Many have had their phones rendered useless because of robocalls and scammers. Can you solve that problem?
Since the Internet has first emerged, people have had to deal with scammers at unprecedented levels whether it be e-mail or smartphones. No surprises here. As an IT specialist I was persistently working on solutions that would protect the use of e-mail and networking services to legitimate traffic. As a user, I have to develop practices that have protected my e-mail, messaging and voice services.
Yet many are not so fortunate. They have had their e-mail rendered useless. Their phones? Pretty much the same. Robocalls have overwhelmed legitimate calls. Scam messages make it difficult to reply to legitimate inquiries. And here it is you are making payments on a $1000 telephone, spending $50 plus per month on the service, and having to turn your phone off so you can have a moment’s sanity. Finally, your personal happiness is pretty much down the tubes.
Robocalls
People often complain about “robocalls”. I have noted that a “robocall” can be a phone call or a message. They work in pretty much the same fashion. And both channels are exploited by bad actors in the same way. Yet most people subliminally forget that a vast majority of the robocalls out there are for legitimate purposes, from amber alerts to appointment reminders to your doctor. Your school district uses it to contact parents in the event of a school closure or emergency. Yet despite all the good things that robocalls can accomplish, it is the 10-30% of the calls that make life miserable for people.
People want it to stop. Missouri Net reports that the state attorney general is joining with 51 other states (and district) to sue four companies for abusive robocalls. Who is it they are going after? Will it be effective?
My Background
I began to study spam early on. As soon as the Internet was in operation my employer was being hit with bogus messages, many of which had lethal payload (viruses). It was an exciting time. We had to develop monitoring techniques, introduce anti-virus protection, employ security mechanisms on everything from e-mail to office software, and re-write employee training to develop a culture of security awareness and best practices. In 2000 this was never-been-done type of stuff. By 2008, when I started working for the US Forest Service, it was just part of daily work. Spam and bogus calls almost never got into the office place.
But then there was the smartphone. Eventually fading into history would be the reliable and simple telephone on the wall, connecting over copper wire. When you consider how safe and personal was the home telephone, you can appreciate the angst that people feel today when the mobile telephone has become a platform for harassment. Features that should be of great value to a person such as voice calls and messaging are virtually rendered useless. How does one solve this problem? Get another phone? Expensive and not practical. You can get multiple e-mail addresses, but telephone numbers cost money, much less the phone that is attached to it. Changing a phone number is also a tectonic event as you may lose contact with dozens of friends and business associates.
So, beginning in 2016, I wrote several articles dealing with spam. E-mail has been pounded for decades with bogus messages and I have introduced to readers ideas for arbitraging spam traffic and reducing the risk of being exposed to spam. The best method is to have more than one e-mail account, preferably three or more. One points to secure operations, like with your bank or stock broker. Another for friends. A third for everything else. In my lifetime I have had only one e-mail address ever get overwhelmed by spam traffic, and that was about seventeen years ago.
In 2021 I introduced an article on how to deal with scam activity on your phone, focusing on messages. Messaging provides several hints that can be transferred to your personal computer for investigative purposes. Using a computer, with a large screen, you can more easily see what is out there. Messages usually provide tell-tale links, hoping to bait you into a trap. There are ways to track these links and discover something about where the message came from.
I followed that up in 2022 with an article on STIR/SHAKEN, a new protocol that enables trace-back capabilities on calls and messages. This new technology has been integrated into our newer smartphones, enabling more efficient spam warnings, filtering and blockage.
Solutions
Your Phone
The first place to begin is to see what your phone offers. The Android phone I have has spam filtering through the Phone app. Tap on the stacked bars to bring up the menu and select “Settings”. At the top of my settings is “Caller ID & spam”. There are two settings I can use:
- See caller and spam ID
- Filter spam calls
I recommend you start with “See caller and spam ID” and test this out for a couple of months. The main reason for this is to verify that this feature is working as you expect. How many friends are marked as scam? How many people you work with (for me it is contractors) are inadvertently marked as scam? Tagging messages as “scam” is a multi-layered process. It is quite possible that your friend is using a provider that has poor certification credentials. When I first started covering this issue in 2016, most of the rural phone services were using dated equipment which did not support the new trace-back certificates. As you can see, you can have a lot of false positives with spam filtering.
The second item, “Filter spam calls”, should only be used if you a) have confidence that the spam filtering is reasonably accurate or b) you are simply desperate and willing to take the risk of blocking out legitimate phone calls. This feature works in much the same way as your spam folder in e-mail. It is your responsibility to check messages and calls that have been marked as spam on your phone. Don’t be surprised if you find out your best friend tried to call you and got blocked.
When I worked with for the US government, some of us were issued cell phones strictly for work purposes. This is one instance where “Filter spam calls” is a good feature if all the calls you expect to receive on the phone are from government phones.
Your Voice Mail
A second tool is your voice mail. I am often surprised that people do not use this feature to their advantage. They allow their mailbox to get full and it becomes useless. KEEP IT EMPTY!
As noted, spam filtering is likely to be inaccurate. I use my voice mail as a backstop. If a phone number I see is not identified or is marked as possibly spam, and it is really important, they will leave a message. I think it is about ten years since a spammer ever left me with a phone message. People who really want to talk to you can leave a message or send you a text to call back when you can.
This loops back to call etiquette. Most everyone should realize these days that robocalls and spam are harassing everyone at some level. If you are needing to talk to someone who most likely does not have your name in Contacts, consider leaving a message by text or voice identifying yourself. I have had contractors call and leave no message. Then they later say “I tried to call you ….” Oh really? What am I to think when I just see a mysterious phone number out there? In this day and age, more and more people are not responding to anonymous phone numbers.
Your Provider
Before loading additional anti-spam software onto your phone, use your phone without added tools for a period of time. You will discover that spam filtering is already resident due to the capabilities of your provider. A call may be marked “likely spam” by them without you having to use anything else.
Phone service providers usually have filtering apps that provide you with more options. I was on AT&T for several years and utilized their ActiveArmor app to scan messages for viruses. Programs like this may also have filtering features. Verizon has a program called Call Filter Plus.
So What About the Missouri Lawsuit
So back to the multi-state lawsuit. The Missouri Net reports the following:
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway says a bipartisan Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force (ARLTF) has ordered four major voice service providers—Inteliquent, Bandwidth, Lumen, and Peerless—to stop transmitting suspected scam calls. In this new effort, 51 state attorneys general formed the task force to focus on identifying and prosecuting telecom providers that carry the highest volumes of illegal robocall traffic into the U.S.
The FTC is also on this case, having sent warnings in 2022 and 2023. (see Resources) The report states it is an “order” from a task force, working on behalf of states, to desist. These are usually re-enforced by a cease and desist order from the FTC.
There is a positive side to this action. Thirty-two of 37 small voice providers have complied by actively removing suspicious actors. I think the key is actively. In my previous investigations, one thing I have noticed is inactivity. As an individual, there is little I can do but lodge a complaint with the phone company or with the state’s attorney general. With my skill set, I can often go after the providers. But generally speaking, I rarely get a response.
Who are the Bad Guys and Why
The ARLTF is going after four voice providers: Intelliquent, Bandwidth, Lumen and Peerless. What they all have in common is that they are “cloud” voice providers. In the old days, a telemarketer would have to purchase a PBX system (or lease space on one), a network of telephones sitting on desks that are physically wired to a switch. Today, a telemarketer can lease time and sockets to create a virtual network of phone numbers and tie into it individuals who are working from their homes. All this is done through servers sitting in a cloud center.
You can imagine the problem that generates. In the old days, there was a physical address. A scammer would have difficulty hiding. The phone number they used was tied to that address physically (copper wire). There was a human being talking to you. Today, the number you see on your phone could be gone tomorrow. It does not run over a copper wire, but from a cloud center over fiber optic wire, the same that is used for the Internet. Investigators, when tracing the phone number, would be led to the cloud center. The “caller” may be nothing more than a computer program. From there, it would most likely require a warrant to seize data pertaining to that number such as who they called and from where the call originated. This is enabled through the TRACEd Act, passed in 2019. In essence, this not only authorizes the federal government to trace back calls based on customer complaints, but requires companies to maintain data to answer such requests. That’s bad news for scammers. It narrows considerably the window of opportunity and it also pushes them off-shore.
Intelliquent was issued a cease and desist order from the FTC in 2022.
Bandwidth? Now there is a name best suited for scamming. A key pattern I have observed amongst scammers is that they utilize common names which make it rather difficult to identify any fraud attached to their name. I see this on Facebook where so-called “users” utilize names that are very common, particularly from the Middle East or Asia. As regards Bandwidth, from what I gather, it is probably African-based Bandwidth Cloud Services Group (BCS). A cease and desist letter was sent by the FTC in 2023 to their office in North Carolina.
Lumen is based out of Monroe, Louisiana. Recently purchased by AT&T, Lumen was formerly known as CenturyLink, who was the primary voice provider in my hometown in Missouri (aka General Telephone). Knowing how they have a lot of legacy wire and telecommunication networking equipment still in operation, it is probably no surprise they have struggled bringing their network up to speed.
Peerless is out of Chicago and it received a cease and desist letter from the FTC in 2023.
What is Really Going On?
First, we know that the both the legal and technical framework is in place to trace calls to the originator. Second, we can gather that these four companies are technically capable of tracking call activity. So the problem, as it currently stands, is the inefficiencies of the complaint-based structure. Legal authorities don’t act unless they receive a complaint. And the complaints must mount to a point that it justifies the use of their resources to investigate. That leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals exposed to potential fraud before action is taken. This is the basic pattern I see in messaging and in e-mail scams. The criminal leases an IP address and sets up a domain, engages in the fraud, and then cancels the address and the domain in a matter of days. In that short time frame, they may have defrauded people of millions. It is this gap that is the problem. How can this gap be narrowed, if not eliminated?
Narrowing the Gap
I have mentioned this in a previous article, but the first step in narrowing the gap is to better inform the customer regarding the phone number. My recommendation is a score. A customer receives a warning that a call is a scam based on a score that they can read. From a scale of 1 to 5, 1 could be “untraceable” to 5 (in your Contacts, traceable). In between could be factors such as
- a call coming from overseas
- a record of complaints against the phone number
- complaints or desist orders to providers
- the age of the phone number (Would you trust a phone number that has only been registered for one day?).
Another element that should be included in the call’s meta-data is the name of the provider. A user could then use that information to learn more about the provider and lodge a complaint directly with the provider (less ominous than going through the state attorney general). A responsible provider will usually send you a reply thanking you for your information, and will act immediately to investigate and possibly de-activate the number.
Bad actors amongst providers will always be out there. The last option that a user could do is block any calls from a specific provider. This is riskier, but if the provider is a non-mainstream operation and is non-responsive to complaints, you can simply block them. This will block any call coming through that provider. This I have done with my website. I analyze attack activity on the EricN Publication website, gathering information as to the IP address provider. I can block either the IP address or even the entire range of addresses from a specific provider. This has immediately dropped attack activity by 30-50% because most of the attacks were coming through IP addresses managed by a handful of providers. They were all non-responsive to my complaints. Has this blocked legitimate readers? Possibly. But unlikely. Since doing this attacks have dropped 90%.
So why not give telephone customers the same option?
These kind of solutions would eliminate the process of complaint collection and litigation. Abuse the customer? Get cut off. That simple.
Finally, putting all this together, give the customer a hot button. When they feel they are being harassed, they can register the call as spam and it is immediately relayed to a central data collection point owned by the state government. This will give them empirical data, in real time, of fraud activity. This will obviously produce false positives, but actual fraudulent activity will have a large volume of data. State officials can then contact the provider. While providers would generally ignore complaints from a guy like me, I seriously doubt they will ignore a call from a state investigator.
Resources
“Missouri takes its fight against illegal robocalls to the next level,” Missouri Net, by Alisa Nelson, December 8, 2025
Intelliquent
- Intelliquent, founded in 1997, was purchased by a Swedish cloud communications provider, Sinch, in 2021. Based on submitted complaints, traceback techniques were employed to prove that calls had been routed through Intelliquent. Traceback is authorized through the TRACEd Act.
- FTC Complaint in 2022
- FTC Warning in 2022
Bandwidth
- This gets a bit confusing. The Bandwidth website says nothing about an African location, but there is a Bandwidth Cloud Services Group that is clearly African-based (BCS). Located in North Carolina.
- FTC cease and desist order in 2023
Lumen
- Based in Monroe, LA. Nothing on the radar at the FTC. Not positive, but AT&T purchased a “Lumen Technologies” company in August 2025.
Peerless
- Website. Chicago-based
- FTC Cease and Desist letter in 2023
© Copyright 2026 to Eric Niewoehner