question

sean-pearson avatar image
sean-pearson asked Becky-Community_Manager commented

Spam calls out of control

I have been with RingCentral since 2009 and have generally had a positive experience. However, recently (since Sep 18th), I have been receiving about 10 SPAM calls per day on my Toll Free Number from spoofed local numbers (never being used twice) and I was just charged for extra minutes for the first time in about 10 years. Each call lasts from about 2 to 10 minutes, but nobody ever hits an extension or leaves a message and they always show up as missed calls. It seems to be computer driven due to the volume.


Does anyone know what is actually going on here? Who might be doing this and what is their goal? What is the point in someone - or a computer calling my number and staying connected to the auto attendant for 5 to 10 minutes at time. How do I prevent someone from doing this going forward?


The auto attendant is scheduled to cycle 3 times and then hangs up, but this does not prevent the call from lasting up to 10 minutes.


RingCentral tech support is completely useless as far as providing information on this. Any insight would be very much appreciated.


Thank you in advance.

phonespam
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ken-winfield avatar image ken-winfield commented ·

We face the same issue... Our organization has hundreds of toll-free numbers and tens of thousands of DIDs and thus even a small percentage of spam calls is a huge number. It's an incredibly difficult problem to solve as the spammers spoof their CID. Preventing spam requires validating the authenticity of the caller at every level of infrastructure, from the originating endpoint, through their carrier, the local backbone, and the handoff to RC. Some carriers are making decent headway; for example Verizon and their resellers have deployed extensive caller verification systems to prevent spoofing from and to their network.


It would be nice to have some transparency from RingCentral regarding their progress in securing and authenticating all communications on the platform.

**apologies for posting this as Answer, I intended to comment...*

1 Like 1 ·
Becky-Community_Manager avatar image Becky-Community_Manager ♦♦ ken-winfield commented ·

@ken-winfield @sean-pearson
RingCentral implemented Stir/Shaken - an industry-wide framework to prevent caller ID spoofing.
While we test that on inbound calls, not all carriers are playing ball yet. Meaning they're not applying the necessary signatures to calls they originate. We are in the early days of the quest for dealing with this problem.
Right now, the bottom line is that there is no guaranteed solution to guard against spoofed calls.
When you have specific examples, numbers you can provide, please share them with us. We'll dig deeper. Community.Support@RingCentral.com
You can learn more about Stir/Shaken HERE.

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Anirban avatar image Anirban commented ·

I am not sure you will get any good answer or a good solution here because I can see a lot of similar discussion happening around here from a long time:

https://community.ringcentral.com/questions/95530/does-ringcentral-offer-any-help-against-spam-calle.html

https://community.ringcentral.com/questions/28459/ringcentral-spam.html

https://community.ringcentral.com/questions/95657/spam-calls-1.html

You can directly check with community team at community.support@ringcentral.com and they can assist you

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sean-pearson avatar image sean-pearson Anirban commented ·

I've already read these articles (before posting here) and one of them isn't even remotely related to my issue. I need some real help here.

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Jason Hay avatar image Jason Hay sean-pearson commented ·

@sean-pearson exact same issue with my RingCentral account also! Would be great if the @ringcentral team can fix this issue urgently!

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Becky-Community_Manager avatar image Becky-Community_Manager ♦♦ commented ·

@sean-pearson Thanks for sharing this context. I'm going to reach out to the product managers associated with the issue you have described specifically and identify if they have any recommendations.
Hang tough.

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Becky-Community_Manager avatar image Becky-Community_Manager ♦♦ Becky-Community_Manager ♦♦ commented ·

@sean-pearson I heard back from the Product Manager on this issue. We do have a feature that blocks calls to toll-free numbers, but it relies on our system to detect a robocall to begin with. This would generally be labeled as a "suspected robocall" - if you can provide caller IDs of these numbers that you believe are the culprits, we can ask our team that develops our robocalling detection solution to take a closer look.
Please feel free to shoot the Community team an email with any details you are able to collect and we'll be glad to begin that work with the Product Team. Community.Support@RingCentral.com

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sean-pearson avatar image sean-pearson Becky-Community_Manager ♦♦ commented ·

As I stated in the original post, whoever is calling is spoofing local numbers, so this wouldn’t have any effect because the number showing up on caller ID is not the number they’re calling from. And they never spoof the same number so that feature is virtually worthless. It’s like putting up a short wall to keep giants out. It won’t stop the giants, but it might prevent your friends from getting in.

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