Telstra Is Blocking Up To 500,000 Scam Calls A Day Thanks To New Technology

No one likes a scam caller. Whether it's in the middle of dinner or while you're having an argument with your partner, a scam call can strike at the worst time and leave you fuming.

But if you're a Telstra customer, this would probably be a thing of the past, hopefully.

The telco brought in a new filtering technology back in May last year and has revealed it has become a massive defence technique in the fight against scammers.

The DNS technology is so good that they've been blocking as many as 500,000 calls a day.

It specifically targets botnets, trojans, and other sorts of malware. It's been updated to even stop phishing text messages that claim to be from government services.

Scammers have managed to nab $48 million from Aussies last year, so it's a pretty big issue.

Telstra's CEO, Andrew Penn, said in a statement: "We are doing this to protect our customers and their livelihoods because we know that we can have a significant impact by taking proactive action at a network level.

"Blocking scam calls is no mean feat. Our Networks team has built a smart platform that enables us to monitor inbound calls on our network that have suspicious characteristics, and block them before they can ever reach our customers.

"We were already blocking around 1 million calls per month using a manual process, so the automation is a huge boon to our capabilities.

"Scammers use a range of methods and some of the more popular types at the moment include 'wangiri' or one-ring scams, and spoofed number calls either pretending to be a legitimate service (like the ATO) or a random number entirely."

The telco reckons they're blocking up to 6.5 million scam attempts every month now that they've updated their system to be automatic instead of manual.

Imagine being the person who was previously hired to monitor all that scamming.

But Telstra wants to increase this rate with each advancement in technology and won't rest until all scammers are kept out.

"Our efforts will always need to evolve to target new, creative tactics that scammers will use so no technology platform will ever stop scam calls entirely. Customers should always remain vigilant," Mr Penn said.

"If you think you are receiving a scam call, our simple advice is: hang up."

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: Australia

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie is a Trending Journalist at LADbible. His first job was as a newsreader and journalist at the award winning Sydney radio station, Macquarie Radio. He was solely responsible for the content broadcast on multiple stations across Australia when the MH17, Germanwings and AirAsia disasters unfolded. Stewart has covered the conflict in Syria for LADbible, interviewing a doctor on the front line, and has contributed to the hugely successful UOKM8 campaign.

@stewartperrie