The Telemarketing It’s been around for decades and each of us receives calls almost daily from call center operators offering new products or services for sale or subscription. Energy, telephone and insurance were the first sectors to turn to call centers, but today everything is sold by phone, including tap water purifiers. While it can be annoying, there is nothing illegal in any of this as long as the call center operator is working properly.
The recent trend in telemarketing, also underway in Italy for a few years, opens up to even more alarming scenarios: we are talking about the so-called “robocall”, that is, automated calls made through software, which allow companies to do telemarketing without going Through a call center operator. In the United States it is already widespread.
According to Cnet estimates, in the first five months of 2021, Americans received nearly 22 million robocall calls and by the end of the year this number will rise to 52 million.
Problem robocall is that making it costs very little and this, along with techniques plagiarism From the phone number, it can become a great technique to scam thousands of phone scams every year. For this reason, in the United States, as of July 1, phone companies have been required by the government and the Federal Communications Commission to use the new system. move / shake To filter calls from masked numbers.
How does the Stir/Shaken system work?
The main problem with phone scams, both those that are carried out by and through the operator robocall, is that whoever receives the call displays a file A phone number that is different from the real number who is calling. This practice is called “spoofing” and consists of sending identification data to the telephone operator (the so-called “Caller ID‘) is intentionally incorrect, which is then passed to the recipient.
Thus, anyone who receives the call, even if they understand that it is scam attempt It has no way to track who is on the other side of the phone. The Stir/Shaken system was created specifically to put an end to this phenomenon.
“Stir” stands for “Secure Phone Identity Reconsideration” and “Shaken” means “signature-based processing of confirmed information using tokens” (“token”). flip over Is the technical protocol e shook It is the framework in which calls can be tracked thanks to the use of a new one Database.
The idea behind Stir/Shaken is to “sign” the caller ID, so that the operator of the receiver can know (and communicate with its user) if the Identity Verified. In perspective, it is also possible to automatically block all calls from an unverified ID. Verified identifiers are included in the telephone operators’ databases, which are accessible to all operators in order to be able to cross-verify even when the caller and receiver are not customers of the same operator.
If the whole system works, so will it فسيكون plagiarism Caller ID is more difficult: the caller sees the fake number, but knows that the caller ID is not verified.
Noise/vibration is mandatory in USA
Stir/Shaken certification is made mandatory for all US telephone operators starting July 1, 2021, through the ‘Tracking Act’: Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act for the Abuse of Automated Telephone Calls. This is a regulation issued in December 2019 by then-President of the United States Donald Trump, which authorized the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set the technical rules for the mandatory enforcement of Stir/Shaken.
All US phone companies have adapted to the legislation and the system is fully operational, although it is still too early to say whether it will be effective at all. Reduce phone scams and calls robocall. Some companies, by the way, offered Stir/Shaken even before they were forced to do so, some for free and some for a fee.
Italian mode
In Italy, at the moment, there is no similar system to the Stir / Shaken. The only thing that phone users can do to reduce the number of unwanted calls from call centers is to use Public Register of Objections, a service run by the Ministry of Economic Development, which is in fact a database of phone numbers.
Every citizen can request that his number be registered in the Public Registry of Objections for Do not contact any call center. However, through the registry, it is not possible to choose who is contacted and who is not contacted, moreover, it is possible to register Landline numbers onlyNot even cell phone numbers.
The Law 5/2018 He expanded the registry to include mobile phones as well, creating the so-called “extended registry” that was not in operation three years after the law that created it: in fact, the implementing regulations are missing, currently awaiting approval by the Cabinet and subsequent signature to the President of the Republic.