At the end of August, Finnish telco and digital service provider Elisa introduced a feature allowing customers to block incoming calls from foreign numbers if they are not expecting such calls (link in Finnish), which helps to eliminate scam calls from foreign numbers. Over 10,000 customers have already activated this call blocking, and it is already making scammers' methods less effective. Call blocking does not affect calls made from Finnish numbers, which will continue to work normally even when the user is in a foreign country.

Criminals are bewildered, as their attempted scam calls to Finland from foreign numbers to Finland are no longer getting through as easily. Elisa's network data shows that customers who enable foreign call blocking may receive as many as 55 call attempts in a short period from a variety of country codes. This behaviour is straight from the scammers' playbook: 

"This is likely to be scammers testing whether any call or number they've been using used in their scams still manages to get through. This confirms our view that scammers are using automation and robocalling. They try to bombard the customer from several different country numbers in quick succession", explains Elisa's Chief Information Security Officer, Teemu Mäkelä. 

The majority of unwanted calls from abroad occur on weekdays during office hours, with weekends being quieter. There are also often signs of "campaigns": on some days, thousands of calls are made to Finland, while on other days, there are hardly any. 

In recent days, the new solution has blocked over 800 unwanted foreign calls per day, on average, with the number rising rapidly as the user base expands. It will be interesting to see how long scammers continue trying to make calls to Finland. 

"We will probably see something similar to what happened in 2021, when Elisa started blocking scam calls that were spoofing Finnish numbers. Scammers kept trying for a couple of weeks before realising the calls were no longer getting through. Finland became a bad target for scammers, and they shifted their operations to other countries", explains Mäkelä. 

Blocking calls from foreign numbers is not something that has happened much in other countries, and scammers have rarely encountered it elsewhere. Finland is once again taking the lead internationally in blocking scam calls. 

"Even if we can't completely eradicate scam calls, we can stop many people from losing money because they won't be accidentally answering scam calls", says Mäkelä. 

Blocking foreign numbers is one of the features of Elisa's "Liittymäturva" subscriptions and is easy to enable in OmaElisa. The feature is ideal for young people, senior citizens and others who don't generally expect calls from abroad. Calls from Finnish numbers are not affected, so a call from a family member travelling abroad will connect normally if the caller is calling from a Finnish phone number. 

More information and interview requests:

Elisa Mediadesk, mediadesk@elisa.fi, tel. +358 50 305 1605 

Elisa is a pioneer in telecommunications and digital services, and our mission is a sustainable future through digitalisation. With over 140 years of experience, we provide sustainable solutions for over 2.8 million consumer, corporate and public administration customers in our core markets of Finland and Estonia, as well as in over 100 countries internationally. In Finland, Elisa is the market leader in telecommunications, and internationally, we offer digital software services. Elisa employs over 6,700 professionals in over 20 countries, and revenue in 2024 was EUR 2.2 billion. Elisa Corporation shares are listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki. elisa.com