In today’s rapidly evolving telecommunications landscape, protecting subscribers from spam calls is more critical than ever. Malicious callers constantly refine their tactics, targeting consumers and evading detection. Carriers need spam protection systems that go beyond identifying “bad” numbers to fully combat spam tactics.
Hiya continuously innovates to better understand the behaviors of spam callers and craft additional defenses against them. Our latest advancement involves modeling phone number “maturity” — diving far beyond a number’s age alone to understand additional characteristics showing how well-established a caller truly is.
This enhancement to Hiya’s Adaptive AI spam protection system provides carriers with superior defense against evasive spam tactics, including number rotation. Automatically included for all carriers, this innovation demonstrates Hiya’s commitment to continuous improvement.
The problem
Spam callers constantly evolve to bypass detection, with tactics like number rotation (where flagged numbers are quickly replaced with new ones). This affects:
- Consumers, who receive more unwanted calls and lose trust in phone communications.
- Legitimate businesses, who struggle to connect with customers frustrated by the spam volume.
Hiya’s data shows that 18% of all reported spam calls in the US now originate from numbers with minimal calling history. But identifying which new numbers are threats is complex.
While bad actors exploit new numbers, not all new numbers are harmful. Defining what constitutes a “new” number is also ambiguous. A phone number that’s made only 5 calls can indicate vastly different things depending on the context. Maybe it’s a new, local business making a small but steady volume of calls — or maybe it’s a spam caller just starting a new campaign.
An effective solution must differentiate between a variety of calling patterns that indicate how mature or established a phone number really is. It can’t oversimplify to just “new” versus “not new” numbers; it needs to understand nuances and also provide legitimate actors with a quick path to building trust.
Hiya’s approach
As long as spam labels have been in place, spammers have sought ways to evade them. Hiya has been monitoring and deepening our understanding of these evasion tactics for just as long.
The result is a sophisticated system of number maturity modeling — the product of many years of iteration and fine-tuning.
We first began with basic defenses like flagging new and low-call-volume numbers. But while that was an important starting point, it wasn’t the destination. As we continued to experiment and refine, our system got better and better at spotting the differences between:
- Spammers using rotated numbers
- Enterprises with large call volumes
- Small businesses with lower call activity
- Personal lines with occasional usage
Today, our system can understand the nuances of low-volume callers, far beyond just the age of a number. Other providers may be content to consider all low-volume callers as high risk — or worse, ignore the threat of number rotation entirely. For Hiya, that’s not enough.
We are always looking to understand spammers with ever greater precision — that’s the only way to beat them. That’s why we’ll also continue to improve our approach to number maturity modeling to keep a step ahead of bad actors.
What is phone number maturity modeling?
Hiya’s phone number maturity modeling looks at how established a phone number truly is — not just its age or call volume. It does this by analyzing multiple factors such as age, activity, and calling patterns. Instead of oversimplifying to single isolated metrics, it considers the whole picture. It’s the result of data collection and fine-tuning of models over many years.
This system is the industry’s only intelligent approach to phone number maturity. It detects calls from high-risk “immature” numbers without confusing them with more trustworthy callers such as a small business with a low call volume.
Why it matters to carriers
Number rotation remains a significant challenge for carriers.
Hiya’s unique system of modeling phone number maturity is part of our overall approach to spam protection. It joins other defenses against number rotation, such as Enterprise Caller Scoring, to offer the most precise spam detection system in the industry.
Maturity modeling is a powerful addition to Hiya’s defenses against number rotation, and has helped detect 2.6 billion spam calls so far.
Benefits of Hiya’s phone number maturity modeling
- Unmatched accuracy: Industry-leading spam detection with high flag rates and minimal false positives.
- Defeats number rotation: Adapts to detect new spammer tactics, keeping your subscribers protected.
- Supports legitimate callers: Helps responsible businesses quickly establish trust, enhancing customer experience.
Why choose Hiya?
Hiya’s Adaptive AI doesn’t just scratch the surface — it’s a self-learning system that evolves to address emerging threats. With this capability, carriers can offer their subscribers the highest level of protection on the voice channel, ensuring unwanted calls are blocked while wanted calls connect.
Ready to take your spam protection to the next level? Partner with Hiya today and experience the difference of truly innovative spam analytics.
For more on number rotation and our advanced spam protection, visit our blog or read our press release.
