BT Block 20.1 Million SCAM and SPAMs from Reaching UK Home Phones
Broadband ISP BT (EE) has this morning announced that their new scam protection service, which is based on Hiya’s technology and was introduced to their IP-based Digital Voice (phone) customers in May 2024, has blocked more than 2.4 million scam calls and almost 17.7 million spam calls since its introduction.
The ‘Enhanced Call Protect‘ feature, which is a free service, follows BT and EE’s decision to start adopting Hiya’s AI-based voice security solutions in January 2023 (here). The tool in question monitors incoming calls and will notify the user of any suspected spam calls. But it also adopts machine learning to improve its scam detection and protection to help tackle the malicious calls it encounters – in one day blocking more than 46,500 scam calls.
According to data from Hiya, UK residents received an average of 3 spam calls per month from January to June this year, with 28% of all unknown calls flagged as spam. This equates to approximately 195 million spam calls per month.
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However, with BT’s service, customers will see a visual warning on their landline phone display, saying, “Nuisance?”, when receiving a potential spam call. They then have a choice to reject or accept an inbound call that is flagged as a spam call. Scam calls are automatically diverted to a customer’s junk voicemail, protecting them from the threat of scammers. Any call from a registered business will have their name displayed to verify it as genuine.
Lucy Baker MBE, BT Consumer’s All-IP Director, said:
“Our top priority is ensuring our customers feel secure and confident when using our services. This new Hiya technology is now integrated with Digital Voice and is proving to be incredibly effective at stopping scam calls. We remain committed to protecting customers during the switch to digital landlines.”
BT has also included some tips to help consumers spot and tackle scam calls.
Tips to avoid scams include:
- If you receive a suspicious call, put the phone down and call back on a trusted number to verify the call
- If you mistakenly give a caller your bank account details, contact your bank immediately
- If you receive a suspicious call, report the call to BT here
- Block any suspicious numbers after you have reported them
Remember:
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- Take a moment to stop and think. Trust your instincts. If it sounds too good to be true or is suspicious, there’s probably a catch
- Don’t stay on the phone unless you’re 100% sure the caller is genuine
- Don’t give away any of your personal details or give anyone access to your computer
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.
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It certainly does work if using with BT Advanced Digital Handsets. I don’t know if it works with handsets plugged into the phone jack on the router though.
I have digital voice with EE, and I’m still getting double figure scams calls a wee. Sometimes 3 or 5 a day.
It does with my BT Smart Hub 2, although I always let them go to my answerphone…wastes a bit more of their time!
Call back a trusted number from a different phone (to prevent landline dialtone scam)
Don’t phone systems now automatically disconnect the line after a few seconds when either party hangs up.
Yes. The BT PSTN terminates calls within a few seconds of the called party being hung up and has done for years following the rise of that particular scam.
Digital Voice is even faster, especially if the DECT handset is used. In the latter case you don’t even need to hang up if you have two phones, as you can make two calls at the same time.
Keep them on the line and play along with the “errors in Windows event viewer” and act like a doddery concerned user, the longer you keep them the less time the have to call so done vulnerable. Report through ico spam page https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/nuisance-calls-and-messages/spam-texts-and-nuisance-calls/
So what about mobile phone customers?
When I was on EE it used to flag up nuisance calls, I’ve just moved to Smarty so maybe not, it hasn’t happened yet.
Many Android phones have had this feature built in for some years.
I assume iPhones do as well.
Richard J Murphy made a video on YouTube about the need for Companies House to better enforce company regulation in the UK and this along with improved scam call protection will help reduce scams.
Why isn’t the regulator acting to identify who is generating these calls, or bringing them into the UK?
Probably not a massive number of perpetrators.
The calls will have passed through a chain of operators on the way here. There’s no way to verify that an originating number is genuine because the operator dropping it off in the UK doesn’t know where it came from, only who passed it to them.
The regulator also has no jurisdiction outside of the UK.
SHAKEN/STIR provides an avenue to clean up that information though. If it isn’t certified as accurate by the originating telco then it could be rewritten or in extreme cases the call could be dropped. If the originating telco is falsely providing certification then you change how you process the call. If the world’s major telcos started blocking your calls or marking them all as scam callers, you might be inclined to get things sorted out.
DKIM is essentially the same thing for emails and it has done a lot to clean up the most obvious attempts at impersonation.
Only 21 million?
So it’s overcharged users like myself that still receive SPAm SPAM SPAm on a daily basis, even though I report to “phishing@bt.com” and receive a delayed response “thank you for reporting”….