This is a YouTube video titled "Free Caller Registry: What It Can and Can’t Do for Your Dealership" created in August 2025. The content is a discussion between two speakers, Scott and Jake, explaining the purpose and limitations of the Free Caller Registry, particularly how it helps legitimate businesses avoid call blocking due to fraud but does not effectively address spam labeling issues. The conversation is focused on clarifying common misconceptions about the registry's capabilities for dealership phone call management.
Hey, good afternoon. Once again, we're back for the next in our series on dealer identity, getting your calls answered. And I have Jake with me today. Jake, how you doing?
Doing great, thanks, Scott.
Today we're going to talk about the Free Caller Registry. We get questions about this. Every single dealer we talk with, whether they're a dealer identity customer or not. Tell me about it, Jake. What do they get when they register with it? How does it help them?
It's a great question and it's a very confusing answer to a lot of, to a lot of people. The Free Caller Registry is a resource that the carriers and the analytics companies, the analytics engines that they partner with, have provided. And this is to fulfill their obligations with the various laws that they need to be held accountable to. And they needed to provide a place for businesses to submit their legal information and tie these phone numbers to that information. Essentially, the carriers needed to provide a place for a dealer or a restaurant, or you name it, to say, hey, I am a legitimate business and here are my phone numbers. These are not fraudulent phone numbers. Now that is all that the legislation required them to do. It doesn't require a big up to date database, it doesn't require any sort of reporting and it doesn't even guarantee any sort of label removal. And this is where a lot of people, unfortunately, there's some confusion about what it actually is doing for folks. So when we talk about the different types of labels that the carriers are implementing on calls, we have spam and we have fraud. So the Free Caller Registry is designed to protect you from having your calls blocked completely due to being labeled as fraud. The Free Caller Registry actually is not really supposed to be helpful with removing spam labels. You know, sometimes anecdotally you hear of a spam label being removed here and there, only to come back in a couple weeks. So I've got to keep submitting to the Free Caller Registry. This is not necessarily a long term strategy that I would recommend, really. The Free Caller Registry is designed to limit call blocking due to fraud tagging. It doesn't really guarantee anything with spam tagging at all, really.
In fact, they even say it in the fine print. You've read it to me, don't they?
Yeah. If you go to freecallerregistry.com and you go through the steps, it says right there, this website is intended for submissions made in good faith based on a reasonable belief that mislabeling or blocking is occurring. The registration of phone numbers does not guarantee redress based on analysis that each analytics engine does independently. Free Caller Registry is not to be used as a replacement for call reputation monitoring services. So. And it even says, please note that multiple submissions of the same telephone number provide no additional value or redress. So it's very clear that though a lot of dealers and a lot of vendors will even tout this as a solution to fix your spam problem long term, it's very clear that this is not the case.
And gosh, why was it even invented then?
Well, it, it's trying to solve the problem of hey, you know, legitimate businesses are getting flagged and, and, and calls blocked. And so there could, theoretically, you know, you could say there was good intentions behind drafting this and putting this requirement together. But the main problem that legitimate businesses are, are running into is, is being labeled as spam. You do see some businesses being flagged as fraud and having their calls blocked, but it is certainly not as common as just being able to spam, which the Free Caller Registry doesn't provide any redress towards, to use their term, in addition to not having any monitoring or remediating ability through the Free Caller Registry.
So in plain English, it won't stop your calls from being labeled as potential spam, it won't rehabilitate the numbers if something happens to them and you're at best still have the labor intensive switch numbers out solution.
Yeah, I mean it's certainly hopefully going to help with call blocking, but it really won't be doing too much with spam labels. And if you, since there's no reporting aspect to it, there's no feed that you get to see the status of your phone numbers, you need to be doing test calls to check the current status of the phone numbers so you know which ones have a potential spam label. It's, it solves, it certainly solves a little bit of a problem sometimes. Most of the time it can help with the fraud and call blocking, but it doesn't go any further beyond that.
So you, I mean use, you just have to take it on faith that it's helping. Right. There is no reporting at all.
Correct.
Okay. Anything else you want to say today about Recaller Registry?
No, I mean, feel free to reach out if you have any additional questions. I know a lot of folks run into this and try it and then wonder why they're still being labeled as spam. There's a lot of bad information out there and I hope that this has been helpful to clear some of that up and I'm happy to talk a little more about this if, if needed.
Yeah, hey, thanks, Jake. Great stuff. Have a great day.
