Getting COVID-19 Emergency Calls Right

YouMail wants to be perfect at blocking unwanted calls and letting through important ones. After all, we’re a call blocking service trusted by millions of people, so we need to get it right. That’s especially important in this COVID-19 emergency, where hospitals, police, government agencies, school districts, and more, are frequently robocalling. These robocalls deliver important information – like stay at home orders, like where to go if you feel you might be sick and more.

In fact, someone’s life can depend on these calls getting through.

In this article we cover:

• Why we need Emergency Robocalls during the COVID-19 Pandemic
• How to filter out Scam Robocalls
• How to intelligently block Spam Calls

Why we need Emergency Robocalls during the COVID-19 Pandemic

While we have our own patented technology to find out when numbers are behaving badly, we’re always open to data that makes our service smarter.   We definitely don’t want to block calls like this recent one from 408-808-7861, a Santa Clara county public health number.

To this end, we’ve partnered with Numeracle to subscribe to and use their Critical Call Registry. This registry is one place where those government entities that are delivering FCC COVID-189 TCPA compliant calls can register and provide full information on the phone numbers they use and what they use them for. Their information is then distributed to companies like ours.

This is super helpful for us to make sure we are not blocking these numbers and are letting those critical and valuable calls get through.   

How to filter out Scam Robocalls

Unfortunately, phone numbers tied to important government agencies are often spoofed by scammers – which might cause them to be blocked by default because of all the bad behavior from those numbers. However, by knowing the phone number is a critically important one, we can route calls from these numbers calls straight to voicemail and filter out the scam messages so people aren’t bothered by them – leaving only the good messages in their voicemail inbox. (There is nothing worse than police impersonation, whether it’s on the road or on the phone.)    

For example, we’ve seen a lot of scams come through on Code Red Alert numbers, like 855-969-4636.

Without knowing this is really an emergency number, and seeing all the spam reports from our users, we would likely be blocking 100% of the calls from the number to protect users from the prevalent scam calls.

However, knowing it’s really an emergency number, we can let the call go to voicemail and then filter out the message to see if it’s truly an emergency message or it’s some sort of devious scammer.

How to intelligently block Spam Calls

Only YouMail can intelligently block some calls and route others straight to voicemail and then filter them. This provides extra protection for our users while lessening the potential impact of getting it wrong. And we have no shame in using data provided by others to do the best job we can! After all, we’re in this fight against robocalls together.

How to Stop Robocalls

How to Look up a Phone Number for free

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