Phone Number Reputation API
While two-factor authentication (2FA) is great for keeping scammers out of your accounts, there’s a gap in security that 2FA can’t fill: caller ID reputation scoring. It takes a combination of factors to assess the riskiness of a caller, and it’s used by major carriers, app providers and crowd-sourced security apps to determine whether or not a call should be labeled as spam or scam.
The big players in this space have their own data analytics teams, and they also contract with outside data aggregators and crowd source app providers to build a phone number reputation score that they use to decide whether or not a call should be labeled spam or scam. The problem is that this approach phone number reputation API can be arbitrary and unfair on a per user basis. In fact, over 40% of legitimate business calls are incorrectly blocked or mislabeled as Spam Likely by these services every day, and this widespread problem is causing serious damage to companies who have to pay for phone numbers that are being misused for unwanted calling.
Traditional caller ID isn’t enough to protect against fraud and abuse anymore, and it can be even more difficult when the caller uses a burner or disposable number that can’t be tracked back. That’s why newer technologies such as the STIR/SHAKEN standards, and the phone validation service that goes along with it, are so important. This enables a phone number to be verified to ensure that it has the correct syntax, and is active and not disconnected, and it can also be validated against local carriers in each country where the number is registered, and it can even determine whether or not the user is a landline, wireless, VOIP or Satellite, as well as indicating the provider company (AT&T, Verizon, Bell Canada etc).
The Federal Trade Commission is very open about publishing data on their Do Not Call Registry, so you can check for yourself that your business phone numbers have not been reported as spam. There are also free services such as the TNS Report a RoboCall that can help you register your business number with other registries and databases.
However, the most valuable aspect of phone validation is that it can also detect ongoing user risk patterns and identify users who may have been involved with fraudulent activity in the past. This is a crucial piece of information that can be used to prevent unauthorized account access, payment fraud and sign ups by identifying users who may have been involved with suspicious behavior online. The phone validation service that accompanies the STIR/SHAKEN API can help with this as it can also perform a risk analysis on the user, and detect high-risk users such as prepaid mobile numbers, international SIM cards and those who have recently been involved in abusive behavior. The service can also provide a risk score of the user in real-time, so that you can take appropriate actions to ensure that your system is as secure as possible.