T-Mobile beefs up its anti-spam arsenal with Caller Verified
Caller Verified is currently available on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, with more phones coming later.
T-Mobile is rolling out a new tool to prevent spam calls.
It's not just you, spam calls have become way more prevalent in recent years. It's even estimated that almost half of US mobile phone calls in 2019 will be spam.
T-Mobile plans to help people fight spam by rolling out its caller verification technology. On Thursday, T-Mobile said it's launching a feature called Caller Verified. Right now the feature is only available on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 (you need the latest software update to use it), but T-Mobile says it'll come to more phones "later this year."
With the new tool, T-Mobile's network will mark incoming calls with "Call Verified" when the company thinks the call is "authentic and not intercepted by scammers," the carrier said in a release. T-Mobile says the feature uses the STIR/SHAKEN standards recommended by the Federal Communications Commission to spot authentic calls.
T-Mobile is the first company to apply the STIR/SHAKEN standards, so you'll only see "Call Verified" if the call is coming from another T-Mobile customer. The company says that Call Verified will work across networks if other carriers start using the SHAKEN/STIR standards too.
Caller Verified is an effort to fight caller ID spoofing, aka when scammers temporarily highjack a phone number that matches the area code and first three digits of the person they're calling, to make you think it could be someone you know.
In November, T-Mobile reported that it had blocked over 1 billion spam calls over the past 18 months.
