose to “block future calls like this one." You have the option to block by CNAM (the name of the contact) or the phone number of the contact.
2. Release the Number: If you find that one particular number seems to be getting more unwanted activities than others, you can always release your CTM number and provision a new one to your account. It could be because of the former owners of this number.
3. Voice Menu: If you are concerned about unwanted calls, chats, messages, forms, or faxes distracting your agents, we also recommend using a voice menu (aka an IVR menu) in CTM to present contacts with a greeting and keypress instructions to help combat spam from reaching your agents.
4. Spam Detective: Finally, our optional Spam Detective service can add an additional layer of protection to your numbers by detecting if a contact appears to be coming through a suspicious rate and if so, route them to a captcha, voice menu or voicemail box to force them to take particular actions before being sent to a live agent.

 

Refunds

We are not able to refund time for unwanted calls, chats, messages, forms, or faxes. In many cases, there are no clear criteria to use to distinguish whether a specific activity was unwanted, fraudulent or spammy, without careful consideration and us having to potentially analyze each and every call, chat, message, form, or fax. The best defense is to use the tools CallTrackingMetrics provides to minimize the duration of these activities and the distraction they may impose on your team.

What We Are Doing

We regularly monitor the work the FCC is doing to address the perpetrators of spam and we aggressively report the situations to our carriers so they can report these cases to the FCC. It appears that this situation will only change when the Federal Government enables the tracing of inbound calls, chats, messages, forms, or faxes to their source in order to stop the perpetrators. We work with our carriers to escalate known cases of abuse and thus far, our carrier’s escalations to the Justice Department have received responses that law enforcement is not able to fully trace these activities upstream to the points of origination due to existing privacy laws.

The telecommunications industry is implementing regulatory changes which CallTrackingMetrics is committed to supporting as part of a global effort to combat fraudulent spam calls and text messages.

STIR/SHAKEN has been put in place by the FCC to combat spoofed robocalls with caller ID authentication. The second regulation is Application-to-Person 10-Digit Long Code, (A2P 10DLC) messaging. For further clarification, 10DLC is a standard 10-digit phone number. This is the latest offering from U.S. carriers to support texting for business while protecting end-users from unwanted messages.

These two regulatory changes require businesses to obtain a trust score by creating a business profile. This trust score provides the underlying carrier with information to verify that the communications are not spam. The business registration process to obtain your trust score is now available for most businesses through the CallTrackingMetrics Trust Center.