Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

This article seemed to be one that we needed to post separately rather than include it in the weekly “U News.” Why? It deals with a potential solution to deal with those pesky robocalls.

According to this article in WRAL TechWire, researchers at North Carolina State  University (NC State) have developed an automated system capable of analyzing the content of these unsolicited calls to shed light on both the scope of the problem and the type of scams being perpetuated by robocalls. Called SnorCall, the tool is designed to help regulators, phone carriers and other stakeholders better understand and monitor robocall trends – and take action against related criminal activity.

“Although telephone service providers, regulators and researchers have access to call metadata – such as the number being called and the length of the call – they do not have tools to investigate what is being said on robocalls at the vast scale required,” says Brad Reaves, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NC State.

SnorCall essentially records all robocalls received on monitored phone lines. It bundles together robocalls that use the same audio, reducing the number of robocalls whose content needs to be analyzed by around an order of magnitude. These recorded robocalls are then transcribed and analyzed by a machine learning framework called Snorkel that can be used to characterize each call.

“Scammers can fake where a robocall is coming from, but they can’t fake the number they want their victims to call,” Reaves says. “And about 45 percent of the robocalls we analyzed did include this ‘call-back number’ strategy. By extracting those call-back numbers, SnorCall gives regulators or law enforcement something to work with. They can determine which phone service providers issued those numbers and then identify who opened those accounts.”

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