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The experience of receiving myriad unwanted phone calls, many of which are scams with varying levels of sophistication, is something all Australians are becoming increasingly familiar with.
They come at all times of the day and night and, more often than not, from listed numbers to give an air of credibility and make you think momentarily that it must be someone genuine calling because wouldn’t a scammer go private? Yet almost as soon as one of these numbers has been blocked, another appears.
So why can’t we seem to stop these calls polluting our phones? While it is probably impossible to get rid of them entirely, as with any kind of scam, that doesn’t mean we can’t effectively eliminate most of them.
Consider how scam calls occur. Usually originating from overseas call centres, scammers use technology that allows them to change or spoof the number they are calling from to an Australian one. For example, if a scammer aims to pose as a member of the Australian Federal Police to pressure you into paying a bogus fine, the scam becomes a little more believable to the recipient if the number on their screen seems to originate from a genuine AFP number.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the regulator of the telecommunications system, developed an action plan in 2019 to prevent this type of abuse, which essentially relies on telcos to act as middle men by identifying phone numbers that have been illegitimately spoofed and blocking the call.
Both ACMA and Australian telcos have been quick to claim how successful this plan has been, noting millions of calls have been blocked before reaching Australian customers. But from a user perspective, the number of blocked calls is of little interest if it is dwarfed by the number of calls that get through, which according to ACMA data is in the billions.
The systems to protect us from scam calls could be better, and easily so. Contrasting the Australian government’s approach to that of the United States, a stark difference can be found.
Since June 2023, US carriers have been required to validate that a caller is legitimate before the call is passed onto its customers using a mandated tech solution called STIR-SHAKEN (a contrived acronym generated by engineers to sound like James Bond). In Australia, despite ACMA’s plan advocating for the use of the STIR-SHAKEN, no regulatory or legal steps have been taken to date to progress this.
The absence of effective technology and a drop in scammer targets across the US invariably makes us a bigger target because it is easier to call unsuspecting Australians, and we are no closer to implementing this improved protection.
A major barrier in implementing STIR-SHAKEN here is what has diplomatically been referred to as “restricted application presently in Australia”. Translated: the technology is not applicable to our pre-NBN landline telephones.
As of September 2023, only 300,000 Australians were still using legacy telephone lines compared with over 20 million mobile phone users. That’s a mere 1.5 per cent of the population that can’t be protected by STIR-SHAKEN.
Yet ACMA’s belief appears to be that if everyone can’t have it, none of us can. Meanwhile, the remaining 98.5 per cent of us have to lump it and continue being bombarded with scam calls, all while knowing the technology to stop most of these exists.
The suggestion isn’t that legacy lines should be disregarded, but the logic of protecting no one because a remarkably small minority cannot be covered by the STIR-SHAKEN technology defies reason.
Of course, this technology is not a silver bullet. Scammers will always find a way around measures, even sophisticated ones. But this kind of technology would make it all the harder and, importantly, costlier, for the scammers to reach Australians. Surely, that’s a sound investment.
Hugh Bradlow is an emeritus professor of computer engineering at the University of Wollongong and former chief technology officer at Telstra.
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