How to deal with your numbers being flag as SPAM

When Call Recipients Flag Numbers

While proper outbound call practices go a long way towards keeping your numbers from being flagged as spam, at the end of the day, it’s entirely up to the call recipients. Call blocking apps are both abundant and easy to use, so if you catch someone at a bad time or accidentally reach the wrong recipient, there is very little to keep your number from being flagged.

One block isn’t enough to flag one of your phone numbers as spam, but if a call clocking app sees that you’ve received multiple blocks or flags in a short amount of time, they will almost certainly label your number as “scam likely” or a “spam risk”.

Luckily for outbound call-based businesses, call blocking apps only work with specific carriers. So if one of your phone numbers gets flagged by one app, chances are high that your caller ID will still show up normally on other carriers.

This can get confusing with some recipients seeing “scam likely” while others see your normal caller ID, but it’s better than all of your outbound calls being universally viewed as spam.

Since call recipient flags are completely outside of your control, the most surefire way to avoid them is to maintain proper outbound dialing practices and follow scripts that seek to inform rather than mislead potential customers.

When Call Carriers Flag Numbers

A common carrier practice is to have call activity thresholds that monitor phone numbers to make sure they aren’t being used for nefarious purposes. An easy example is that if one phone number makes more than 10 calls a minute, 100 calls a day, or 1000 calls a week, it’s incredibly unlikely that phone number is being used by a real life human person to conduct reputable business.

When a carrier notices such activity, they’ll assign a flag to your phone number, identifying it as likely being used for scams or robocalling.

The most likely cause of carrier flags is using power dialers or other mass-dialing technology. When dialing individual leads, agents can only speak with a few people every hour. So if your phone number reports that it’s called dozens of different numbers in the same amount of time, that’s an easy number to flag.

A good strategy to help you reduce the chance of being flagged by carriers as spam is to change the phone numbers you’re using to call prospects throughout the day. This will help keep them under carriers’ call thresholds, and also reduce the number of chances for specific numbers to be flagged by recipients.

Every carrier has different thresholds for what is considered spam and monitors call behavior in different ways. Unfortunately for outbound call-based businesses, the processes they use are not available to the public. As with recipient flags, the best way to avoid being flagged as “scam likely” or “spam risk” is to follow ethical calling guidelines.

Report your number as not spam

Samsung

Samsung phones use a third party service called hiya that handles their spam and fraud management. If you want to lodge a request to get it removed please go here: https://hiyahelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=824667

Google - Android generic

We strongly suggest to add your number to google maps/Google my business. They spend time to verify the phone number with periodic calls etc to confirm that it is legitimate. To find out more go here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7039811?hl=en

Unblocking the calls on a phone can assist in this process: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/3459196?hl=en#zippy=%2Creport-a-mistake-in-spam-protection

Apple

At the current time, Apple iPhones have no direct spam filtering, although there are third party apps which can do such things.