Earlier this week, we learned about a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 update that included a new calling service enhancement named Caller Verified. Now T-Mobile has officially announced the feature.

Caller Verified is a new T-Mobile feature that uses the STIR and SHAKEN standards to fight scammers. When a call comes in, T-Mo customers with this Caller Verified feature will see “Caller Verified” on the incoming call screen when T-Mobile has confirmed that the call is real and has not been intercepted by scammers.

The STIR and SHAKEN standards allow calls to be signed as legitimate by originating carriers and validated by other operators before the calls reach consumers. STIR and SHAKEN digitally validate the handoff of calls so that the consumer knows that an incoming call is really from the person supposedly making it. This is all to help fight caller ID spoofing, which is a technique scammers use to temporarily hijack a phone number to match the area code and three-digit prefix of a person they’re calling to make the incoming call look legitimate.

T-Mobile touts that it’s the first in the industry to launch a caller verification feature using the STIR and SHAKEN standards. Once the technologies are adopted by other carriers, Caller Verified will work on calls made across most networks.

Caller Verified is now available on the T-Mobile Galaxy Note 9 at no extra charge. T-Mo says that it’ll be available on more smartphones later this year.

Spam and scam calls are a big issue with mobile phones. They can be annoying when they ring your phone and interrupt you throughout your day, and they can be dangerous when they scam people out of money. Caller ID spoofing makes this issue worse since it helps to make an incoming scam call look more authentic, and so hopefully it’s not long before we see Caller Verified making its way to more phones.

Source: T-Mobile