Neustar Launches Free Call Registry for Emergency Service Providers to Eliminate Incorrect Spam Tagging of COVID-19 Calls

Neustar, Inc., a global information services and technology company and leader in identity resolution, is offering its Caller Name Optimization (CNO) Emergency Call Registry solution, free of charge, to hospitals, health care providers, state and local health officials, and other government officials to ensure emergency COVID-19 calls reach the public and are not blocked or misla- beled as spam. Emergency service providers that rely on the phone channel to deliver vital health and safety information related to COVID-19 can reach out to Neustar at [email protected] to confirm qualification and proceed with service implementation.

Health care providers as well as local, state and federal government sectors are reaching out to the pub- lic with phone calls to communicate critical COVID-19 information, but the calls are often being incor- rectly tagged as spam, resulting in ignored calls and missed information. As a public service, Neustar is offering its CNO Emergency Call Registry solution, which vets the emergency service provider, confirms

its phone number ownership across all major carriers, manages how the entity's name appears on recip- ient device screens, and registers the entity's number to mitigate incorrect call blocking and mislabeling. This public service application leverages Neustar's commercial CNO caller name registration clearing- house service ? currently deployed for many of the largest enterprises across finance, health care, in- surance and retail industries ? as a centralized platform to register with leading mobile apps and more than 800 mobile, cable, VoIP and landline carriers.

"These are extraordinary circumstances, and we need to ensure our essential organizations can com- municate effectively throughout this crisis," said James Garvert, Senior Vice President and General Man- ager of Caller Identification Solutions at Neustar. "One way Neustar can help is to ensure critical health calls are getting through. Our aim is to correct the inadvertent spam mislabeling and call blocking that is catching legitimate emergency and COVID-19 related calls in the same net as calls from scammers and spoofed robocallers, and to do so for any emergency service provider that needs it, at no expense."

To date, Neustar has implemented the free CNO Emergency Call Registry service across major mobile carriers for the Township of Millburn New Jersey and has worked with leading emergency communica- tions platforms to complete several emergency service provider registrations across Alabama, Arizona, Kansas and Pennsylvania. For the affected organizations, Neustar remedied the call mislabeling within 24 hours of service implementation.

CNO is widely used and readily available to all enterprises, but this no-charge CNO Emergency Call Regis- try offering is expressly for emergency service providers for the sole purpose of making COVID-19 emer- gency calls.

To qualify, organizations must meet both criteria outlined by the FCC in Section 7 of its COVID-19 TCPA Declaratory Ruling. "First, the caller must be from a hospital, or be a health care provider, state or local health official, or other government official as well as a person under the express direction of such an organization and acting on its behalf. Second, the content of the call must be solely informational, made necessary because of the COVID-19 outbreak, and directly related to the imminent health or safety risk arising out of the COVID-19 outbreak."

For additional information on this service and to determine qualification for the free offering, send an email to [email protected].

About Neustar

Neustar is an information services and technology company and a leader in identity resolution providing the data and technology that enables trusted connections between companies and people at the mo- ments that matter most. Neustar offers industry-leading solutions in Marketing, Risk, Communications, Security and Registry that responsibly connect data on people, devices and locations, continuously cor- roborated through billions of transactions. Neustar serves more than 8,000 clients worldwide, including 60 of the Fortune 100. Learn how your company can benefit from the power of trusted connections here: https://www.home.neustar.