Even though spam phone calls have been around well before the era of cellphones, telecom companies haven’t done a whole lot about it until recently. One of the primary hindrances in combating spam is the ability to differentiate a legitimate phone call from a spammy one. The technology appears to be here and T-Mobile wants to put it to the test. The telecom giant is implementing what it calls Caller Verified technology with the Samsung Galaxy Note9.

At the crux of the ‘Caller Verified’ technology lies T-Mobile’s version of the STIR (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) standards. These standards combat illegal caller ID spoofing which makes an incoming call look familiar by hijacking a phone number to match the area code and 3-digit prefix of the person they are targeting. T-Mobile also claims to be the first in the industry to launch caller verification using the STIR/SHAKEN standards.

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Once Note9 owners get the update, any calls on the T-Mobile network that they receive will show a “Caller verified” message on the incoming call screen. The update is already live and you can expect to see it pop up in the coming week. The company also claims that ‘Caller Verified’ will be available on more smartphones later this year, but is yet to say anything about which devices will get it and when.

But, if we’ve learnt anything from history; it’s that scammers always find a way. At this point, it is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole between telecom giants and scammers trying to outwit each other. The loser here, unfortunately, is the end user. A lot of traffic on US-based networks is spam, and it’ll take a lot more than the above feature to get rid of it completely.  But, if all carriers implement the standard across all their devices, we might have a fighting chance after all.

Source: Android Police