GATINEAU – Bell Canada has asked the CRTC for permission to conduct a 90-day test this fall where it will block verified, known scam calls “received or transmitted from, to, or over our networks.”
Blocking fraud calls on the network level is something the CRTC has demanded of Canadian carriers, with a deadline of December 18th this year, but this new application asks for a step forward from what the CRTC has demanded.
The abridged application on the public file is light on details on how the calls will be identified and blocked, for obvious reasons. “As always, the challenge is to balance the significant risk of signaling to bad actors our detection mechanisms and thereby providing a 'how to' road map that could be used to thwart this proposed anti-nuisance calling proposal against the need to provide sufficient notice of the proposal to potentially impacted parties,” reads the Bell Part 1 application which has several passages blocked from public consumption but have been filed in confidence with the CRTC.
The CRTC policy decision (Compliance and Enforcement and Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2018-484) from December 2018 called for the implementation of universal network-level blocking of calls with blatantly illegitimate caller identification.
Bell’s application says it is already prepared for this. “In anticipation of this requirement, we have reconfigured our SS7 networks and deployed blocking tools at our consolidated SS7 gateways and international gateways.” SS7 gateways are network devices which facilitate the interface between voice-over-IP signals and traditional telephony signals.
However, the company wants to go further and use artificial intelligence to build on the universal network blocking tools to further clamp down on fraudulent or scam calls which happen to ride anywhere on its networks. The application notes fraudsters are already changing their practices to conform to the CRTC’s demand that legitimate carriers block obviously spoofed numbers, such as those with very lengthy numbers shown in caller IDs, or numbers which can’t be dialed (like 000-000-0000).
“We believe we can build upon the above blocking tools and combine them with artificial intelligence and machine learning to potentially block additional types of fraudulent and scam nuisance calling.” – Bell Canada
“(W)e believe we can build upon the above blocking tools and combine them with artificial intelligence and machine learning to potentially block additional types of fraudulent and scam nuisance calling,” says the Bell application. The document estimates the number of scam calls which would be blocked on Bell’s networks under CETRP 2018-484, but goes further to note the company has identified a number of other “verified fraud calls” which now use conforming caller ID and would not be blocked under the CRTC’s policy set out in December.
It’s those calls Bell is asking to block with this test, and not just ones terminated on Bell networks either. It’s asking to “conduct a trial to block Verified Fraud Calls received or transmitted from, to, or over our networks,” reads the application.
While Bell filed the above counts of scam calls in confidence with the Commission, the number of them must be large if it wants to take this extra step.
The application then goes on to describe the proposed process, but is all filed in confidence. “Given the nature of the mechanism explained above,” reads the application, “this blocking would impact all calls that transit or terminate on our network (i.e., even a call that originates internationally and is destined for another local exchange carrier (LEC) that is not our affiliate, but for which an interexchange carrier delivers the call to us to transit for them to that LEC, would be blocked based on the above criteria).”
Bell filed the request on July 24th (it was posted to the CRTC website July 29th) and wants to begin the fraud call blocking test in September or October. The deadline for interested parties to file an intervention is August 28th.
