Capital and Google Ventures (now GV) investing in the same startup. Services In 2015, Federal Trade Commission singled out robocalling as the No. 1 consumer complaint in the U.S., with about 170,000 complaints a month. A Pindrop Security report The State of Phone Fraud 2014-2015: a Global, Cross-Industry Threat found that 86 million calls per month in the U.S. are phone scams. It also found that 1 in 6 phone numbers calling a consumer is a robocaller and 2.5 percent of U.S. phones receive at least one robocall per week. Such calls create the loss of more than $20 billion annually in the US alone. The "acoustic fingerprinting" technology integrates with companies internal systems and identifies people's voices, locations, and devices. This is added to a database for future reference and to help separate legitimate callers from scammers. The company listens for 147 different features that help identify the uniqueness of a device and attach it to a caller. To create metadata, Pindrop Security analyzed millions of phone calls in telecom databases from around the world and used machine learning to turn that information into usable content. By analyzing both the audio of a call and the metadata it has about a caller, the phoneprint reveals whether the caller is using a cell, landline, or VoIP phone; where the call really is coming from; and whether the caller has been seen before. It looks for evidence of frequency filters and codec artifacts, for example, and analyzes the calls for packet loss and dropped frames. In packet loss, "pindrop"-sized bits of audio drop out, which is where the company's name came from. Based on the analysis, the service generates a risk profile and a score for each call. Analyzing millions of samples from call centers, it can identify specific criminal groups. An example is a criminal group based in Nigeria nicknamed "West Africa One." According to Pindrop, the West Africa One has 12 members and Pindrop has assessed the skill levels of each of the 12 members. Other tools Pindrop has additional tools that update the company's fraudulent call database with relevant information. Phoneypot is a telephone honeypot with about a quarter-million phone numbers that are not being used by real people, which Pindrop uses for research. Workers enter the numbers into sweepstakes and online databases to collect data from millions of calls from robo-callers, debt collectors, and telemarketers. Among trends,