With tax season in full swing, scam callers are a regular nightmare.
While it’s true that this time of year sees an increase in fraudulent calls, emails, and messages, the reality is that throughout the year, Bandwidth is working hard to combat illegal robocalls, scam calls, toll fraud, and spam around the clock.
So what do we do to combat fraud and abuse?
Educating our partners and customers
One of the biggest ways we combat fraud such as spam and scam calls is by working with and educating our partners and customers. While we are actively preventing fraud on our end, we also take an active hand in educating the companies we work with to ensure they too are adopting fraud prevention best practices to ensure they’re delivering legitimate traffic.
Bandwidth also works to provide our customers with the tools to educate their end-users, which is also aimed at ensuring good traffic isn’t improperly blocked.
Messaging spam filters
Most large carriers manage their own text messaging spam filters, and at Bandwidth, we’re no different.
Every message that is delivered to our network is passed through our filtering system to prevent further delivery if it’s spam. This not only helps to ensure our customers’ valid messages are properly delivered, improving their ROI, but also ensures that we’re protecting consumers by preventing the delivery of spam and fraudulent traffic over our network.
Proactive network monitoring
We’re really proud of our network, so we take great care in how it’s used; this includes 24×7/365 monitoring by our Network Operations Center (NOC) and Fraud Mitigation Team. Not only do we monitor our network for network performance issues, but we also look for unusual traffic that could be a sign of fraudulent behavior.
When fraud is detected or brought to our attention, we engage in traceback efforts designed to find the source of the fraud. We cooperate through industry organizations and directly with a wide array of co-carriers and customers to both self-regulate against fraud and abuse to the greatest degree possible while also actively supporting law enforcement efforts to bring fraudsters to justice.
Further, Bandwidth is at the leading edge of the industry efforts to deploy technical standards that aim to provide automated indicators of traffic sources to end-users and co-carriers alike (keep following the Bandwidth blog for future updates on our implementation of STIR (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs)).
Fraud prevention solutions and integrations
Bandwidth also offers a set of solutions and features for actively combating fraud in voice including:
- Call verification: Caller authentication for contact centers
- Pindrop integration: Carrier-level voice authentication and anti-fraud integrations
- Insights: Real-time carrier-exclusive voice and messaging insights
To sum it up
These are just a few of the ways we’re working with our partners and customers every day to prevent illegal robocalls, spam, and toll-free fraud on our network.
We’re an active member of key industry organizations like Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA), SipForum, the Internet and competitive networks association (Incompas), Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA) and Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG), that are all working hard to find solutions to the scourge of consumer fraud and abuse.
Being an active member of these industry organizations enables an exchange of critical information to stay on top of the latest industry threats and trends to support our continuous efforts to offer safe and innovative communication services that today’s consumers demand.
