YouMail, a provider of consumer security services, and Avira, a leading cybersecurity company, today announced a joint partnership that will provide Avira with access to YouMail’s spam and scam call identification technologies, which will be used to further improve mobile calling security in Avira’s products and services.

The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book highlighted that, in 2019, there were 821,682 reports indicating over $493 million dollars lost to ID theft and other scams, all from interactions that started from a phone call. These calls were the largest source of such fraud, making it imperative to keeping fraudulent calls from ever reaching consumers.

YouMail’s patented and patent-pending spam identification technology can purportedly identify badly behaving numbers through a single call to any of its over 10 million YouMail users. It can also determine the likelihood of a call from any given US phone number being problematic, and can accurately label the caller, such as “IRS Scam” or “Health Insurance Telemarketing.”

This real-time call scoring and labeling database is accessible through the YouMail API, which is used by the YouMail iPhone and Android apps to reliably identify and block scams and spam, to send questionable calls to voicemail when a phone number is being spoofed or has a mix of legal and illegal call traffic, and to label incoming callers appropriately.