A premium, high quality international carrier endeavours to always pass true calling line ID. The importance of this cannot be understated in this era of increased telecom fraud. Voice calls have always attracted hackers, cheats, hoaxers and swindlers. Telephony frauds can range from the use of grey routes and CLID manipulation to Wangiri (one ring) and PBX hacking to stimulate International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF). True CLID helps mitigate telecom fraud.
Why, as a responsible service provider, should you ensure that you always pass true CLID ? Why not give in to the siren song of cheaper, lower cost grey routes? In the end, choosing the Least Cost Route that doesn’t pass true CLID will cost you more and provide lower value.
1) The top line revenue will suffer. If the true CLID is not passed through to the far end customer being called, a large percentage of the calls will not be answered. There is NO revenue generated by unanswered calls ! Think about it, do you personally answer calls from a number you don’t know ? Or when “Unknown” shows up from a blank CLID ? Of course you don’t. Your customers and their friends and family are no different.
2) Grey routes will often spoof the CLID to get around regulatory restrictions. Here India is a classic example. The regulator, TRAI, has set strict guidelines for the rates charged for incoming international calls. Many schemes from fraudsters have set up leaky PBX’s or SIM box fraud schemes in India connected to the internet to take inbound calls from overseas and pass them into the Indian market, changing the CLID to a local Indian number to bypass the true rates. You think you are benefitting from a cheap rate, but the quality is usually sub-standard and many of the calls go unanswered, or then abandoned for poor quality when it is answered.
3) Origin based surcharges are triggered by blank CLID. I wrote about Origin Based Surcharges here, but there are also cases where calls from Canada are not subject to these charges. For example, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey-Turkcell Mobile recently introduced origin based surcharges for calls from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco (not Canada or the USA). If the CLID is blank though, they levy a massive surcharge ! More and more countries, including ones from outside of Europe are levying such origin based surcharges. Not having proper CLID leaves you vulnerable to paying far more than you anticipated.
4) Further to the above, carriers are now doing this; “Also, if a call is sent with what appears to be a valid A-number but is later shown by the terminating network to be a manipulated or modified A-number, we reserve the right to recalculate the billing as per the charges applied by terminating supplier for those calls within 90 days of invoice date of the relevant traffic month.” That means that carriers and countries are actively looking for spoofed CLID and will levy the maximum surcharges accordingly. (ie a spoofed CLID equates to a missing one)
5) The USA has moved to Caller ID authentication and verification using the STIR/SHAKEN protocol. Canada is following suit as the CRTC has asked telecommunications service providers to implement, by September 2020, the STIR/SHAKEN framework which is a caller ID authentication and verification measure. It aims to certify the extent to which a given caller’s identity can be trusted. This will empower Canadians to determine which calls are authenticated, thus reducing the frequency and impact of caller ID spoofing on consumers. As a service provider you will need to ensure valid, trusted CLID for all calls within Canada and the USA by September 2020.
The evidence is overwhelming . Ensure that you send true CLID each and every call. Choose a carrier for your international traffic termination that passes true CLID. Avoid cheap, poor quality grey routes ; the new LCR stands for Least Corrupt Routing !
