Spam calls are at a record high.
The reality is, scam calling is a lucrative business and as long as it continues to be, people will find ways to work around the system to make these calls while skirting legal repercussions. Advancements in technology have made it so that these calls can be made from all over the world.
As scammers and robo calling businesses work to protect their income by finding ways around spam blockers, carriers, app creators and smart phone producers have been working tirelessly to protect consumers by closing vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately, legitimate businesses who need to make frequent outbound calls to their prospects or customers are getting caught in the crossfire. In much the same way that legitimate emails can sometimes end up in your spam folder, calls from legitimate businesses are accidentally being filtered out or flagged by well intended systems meant to protect the consumer.
The Federal Communications Commission responded by introducing Caller ID Authentication which was required to be implemented by all carriers using the STIR/SHAKEN framework (or an equivalently acceptable solution) by June 30, 2021. This is intended to provide a common framework for carriers to communicate to each other whether calls are from legitimate businesses or not.
Given time, we expect STIR/SHAKEN to help mitigate erroneously flagged calls, but we have yet to see how this authentication method will be factored into the hundreds of different spam prevention systems (apps, smartphone software, etc) which all use different secret recipes or formulas in detecting spam.