Three UK Blocks More Than 173 Million SPAM Texts in Two Years
Mobile operator Three UK has today revealed that the anti-spam filters on their network have blocked more than 173 million spam texts, equivalent to 10,000 every hour of the day, in the last two years, as part of its efforts to protect customers from rising online fraud – thanks in no small part to their Mavenir platform.
In case anybody has forgotten, Three UK started to implement Mavenir‘s network-level anti-spam filter technology during 2019. The system uses AI learning to automatically filter and detect scam or spam messages, although no system is perfect and some nuisance communications will invariably still reach their customers.
In addition, the announcement also notes that 72,000 calls (i.e. those suspecting of being spam/scams) have been reported to 7726, the free anti-spam reporting service. The number ‘7726’ was chosen because it spells ‘SPAM’ on an alphanumeric phone keypad – that’s a handy way of remembering it.
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Darren Purkis, Chief Financial Officer at Three UK, said:
“The battle against fraud is a constantly evolving one with scammers using increasingly sophisticated methods to defraud people. Blocking these messages represents significant progress in our fight against online criminals and we will continue to invest in people and technology to fight this rapidly evolving problem.”
To further protect customers, Three UK has also sent out millions of messages and alerts to its customers to warn them of the latest scams and provide advice on how to protect themselves, as well as introduced one-click SPAM reporting for Android devices, streamlining and enhancing reporting options for its customers.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
Between Three and Google we are saved from the junk! Google will suggest a text as spam and a phone call. I do always always block and report.
Phone doesn’t even ring for most of them and I only see a missed call in the history that I can report also. Google really has been a big help in filtering out the ones that do slip through.
Having a sim with all 4 major networks, I can tell you that Three definitely has the best anti-spam.
EE seems to receive a huge amount of spam issues. Do they sell your number? hmmm….
Seems 02 is bad for the spam as well tbh, I wonder if both of them are in cahoots with each other. I had to move from Samsung messages to Google messages to filter out the texts i was getting.
I’m with iD and it’s not often i receive a dodgy call or text.
EE on the other hand i agree struggles much more.
Weird. Never had an issue with EE. Get nothing at all
But they let 7 billion text messages through! Without knowing how many were let through, its hard to know if this is news item is a PR success story or failure.
EE say “BIG NUMBER” except it isn’t big when you put it into context. 🙂
I could’ve sworn O2 used Mavenir at some point… They’re supposed to be an industry standard platform for stuff like RCS, which O2 moved over to Google at some point.