A fraud risk call is a robocall that’s detected by your phone carrier’s machine learning engine as suspicious. These calls are usually blocked, but not all of them will be.

Fraudulent telemarketers use a variety of tactics to get you on the line, including false promises and aggressive sales pitches. Some scammers even pose as government agencies. They may try to scare you into paying a fake tax bill or delete your Social Security number by threatening to withhold it from you.

Scam calls aren’t just annoying — they can also cause serious financial harm to you and your business. To fight telemarketers, organizations are turning to new technologies that can identify and reduce these fraudulent calls.

One robocall-blocking tool, YouMail, uses an audio fingerprint system that can analyze the content of a call to identify known scam calls without anyone actually listening to them. This can help identify known spam calls and potentially new scams in progress, too.

The Power of the Phone: How Fraud Risk Calls Can Protect Your Business

YouMail’s technology is powered by a machine learning engine that takes a call’s audio and creates an image called its “audio fingerprint.” The more similar the audio fingerprint is to known spam and scam calls, the less likely it is to be legitimate.

Another robocall-blocking solution, Neustar Phone Takeover Risk, uses unique global data sets that can detect whether a consumer’s phone number is high-risk. This can help mitigate phone-based account takeover and new-account fraud.

These scam calls may claim to be from your bank, insurance company or government agency. If you receive a call like this, hang up and contact the agency directly to verify the call is legitimate.