T-Mobile protects its customers from scam calls 30% better than its rival carriers

Tired of getting spam calls from automobile extended warranty companies? Even if you were to decide not to pick up the phone unless an incoming call showed a familiar phone number, your bound to still end up wasting your time dealing with spam and scam calls. Why? Because spammers and scammers manipulate the phone numbers they use on outgoing calls so that the area code and the first three numbers come close to matching the area code and the first three numbers belonging to the phone number of the victim. This is called numbers spoofing and T-Mobile uses STIR/SHAKEN to fight against it.

Today, the nation's second largest carrier announced its next Scam-Shield Un-carrier milestone that will help stop T-Mobile customers from being victimized by scammers and spammers. T-Mobile is now the first and only U.S. wireless carrier using STIR/SHAKEN with all major U.S. stateside wireless firms. This is happening three months ahead of the FCC's June 2021 deadline that the others will have to adhere to. As T-Mobile stated in Thursday's press release, "T-Mobile customers can rest assured that when a call comes in from any of the major carriers, or any of several other smaller network providers, to T-Mobile’s network (or vice versa), the companies will be able (to) authenticate it’s coming from the phone number displayed in Caller ID and has not been spoofed. This makes Caller ID even stronger in the fight against scam and robocalls, and with Scam-Shield, all T-Mobile, Metro by T-Mobile and Sprint brand individuals, families and small business get free Caller ID — so for the millions of businesses and people not your contacts, if we know who’s calling, you’ll know who is calling."

T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert revealed how many scam calls its customers have received since it started to protect customers from scammers. Sievert said, "T-Mobile was first to implement number verification in 2019 because protecting customers against scammers and spammers is one of the most important things we can do as an industry. To date, T-Mobile has protected over 80 million customers from more than 33 billion suspect calls – and counting. With the combination of Number Verification, free Caller ID and the scam blocking tools in Scam Shield, and by working with network providers of all sizes, we are providing the industry’s most comprehensive scam and spam protection for free to all our customers and working every day to make scammers jobs impossible."

Last year, T-Mobile introduced Scam-Shield to protect customers from scams and robocalls. It protects T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile customers by giving them free and automatic scam call warnings, free Caller ID, and the ability to block scam calls. T-Mobile's network is said to be 30% better at finding scam calls than its rivals. And instead of having to pay $2.99 per line per month, Sprint customers get free identification and blocking with the Call Screener app.

T-Mobile says that scam calls are returning to pre-pandemic levels. On a daily basis, T-Mobile is handling more than 237 million calls from numbers verified by STIR/SHAKEN. In the presser, T-Mobile gets a little zinger in on the 5G capabilities of its rivals. The carrier says, "Now with fifteen cross-network partnerships and all major carriers working with T-Mobile, even the major carriers with smaller 5G networks (which is all of them), the company is first to deliver industry-wide STIR/SHAKEN protection for its customers. The companies that T-Mobile is working with using STIR/SHAKEN are AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum Voice from Charter Communications, US Cellular, Verizon Wireless, Altice USA, Bandwidth, Brightlink, Clear Rate, Google Fi, Inteliquent, Intrado, Magicjack, Peerless, and Twilio. With these partnerships, T-Mobile now authenticates calls with wireless and network providers that represent a whopping 98% of wireless customers in the U.S.

Implementing STIR/SHAKEN is important since being able to verify the phone number of an incoming call allows T-Mobile and Metro customers to have the piece of mind of knowing that their incoming calls are not being spoofed and are legitimate. As T-Mobile Noted on Thursday, "With free Caller ID for customers, and Number Verification broadly implemented, the Un-carrier is now providing customers with the best ability to decide which calls to answer…or block completely."