T-Mobile on Thursday unveiled a new suite of tools designed to protect customers from scammers and robocalls.
Dubbed “Scam Shield,” the initiative expands caller ID to all T-Mobile customers and allows them to flag or block calls the carrier identifies as “scam likely.” T-Mobile customers on Magenta and Essentials plans will get a free second number or “Proxy Line” to which they can direct spam, a program modeled after the way many consumers use an alternate email address.
ScamShield also includes Be ID Aware, a new identity monitoring and alert service that notifies T-Mobile customers when their information shows up on the dark web or is compromised in a data breach.
“Scams and robocalls are some of the most complicated issues we’ve ever taken on,” said T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert in an announcement Thursday.
But Sievert said that T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint that closed in April made ScamShield possible: “As a bigger company now we can take on even bigger pain points,” he said. “Our ‘Un-carrier’ moves used to be only about fixing what the carriers broke … now we can take on even bigger problems.”
When T-Mobile and Sprint were trying to win over regulators, they claimed the merger would allow the combined company to better compete with industry titans in wireless. But not all of the promises the companies made have come to fruition.
T-Mobile said the merger, which received intense antitrust scrutiny, would “create jobs from day one” but TechCrunch reported last month that T-Mobile notified “hundreds” of Sprint employees that they were being let go. T-Mobile issued a statement, noting that some employees will be asked to “consider a career change inside the company, and others will be supported in their efforts to find a new position outside the company.” T-Mobile said it is adding 5,000 new positions over the next year.
Last year, T-Mobile announced a partnership with Comcast to create new authentication tools and detect robocalls between the two networks. The tools were developed following FCC standards for spam calls known as STIR/SHAKEN, a process by which calls going through airwaves are identified by the originating carrier as authentic and then validated by other carriers before reaching consumers.
Americans received an estimated 58 billion robocalls in 2019 and nearly 26 billion scam calls. The increasing phenomenon is the number one complaint consumers make to the FCC.
