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July 28, 2015

The End is Near for Voicemail


By TMCnet Special Guest
Tom Ryan, CEO of Argyle Data


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Are the days of voicemail coming to an end? JP Morgan (News - Alert) Chase thinks so. Last month, the global financial services firm ended voicemail services for most of its employees.


“We realized that hardly anyone uses voicemail anymore because we’re all carrying something in our pockets that’s going to get texts or email or a phone call,” said Gordon Smith, head of JPMorgan’s consumer and community bank, after the announcement. “So we started to cut those off.”

Voicemail systems were first developed in the late 1970s and soon thereafter became a staple in the workplace. While originally voicemail systems were costly and therefore only available to larger corporations, by the 1980s, the invention of PC-based voice processing boards allowed for cheaper voicemail systems, leading to the proliferation of voicemail to the masses. Throughout the rest of the 20th century, voicemail was the primary means of communication for businessmen and women, and companies of all sizes relied on voicemail to communicate with their customers. However, as technology often does, more efficient tools like email and cell phones led to the downfall of voicemail. In 2012, Vonage reported its year-over-year voicemail volumes dropped 8 percent.

JP Morgan’s decision to end voicemail came about when the bank was looking to make easy budget cuts. Voicemail costs $10 per person per month and first offered employees the choice to cancel their voicemail in January. “People started raising their hands. They started volunteering, ‘Please take my voicemail away. It’s annoying, it’s redundant, I never use it anymore,'” Trish Wexler at Chase told NPR.

Within months, the company eliminated over two-thirds of its voicemail boxes totaling over $8 million in annual savings. JPMorgan isn’t the first company to cut their spending on voicemail. Coca-Cola shut down $100,000 worth of voicemail lines at its headquarters last year. More and more companies are opting out of voicemail due to its cost. But many neglect to mention the security risks involved in voicemail systems.

While voicemail use is dwindling, voicemail fraud is still a persistent threat. Many systems exist on a PBX (News - Alert), a private telephone network used within a company, which can be accessed remotely and programmed to make external calls. A useful tool for traveling business people becomes an easily accessed vulnerability abused by fraudsters. Hackers compromise a PBX system with the intent to use it to make an excessive number of international, long distance, or premium rate phone calls.

via Shutterstock.com

PBX hacking affects companies both large and small but can be especially damaging to small businesses. Last year, hackers broke into the phone network of a small architecture firm and routed $166,000 worth of calls from the firm to premium-rate telephone numbers overseas in a single weekend. PBX hacking racks up $4.4 billion in losses globally, and around $1.5 billion in both North America and in Western Europe. These losses contribute to the average 5 percent of revenue losses due to fraud within most companies.

JPMorgan’s estimate voicemail costs likely don’t take into account the potential fraud perpetrated on these systems. Phone (News - Alert) networks, especially at large, multinational companies, are often expensive to maintain and even more difficult to secure. With the realization that most businesses aren’t using their voicemail systems anymore, this also means that it is often a dormant vulnerability. Never late to the game, hackers may catch onto this and up their attacks on unused voicemail systems. Hackers are notoriously known for evolving their strategies according to our habits. So better to end voicemail now, before it ends you.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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