The Promise of International Traceback in the Fight Against AI-Powered Global Fraud

July 2, 2024

Coming up on its 35 year-anniversary, the film Back to the Future Part II imagined a 2015 with hoverboards and flying cars, video phones, voice-activated appliances, and smartwatches.  While we’re still waiting on our hoverboards and flying cars – though flying cars could be coming soon to the sky near you – we did get our video phones, voice-activated appliances, and smartwatches. 

And we got far more than that, something that Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale probably could not have imagined in 1985: the global internet.  By 2015, we had the ability to call friends and family anywhere in the world for free or at low cost, regardless of where they were and what they were doing thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones always with us in our bags and pockets.  But as we gained this new transformative capability, so did the bad guys.  They took advantage of the technology and blasted us with billions of illegal and unwanted robocalls, pretending to be a neighbor, the government, tech support companies, and our banks.

In the United States, policymakers and the communications industry faced these challenges head on and found ways to work together to protect individuals from this new scourge.  Voice service providers got Federal Communications Commission permission to block and label suspected illegal and unwanted calls, and then aggressively did so.  A new caller ID authentication framework was developed, mandated, and deployed.  And we launched the  Industry Traceback Group to trace back these spoofed illegal calls.

Almost ten years later, we know the results.  Empowered by our traceback data, there has been more coordinated enforcement across the country and across U.S. agencies than ever before.  There has been an 80% decline in scam robocalls, and some incessant robocall campaigns have dried up entirely.  Complaints to government agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, are trending downwards as well.  This progress is undeniable, even if our work is far from done.

Yet there may be more cause for concern than ever before.  The bad guys have shifted from robocalls to more targeted – and more effective – attacks.  Fraud loss is increasing, with both the young and old, technologically savvy and not, falling victim in countries all over the world.  And we stand on the eve of an age of another transformative technology, generative AI, that may prove as impactful for society – and for bad actors – as the internet.  We’ve already seen the technology reportedly used for voter suppression and scamming a CEO, company director, and a grandparent, and we’re sure to see new iterations in the near future.

Yet, even with this advance in technology, scammers and other bad actors often still rely on a phone call for their schemes, even when using AI.  A phone call can capture a potential victim by surprise and enable the scammer to apply more pressure and coercion.  A scam call also can be more difficult to detect and prevent than a scam email or text, given that there is no technological or legal mechanism to automatically assess a call’s content in real time.

And that’s where traceback comes in.  Traceback has proven effective in identifying the bad actors behind illegal robocalls and holding them accountable, and is proving increasingly effective in disrupting these more targeted attacks as well.  In just hours, traceback helped to identify those responsible for an AI-voice cloned voter suppression robocall in January, and led directly to enforcement against them. 

So what’s next?  In a world of already-rising global fraud – and with the risk that AI supercharges this concerning trend – we need to look to double down on solutions that work while expanding them globally.  After all, fraudsters do not respect jurisdictional boundaries.  Many of the same criminals going after Americans’ bank accounts are also victimizing individuals from countries all across the world.  

At the Industry Traceback Group, we’re focused on building out a global traceback solution that will help protect individuals across the world from abuses of the phone network, whether that’s malicious calling, scam callback operations, or other forms of fraud.  Such solution will enhance any existing domestic traceback capabilities as well as benefit all traceback operations through increased scale.  Our effort already is global with over 1,100 voice service providers from 75 countries working with us.  We are leveraging our existing technology, expertise, and operations to help deploy traceback capabilities for industry, regulators, and law enforcement across the world.   

At the end of the day, we all are in a fight against well-coordinated, global criminal enterprises.  The communications industry and regulatory and law enforcement communities need the same level of organization, scale, and global operation to turn the tide.  Global traceback will get us there, and we at the Industry Traceback Group are committed to building out and delivering on that vision.

Josh Bercu
Executive Director, Industry Traceback Group
josh@tracebacks.org