Harassing phone calls, 7.5 million blocked every day with new Agcom filter

Since 19 November, when the second anti-spoofing 'cut-off' was triggered, Italian telephone operators have been rejecting an average of 7.5 million calls every day disguised as Italian numbers but originating abroad

It is an enormous number, the one released by Agcom: almost six times higher than the fixed telephone calls blocked in August, at the debut of the first filter. And it tells, more than any analysis, the extent of a phenomenon that in recent years has transformed the smartphone into a potential Trojan horse for scams and opaque commercial pressures.

Spoofing - the falsification of the caller's number - is the technique that allows foreign call centres and shady organisations to present themselves with an Italian prefix, deceive the addressee, extract a modicum of trust, and then bite him or her with aggressive proposals or outright deception. To stem the tide, Agcom rewrote the rules with resolution 106/25/CONS and asked operators to insert a technical filter in two steps: from 19 August for fixed numbers, from 19 November for mobile numbers.

A first operator - writes the Authority in its press release - counted 8.1 million blocked calls in 72 hours, plus another 2.6 million over the following weekend. A second operator intercepted 8.3 million suspicious calls out of a total of 17 million: half of the calls received were bogus. A third, on the day of 21 November alone, requested the blocking of 90% of the calls, practically a cascade of scams. The last one, slightly smaller, stopped 650 thousand out of 940 thousand calls in four days.

Result: a large number of fraud attempts rejected at the country's digital borders. But the filter is not enough to heal everything. Agcom warns: fraudsters are now falling back on international numbers, which the regulatory framework does not yet allow to be blocked automatically. And it is possible - almost certain - that some of the spoofing will start 'self-producing' in Italy, where tracing the source is easier and sanctions are already in place. The game, in short, is not closed. For now, the message to citizens remains the same: be wary of suspicious phone calls, especially if from now on they arrive from abroad and speak of offers, urgent services or abnormal requests. The filter does its job, but the last barrier - the one that prevents scams - always remains in the hands of the person who answers.