What is Robocalling?

Nowadays, almost every person in the world have smartphones in their pocket which can be used to make incoming and outgoing calls, Internet surfing, download and all other tasks. Robocalling deals with calls that are made legal to many charity workers, emergency announcements and election parties but are mostly used for scams and carrying out fraud practices which are somewhat irritating for normal people who are dealing with daily life challenges and now have another task included in their schedule from some years to deal with scammers doing robocalls to steal something from them. "Something" can be banking login credentials, credit/debit card number and CVC, etc are mostly related to money. So, lets get further to know "How does robocalling work for scammers?".

Firstly,

• What is Robocalling?

Robocall is a phone call that uses a computerized autodialer to send a pre-recorded message. These calls have increased in recent years because technology has made it cheap and easy for robocallers to make calls from anywhere in the world while hiding their identities by displaying fake Caller ID information. Many attempts by government organizations seems to fail before spam robocalls. These robocallers are one step ahead of the present laws in the world.

• Why is robocalling increased in recent years?

 The most common reason for increasing robocalls is that they are pretty cheap and easy to make, The computer autodials multiple numbers at a time and the one that is picked up try to steal something from them by introducing themselves as bank manager, Income tax department officer, etc. Technology gives these robocallers a big advantage as these autodialers can make thousands of calls every minute, as mentioned above at very low cost so using this becomes preference for them. 

• What is neighbor spoofing and what is the advantages of neighbor spoofing to illegal robocallers?

Neighbor spoofing is a new strategy in trend with robocallers that shows the receiver a fake number of robocaller that will most likely be made using the receivers first three to four digits that will appear to the receiver coming from colleague, friend or someone they know But these calls are made by robocallers. The advantage that neighbor spoofing gives to robocallers is that the receiver is most likely to receive the call which resembles their number or seems to be from local area thinking that the call might be from someone they know.

• What can be done to avoid illegal robocalls?

Many smartphone has a inbuilt feature to avoid spam calls(calls that are sent to multiple peoples that are unwanted or they have not requested for them) and other facilities in android, apple stores that shows the notification when the call is received searching about the number in its directory but these robocall blockers also fails nowadays when robocallers can easily change their numbers and fool the these robocall blockers. Applying for DND(Do Not Disturb) services also fail identifying these spam calls. 

Solution- This is not a full proof solution against robocallers but one can rely on this to minimize these. AT&T has a free app(Call Protect) that’s designed to block some fraudulent robocalls from reaching you. Users can also manually block any numbers they like and report numbers to help AT&T improve database.

The important caveats to know are that Call Protect is only available to postpaid customers; prepaid customers can’t use it at all. And the “Suspected Spam” feature only works in areas with AT&T HD Voice coverage. Also, the app is unable to block unknown callers altogether.

• Conclusion

Increasing amount of robocall percentage over years has mostly frustrated every user that want a full stop over robocalls but as in 2018 and upcoming years seems quite impossible to stop these robocalls and one quite good solution might be to rely on yourself to ignore these robocalls when they tell you that " Your debit card/ credit card has been blocked tell me your debit card or credit card number and CVC to unblock it". This is the most common phrase presented by them don't fall in this trap ever. If you had any incident related to robocalls tell me in the comments or via e-mail or on my facebook  page. Hopefully robocalls will stop one day.  This is studying blogspot author signing off. 

Cheers.