Nobody likes spam calls. Unwanted, unsolicited calls from companies or scammers are a time-wasting annoyance for anybody, but for your Ringba numbers they're especially bad since they waste your money in addition to your time.
Fortunately, Ringba offers a variety of solutions to help you stop spam calls before they arrive. Read on for ideas on how to stop spam calls based on your situation.
This article contains the following sections:
- Stopping Spam Calls Across Campaigns
- Stopping Spam Calls from One Area Code
- Stopping Repeated Calls from the Same Number
- Stopping Spam Calls to One Number
- Stopping Spam Calls Attacking One Landing Page
Stopping Spam Calls Across Campaigns
If you are getting spam calls randomly across all your campaigns, you might be the victim of robo-dialers. Robo-dialers use computers to dial large quantities of numbers and hope someone picks up.
Ringba has a few tools you can use to make it harder for robo-dialers to connect to your numbers:
Stir/shaken attestation
Stir/shaken attestation can help thwart robo-dialers. Stir/shaken attestation is a technology standard developed by industry experts to help with exactly this problem. Each call you receive has an attestation level—A, B, or C—that indicates how much you can trust the caller to be using the number they're calling from legitimately.
You can configure the account stir/shaken attestation setting on a campaign-by-campaign basis. These controls appear in the General Information section of your campaign.
If you do not currently require stir/shaken attestation, you could try turning it on for select campaigns to see if it helps with spam calls. If you already require stir/shaken attestation, you could try increasing your requirement.
Important: If you increase your stir/shaken attestation too much, you could accidentally reject legitimate calls. As you experiment with this setting, monitor your campaigns' revenue to make sure the changes are saving you money.
Randomized call flows
Robo-dialers thrive on consistency, so injecting some variability into the experience of calling you makes their job harder. Call flows let you define the experience of calling you, and you can make a randomized call flow using a Splitter Node.
The primary use case for the splitter node is to set up an A/B test, but you can also use it to require a percentage of your callers to press a key to continue. By asking only some of your callers to press a key, you avoid bothering all your callers, but you also train the robo-dialers that your phone number is not worth dialing.
If you set up this solution, you set up all the branches of the splitter node go to the same dial node. See the Call Flows article for step-by-step instructions of how to use this tool.
Note: Randomized call flows won't work for RTB calls.
SIP numbers with Ringba RTB
Ringba works with traditional phone numbers ("direct inward dialing" or "DID" numbers) or dynamic numbers ("session-initiated protocol" or "SIP" numbers). Using SIP numbers for the ring tree targets (RTTs) you use in real-time bidding (RTB) setup can help cut down on spam connections.
In general, SIP numbers are better. SIP numbers negotiate call connections faster than DID numbers, resulting in improvements in connection time. But more importantly for reducing spam calls, if you connect over SIP during RTB, there is a 1:1 relationship between the bid and the call that arrives on that SIP connection.
This provides more precise tracking than DID numbers. With regular DID numbers, when sending RTB calls without caller ID, Ringba has only the DID to try to match the publisher to the call. This can be less reliable, particularly if the call arrives late.
That 1:1 relationship also makes it nearly impossible for spam calls to affect your RTB campaigns because the SIP address is unique and never reused.
You can implement this solution by passing the following parameter in your Ringba RTB request:
sipOK=true
You must also look for the sipAddress parameter in the response.
Note: Many users ask Ringba to create or review their ring tree targets. See the Open a Request to Create or Review a Ring Tree section of the How do I get help with Ringba? article for specific instructions on how to contact support. Let them know you want to convert your Ringba RTB RTTs to use SIP numbers instead of DID numbers.
Stopping Spam Calls from One Area Code
If you find all the calls from one number, area code, or country code are spam, you can easily block calls from the number or prefix. You can block the calls permanently or for a period of time. When you block numbers, Ringba automatically terminates any inbound calls from those numbers when they attempt to connect to you.
You can block one number at a time or upload a file of numbers to block in bulk from the Numbers > Manage Blocked Numbers screen. See Number Blocking [Video] for step-by-step instructions.
You can use this same tool to block anonymous calls. If you notice a pattern where every call that comes in anonymously is spam, blocking anonymous calls with this tool can help.
Stopping Repeated Calls from the Same Number
If you find that you are getting multiple calls from the same number in a short period of time, the Spam Filter settings on your campaign can help. Just open your campaign and scroll down to the Spam Filter section. You can set a threshold for how much time must pass before you accept another call from the same caller ID.
Another approach would be to block individual numbers in the Call Details Report. This can be useful to block a number as soon as you notice a spam call in your reporting. Find the number you want to block and use the Block Number icon in the Actions column.
Stopping Spam Calls to One Number
If you have a set of numbers in your account, but you see that all the spam calls are coming to the same number, you can guess that number is being targeted.
Fortunately, it is easy to buy a new number and delete the number that is receiving the spam calls. Just go to the Numbers screen and click the Create Number button to make a new number.
Find the old number on the list and click the Deallocate Number icon in the Actions column.
Stopping Spam Calls Attacking One Landing Page
Like spam calls that focus on one number out of many, if you have many landing pages and only the numbers on one of them seem to get spam calls, that's evidence that your landing page is being systematically targeted.
The best solution in this situation is to move the landing page. The bot that's dialing your numbers on the landing page is probably keyed to the URL, so if you change the URL, the bot won't know where to find the page anymore.