Disconnected: How Innovation in Telecoms Can Disrupt Scam Outreach

Everyone has received fraudulent text messages or phone calls, ranging from government impersonation to IT support texts to “wrong number” outreach that can evolve into elaborate investment scams. Americans receive an average of 377 scam attempts a year, and surveys from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance show that text/SMS is the most reported method of outreach, followed by email and phone calls. Artificial intelligence and automation allow for increasingly professionalized scam operations to rapidly scale and adapt outreach, increasing both the frequency and sophistication of attempts, as well as consumer fatigue and mistrust of SMS communications and unexpected phone calls. Join us for a discussion about how telecommunications service providers can respond by blocking scam outreach before it reaches consumers, such as by using better technologies to improve the identification of spoofed calls, running AI analysis directly on the line to identify scams in action, and implementing security protocols such as enhanced due diligence. This event is the first in a series of dialogues sponsored by Google on how innovative technical responses and improved industry best practices can help stem the scourge of online scams.