By Simon Woodhead
It should be no surprise from our pioneering work around VoIP fraud or our efforts to persuade ITSPs and carriers to ‘give a shit’ about encryption, that we really care about your end-users’ safety, privacy and security. When I say ‘care’ I mean care not ‘see an opportunity’, because the reality is that so few of those that we seek to protect actually are aware or care themselves. The absence of an obvious opportunity might also be why ‘me too’ have thus far failed to commoditise rubbish in this space. It is an uphill struggle, but something that matters to us.
Thankfully, new Ofcom CLI regulations require us all to do some work and we can expect take-up of some of the features we’ve had for years, and enforce policies that whilst desirable would have been commercially destructive, e.g. blocking calls with invalid CLI. Sadly, we expect these requirements to be met with muppetry and cries of ‘too hard’ from the rest of industry but the intent of Ofcom is something we support. We have solutions however.
For the last two years, we’ve been doing a lot of work in this space for our financial ultimate end-users, given that telephony is a key tool in the fraudsters arsenal for unrelated crimes such as credit card fraud. We’ve built many solutions to assist in identifying where telephony is being misused and would welcome conversations with service providers who have opportunity to make use of them.
However, whilst it is gratifying that some customers already share our mission, we still want end-users to know the privacy and protection they presume from ‘me too’ is largely non-existent and demand better. As an industry collective, we’re deceiving the market by allowing misplaced presumptions of privacy and security to persist.
With that and our extensive experience in the space in mind, earlier this year we published a book called “Speaking up on Telephony Risks”. Those at SimCon1 will have seen and possibly got a copy of this back in February, before it was sent out to every business in the UK with a turnover over £50m. We’re now ready to make this more widely available* and recruit more of our customers to this journey.
With more education, we think every business in the UK will be outraged at the total absence of protections from most service providers. They’ll be looking for service providers that can fix that, backed by carriers that know what they’re doing and care. Will you be able to help them?
* We will not be sending this book out to competitors, actual or aspiring, nor those who may misuse the information. We will send to production customers and those who meaningfully engage with us and whose aims are legitimate.
