Caller IDs are a useful thing. Apart from directly detecting and further blocking various intrusive callers, they also help in many everyday situations, for example, when you are looking for a contractor for a one-time job through some online platform. You save a person’s number and immediately see what other people think about him, what kind of experience they had with him.
Among the services that perform these functions there are also some dubious ones, such as GetContact, which has enjoyed great popularity in recent years: they request too many permissions and accesses.
Anyone can leave a “black mark” on you. But to get it removed, you will have to prove that you are not a drug dealer.
There are also more reliable ones: these services are provided by mobile operators, banks and information security companies such as Kaspersky Lab. They all scan your phone book and then analyse incoming calls in real time. They flag unknown numbers based on information from databases and immediately block guaranteed malicious numbers.
The disadvantage of such services is derived from their advantages. Anyone can mark a number as spam or fraudulent.
And this is what user Svetlana said on the social network: “A bad person put my phone in spam about a year ago. At first it ended up in MTS antispam, which is why a key colleague for me did not accept my calls. It’s been a long time, but you didn’t notice that your number is blacklisted. They just leave you and you think, for example, that the person is busy, until you ask them directly: “Why do you keep leaving me?”
Statistics from the Kaspersky Who Calls app, which classifies incoming calls. I don’t want the contact I need to end up in the spam category. Photo: diario.tinkoff.ru
According to the user, she started to investigate, reached MTS and there her number was deleted from the database. But the misfortunes did not end there.
“A few days ago it turned out that I was considered a spam client by Sber, whose client I have been for quite some time with a very clear track record and a transparent and regular monthly salary turnover. It also happened by chance,” Svetlana continues.
As a result, he notes, “anyone can put a tag on you in the toilets, even if you are a thrice-decent citizen, and to get it off you will have to prove that you are not a drug dealer.”
“To make a verdict on a number, various sources are used, including user feedback. The decision is made by algorithms based on a combination of factors without the participation of people. The chances of an ordinary user getting into the spammers database are minimal to zero, but it is possible,” said Andrey Biychuk, director of the MTS Defender product.
Roskomnadzor explained to RG that the procedure for entering numbers into spam databases and excluding them from them is not regulated. “The decision to include a number in such a database is made by the telecom operator. The basis for this can be an analysis of subscriber activity conducted by the telecom operator, information received by operators of banks or Internet platforms (for example, Yandex), or complaints from citizens,” the department said.
They noted that in order to be excluded from the spam database, the subscriber must contact the operator with whom the service provision contract was concluded. This can be done through your personal account on the operator’s website or by contacting technical support.
“After reviewing the application and agreeing with the initiator to add the number to the spam database (bank, Yandex, marketplaces, etc.), the operator makes a decision to exclude the number from the said database,” Roskomnadzor said.
There is no procedure for “whitening” a number, explained Eldar Murtazin, a leading analyst at Mobile Research Group. However, he believes that the problem as such does not exist today. Virtual capacities and number pools are used for calls.
“It is extremely rare that numbers that are in use end up there. Today there is no exchange of databases between operators. Each one collects its own database, because that is the main value – the service they can provide to subscribers. Except that “Beeline is trying to cooperate with all banks and with Kaspersky Lab and asks to change data, but this is the exception rather than the rule in our market,” Murtazin said.
However, as the personal experience of an RG observer shows, the problem exists and goes beyond mobile numbers. When I tried to register with one of the government agencies, I was never able to receive an SMS with a confirmation code. Communication with the department’s technical support specialists showed that the codes sent by the service they use do not go through at least two of the four telecom operators, apparently being marked by the system as spam. And how to solve this problem remains an open question.
