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Editorial

SPAM, robocalls and anonymous calls

Published on:

September 20, 2017

As spam and robocalls increasingly disrupt businesses, Vodia Networks offers advanced filtering in its PBX system, including anonymous call detection and, in partnership with TrueCNAM, a spam scoring feature. This integration assigns each incoming call a spam score, allowing companies to block or redirect high-risk calls. Configurable at the domain and user levels, this feature — available in Vodia PBX version 58.4 — provides flexibility for hosted PBX clients to customize call handling and protect productivity.

Christian Stredicke

Unfortunately, not every phone call contributes to the productivity of a successful company. Especially on the inbound side, there are more and more calls from robots and scammers. Those calls might reduce staff productivity or, even worse, your company might be hit by a real scam. There are estimates of how much damage these calls cause, but one thing is clear - it's a lot.

We have had a feature to detect anonymous calls in the system for many years. This can be seen as a primitive way to detect unwanted calls, a way to get started on scoring incoming calls on a SPAM scale. On ACD and hunt groups, those anonymous calls can be redirected to separate locations - mailboxes, for example, or just an announcement. For the extensions, we have more options, including asking the caller to leave a name and then calling the user up and letting him or her decide.

We have now built on top of this a more elaborate way of handling calls, together with a company called TrueCNAM (truecnam.com), whose founder we've personally know for many years.

What the PBX will do now, on an inbound call, is to contact TrueCNAM when an inbound call hits the PBX. This requires an account on truecnam.com; otherwise, the PBX will behave like before. The query returns a score between 0 and 100: 0 means the number is definitively not SPAM, and 100 means it is definitively SPAM. Values therein between indicate the score estimate for the number.

If the number is coming without caller-ID the system admin, domain admin and account user can set the score value for this call. Making this available on system, domain and user level leaves maximum flexibility as to where anonymous calls should go.

When the call hits an extension, a hunt group or an agent group, the PBX then makes a decision if the call should be treated as SPAM or not and applies the rules already in place for anonymous calls.

This feature will be available from 58.4 onward in the hosted PBX edition. The SPAM rejection feature can be set on a per-domain basis. This will make it possible to include this feature in value-added hosted PBX bundles for end customers.

To learn more, visit at https://doc.vodia.com/spam

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