netnumber Number Check
The Challenge: Trust and Fraud Prevention
Phone numbers have long become a part of our identity. At the same time, many online and mobile services deliver one-time passwords over SMS for account registration or two-factor authentication. This has created significant opportunities for fraudsters to exploit insufficiently secured services for their own gain.
A common scenario occurs when fraudsters create online accounts using invalid phone numbers. If the registration process doesn’t confirm the validity of the phone number, fraudsters can then automate the account creation. These fake accounts can be used afterward for spam or other illegal activities.
Another problem that’s been on the rise across the telecom industry is the fraudulent transmission of messages and voice calls. In the pursuit of financial gain, fraudsters use a variety of techniques – from CLI refiling and artificial traffic generation to spoofing of voice caller IDs and message sender IDs and many others.
The netnumber Number Check Solution
The netnumber Number Check service brings in real-time phone number intelligence to help prevent a multitude of fraud types. Number Check evaluates the likelihood of a phone number anywhere in the world being valid or invalid, enabling brands, enterprises and communications service providers to enhance their phone number verification processes. With a simple, API-based implementation, Number Check allows for existing user data to be scrubbed regularly, and users with inactive phone numbers can be prompted to update their accounts to keep them secure.
With the FCC’s recent crackdown on unlawful messaging, a new Report and Order now requires U.S. wireless carriers to implement heightened verification processes. At the same time, as security concerns grow across the global communications ecosystem, members of the telecom community must now ensure that they are optimizing their fraud prevention solutions for both messaging and voice origination and termination.
With Number Check, brands, enterprises, and communications service providers can validate phone numbers from any country in the world to screen for potential fraud and meet stringent new policies. netnumber’s comprehensive data sets, DNO (Do-Not-Originate) number information and sophisticated logic enables granular number verification that tightly aligns with the customer use case and traffic type. All of these advantages make this solution the ideal fit when addressing telecom, financial or other fraud methods, securing messaging and voice transmission from origination to termination. Within the context of SMS and voice traffic, this ability to detect invalid phone numbers ensures providers can effectively avoid routing traffic originating from or destined to invalid numbers, reducing the costs associated with delivery. Contact centers and marketers can also benefit from accurate phone number information. By not dialing out to invalid numbers, they are able to use agents’ time more effectively and save money on marketing costs by not paying for SMS or calls that will not get through.
Key Features
Real-Time Number Verification
The Number Check API returns phone number data in milliseconds. This underpins real-time flows like transmission of messaging or voice traffic, verification of financial transactions and registration of user accounts.
DNO (Do-Not-Originate) Data
Number Check evaluates in real time if a phone number is a valid message sender ID or voice caller ID. This enables communications service providers to protect their networks and comply with the FCC DNO requirements, including the Report and Order targeting unlawful text messages.
Smart Logic
In contrast to static and limited phone number ranges and DNO lists that may be in use today, Number Check is a true global service that evaluates a broad set of data points in real time to ensure customers benefit from comprehensive, up-to-date information. Even when fraudsters quickly change their tactics in an attempt to maximize profits, Number Check customers are one step ahead.
Use Cases
User Account Verification
Number Check enables customers to strengthen their account verification upon new user registration. A customer prompts a new user to provide their phone number and then queries the Number Check platform with the phone number as a parameter. The answer is sent in real-time by netnumber and includes an indicator of the phone number being valid or not. In the case of an invalid phone number, the customer can adapt the registration workflow by prompting the user to check the phone number format or by adding a CAPTCHA step for authentication.
Traffic Routing
Service Providers can save some of the cost of terminating SMS or voice calls by checking if the receiving phone numbers are valid or not. Routing messaging or voice traffic to invalid numbers can be avoided, and the corresponding termination cost can be saved. Number Check validates the originating number too, flagging those that might be DNO (Do-Not-Originate) or helping mitigate CLI refiling in an Origin-Based Rating (OBR) scenario.
Fraud Prevention
Risk scoring of telephone numbers is essential for fraud prevention purposes. Different data points give useful information about the risk associated with certain actions, for example, a service sign-up attempt or a financial transaction. With Number Check, fraud prevention algorithms can then attach a higher risk to invalid numbers.
Benefits
- Helps prevent fraud using real-time phone number intelligence
- Helps communications service providers implement FCC number verification requirements
- Strengthens the user’s account creation by ensuring phone numbers are valid
- Helps prevent fraudulent financial transactions
- Helps call centers and marketers save costs by eliminating dial-outs to invalid phone numbers
CONTACT US TODAY!
To learn more about how netnumber ’ full range of innovative, pioneering and cost-effective phone number intelligence solutions can help you streamline, simplify and secure your network operations, drop us a line at sales@netnumber.com
