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Automated fraud alerts

Simon Woodhead

Simon Woodhead

28th November 2013

We’ve mentioned before the numerous features we offer to protect you if there’s a fraudulent issue on your account, such as your equipment or your customer being compromised or simply unviable destinations. We recommend re-reading our post about Protecting you from VoIP fraud to recap.

We’ve also explained how the fact that we’re database free for call routing, making hundreds of thousands of decisions a second in RAM and CPU only, makes us really quick – see our Real-time Big Data post for more. Not only does this enable us to offer you the above fraud features with lower Post Dial Delay than our database-based competitors (who don’t offer the same protections), it also means our Virtual Interconnect customers know their income figures very very quickly.

Until now however, us rejecting a call because of fraud settings and features you’d made use of would be buried in your logs unless we got in touch due to a high level of unusual activity. Given that when a customer is compromised we find they burn credit extremely quickly we figured a more pro-active and instant approach was required.

Effective today, when we reject a call due to, for example, a fraud setting you have specified on the account or individual call (e.g. max cost), or a globally blacklisted destination known to indicate an early compromise, we’ll send you a mail with detail. This is automated and is triggered directly from the call flow – no horrible database polling after the event here. This uses our new notifications engine so messages will come to the default contact on your account but can also be configured to go to dedicated addresses and/or SMS – just use the API or drop us a line to configure that.

A sample fraud blacklist alert

Rather than bombarding you with mails for each call when there could be thousands, we get the first one off immediately and then follow-up every 15 minutes or 100 rejected attempts, whichever comes first.

As we’ve tried to make clear in the past, our business is your long term prosperity and we do not want to profit in any way from your misfortune. We think we have the best feature set in the industry to help you protect yourself and many of our new customers seem to agree. Naturally, if you think we’ve missed anything do please let us know.

There is one major caveat with all this (other than the wealth warning below!) which relates to secondary routes. Many customers use more than one wholesale route but have us in first place. Where we reject a call it is unfortunate if they’re configured to then pass it on to a second carrier who offers no protection. We therefore strongly encourage you to configure around this or manually activate your second route in the unlikely event of it being needed.

Wealth warning: Of course none of the features we offer should be depended on or used as an alternative to your own sensible effective security measures. You are responsible for the security of your own equipment.

 

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