FTC Announces Winners of Death-to-Robocalls Challenge

The Federal Trade Commission gets about 200,000 calls monthly from consumers complaining about robocalls, those illegal prerecorded messages hawking everything from timeshares in the Bahamas to free money. Because the commission's "do-not-call" registry was simply not able to handle the deluge of robocalls and caller-ID spoofing, the FTC took to private enterprise to dream up a technological solution to block these unwanted nuisances on both mobile and landline phones. The FTC announced Tuesday three different concepts that could work as solutions, and urged private enterprise to try to make them a market reality.
Image may contain Text Label and Plot

The Federal Trade Commission gets about 200,000 calls monthly from consumers complaining about robocalls, those illegal prerecorded messages hawking everything from timeshares in the Bahamas to free money.

Because the commission's "do-not-call" registry was simply unable to handle the deluge of robocalls with caller-ID spoofing, the FTC took to the private sector to dream up technological solutions to block these unwanted nuisances on both mobile and landline phones. The FTC announced Tuesday three different concepts that could work as solutions, and urged enterprising companies to try to make them a market reality.

"The solutions that our winners came up with have the potential to turn the tide on illegal robocalls, and they show the wisdom of tapping into the genius and technical expertise of the public," said Charles Harwood, acting director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "We’re hoping these winning proposals find their way to the marketplace soon, and will provide relief to millions of American consumers harassed by these calls."

The "Best Overall Solution" awards went to two different concepts:

"Robocall Filtering System and Device with Autonomous Blacklisting, Whitelisting, GrayListing and Caller ID Spoof Detection" would filter and block robocalls using software that could be implemented as a mobile app, an electronic device in a user's home, or a feature of a provider's telephone service, the FTC said.

The concept was developed by Serdar Danis, a computer engineer who earned $25,000 for the idea.

The other, called "Nomorobo," employs "simultaneous ringing," that routes incoming calls to a second telephone line, which identifies illegal robocalls before they could ring through to the user, the FTC said.

Aaron Foss, a New York software engineer, brings home $25,000 for his solution.

The concepts are proprietary, so the FTC released basic details (.pdf) of the proposed products. The FTC received nearly 800 entries beginning last fall.

What's more, the FTC also issued a non-monetary award to two Pennsylvania-based engineers from Google – Daniel Klein and Dean Jackson – for their project called "Crowd-Sourced Call Identification and Suppression." Not surprising, the concept, which earned the "Technology Achievement Award," involves algorithms to identify and filter out spam callers.