Urian Buenconsejo Tech 02.16.2021 15:Feb PM EST

Telstra Automated Scam Blocking Blocks Half a Million Calls a Day: Scams Cost Australians AU$48 in 2020

Telstra noted that it is now blocking about 6.5 million suspected scam calls in a single month! This is around 500,000 scam calls a day! The company noted that this was thanks to automating the previous manual process that sat at a whopping 1 million scam calls per month.

Telstra Clean Pipes program

According to the story by ZDNet, the new system that Telstra reportedly built in-house now forms the third leg of the company's Cleaner Pipes program. Back in May, the company now kicked off with its DNS filtering in order to fight against trojans, botnets, as well as some other malware types. This also extended to blocking some phishing text messages all purporting to be from either Centrelink or myGov before they had hit the phones of their customers.

The CEO, Mr. Andy Penn wrote in a particular blog post that scams calls are not just annoying, but they have also caused a real financial impact on Australians in general and are also estimated to have cost some ordinary Australians about AU$48 million or over $37 million USD in 2020. He then noted that for those thinking they are receiving a particular scam call, the simple thing to do would be to hang up and avoid the scammers altogether.

How scams function

Penn noted that the company would only call its customers between the hours of 9am all the way up to 8pm on weekdays and from 10am up to 3pm on Saturdays. However, there would never be calls on Sundays. The exception towards this, as noted by the president is when the user has an unpaid account or even a customer-initiated inquiry with the respect to a particular order, fault, or even complaint.

It was also noted that they will respect the customers' wishes and even terminate the call for those that say no and that the company won't ever repeatedly call those that won't answer. These were noted as hallmarks of certain scam calls. Penn noted that in the future where scam calls of that particular type are now effectively ring-fenced as well as eliminated from the network.

Telstra revenue fall 10%

It was also noted that it will also take more innovation and investment as well as continued support coming from the government, however, they have an ambition to be able to make these kinds of different changes to continue to improve the total level of trust that the Australians have in their own phones. Last week, Telstra has also reported a challenging first half of the known fiscal year that it had seen double-digit drops in both the earnings and revenue before the interest, the income tax, expense, amortization, depreciation, and consequently, it has also revised its own guidance downwards. For the very first half of December 31, the company noted that it saw revenue fall down 10% to AU$12 billion.