Every year tens of millions of scam calls target people in the UK. Many scam calls that reach UK mobiles come from international locations posing to be from UK-based numbers for legitimacy.
They are often run by international scam networks for the purposes of fraudulently acquiring personal information, access to devices and, in some cases, bank details from the customer.
The firewall technology from EE uses AI to review calls passing through UK Calling Line Identification (CLI) from other countries and blocks those pretending to be based in the UK, halting scam calls so that they never reach customers.
Chris Howe, customer care change director, said, “We are investing in the latest technology to ensure as many scam calls as possible are blocked before they reach our customers. Everyone should feel confident answering their phone or reading a text message without the fear of potentially getting scammed.
“This new international call blocking technology, combined with the 200 million scam texts blocked from our mobile network, means our customers can count on EE to have the safest network”.
This technology benefits every BT, Plusnet and EE customer but also benefits customers on other networks by detecting all inbound calls from international locations using UK numbers and stopping them from being further forwarded to other networks.