Spam or Scam Likely Phone Numbers

What is a spam call?

A spam call is a call made from a number that has been flagged as suspicious by any of the carriers involved, or a call originating from a phone number that the carrier cannot identify. Customers may see their outbound calls display as "Spam," "Spam Likely," "Scam Likely," etc., to recipients in their caller ID. Calls may even be blocked altogether.

Why does spam flagging or call blocking exist:

Spam flagging aims to protect consumers against:

- Unidentified calls
- Robocalling: high-volume, short-duration calls originating from a single number
- Illegal Calls
- Unwanted Calls

As such, regulators and major phone carriers have implemented protective actions to help reduce the occurrence of robocalling, illegal calls, unwanted calls, and calls made from unidentified phone numbers.

Some reasons your number could be blocked or flagged as spam are:

- If your calls are being blocked to T-Mobile devices, you need to register your phone number with FirstOrion, a free service that T-Mobile uses to identify calls from verified phone numbers. If you are not registered with FirstOrion, this is the most important thing you can do to fix this issue and only takes a few minutes.
- Your phone number is not registered with Hiya, a free service just like FirstOrion, used by AT&T to identify calls from verified phone numbers.
- Consumers may have reported your phone number to their telecom carriers, resulting in your phone number being flagged as spam. This is unlikely, but you can fill out a form to have your phone number removed from this list here: https://reportarobocall.com/trf/

How Ringy Can Help:

Ringy is not able to alert you when your number might possibly be displaying as “spam likely” or something similar. However, we can provide you with best practices to follow to help avoid this from happening.

To start, you should create a Standard Business Profile. Doing so will register your phone numbers with SHAKEN/STIR, which will give your outbound calls the highest SHAKEN/STIR attestation. You can do this by navigating to the Phone Setup page and selecting the Business Profile tab. Please review this article for more information on registering: https://www.ringy.com/knowledge/business-profile-tab

Next, register your phone numbers with FirstOrion so T-Mobile knows who you are. Registering is free and easy, and you can do so here: https://portal.firstorion.com/app/landing/#/signup.

After registering your phone numbers with FirstOrion, you should then register your phone numbers with Hiya so that AT&T knows who you are. Like FirstOrion, Hiya is free of charge and makes it easy to register. You can register with Hiya here: https://hiyahelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new .

Just like Hiya and FirstOrion, here is the Verizon registration option, which is free and easy to register with: https://www.voicespamfeedback.com/vsf/

Please note, if you swap out your Ringy phone numbers, you will need to update these sites. Once you register your phone numbers with FirstOrion and Hiya, please wait 1-3 days before verifying your phone numbers no longer show as spam likely.

Behaviors that may increase spam flagging:

- High volume: Companies that make over 20,000+ calls per month with very low answer rates are generally labeled high volume and may be flagged automatically
- High volume short calls: Typically under 50 seconds
- High volume of unanswered calls

Key takeaways:

Create or join a standard business profile within Ringy, and make sure you register with FirstOrion and Hiya. This is the biggest thing you can do so your phone calls don’t show as “spam likely” no matter what platform you use.