Bradley Greer, Senior Director of Data Solutions & Partnerships for netnumber Global Data Services, shares highlights from a recent MEF Webinar where he chats to Director of Programmes for MEF, James Williams, about tackling fraud through number verification, and explains in detail some of netnumber’s own tools and solutions.
With more and more consumers facing daily threats of phone number fraud, it’s no wonder that Communication Service Providers (CSPs), Mobile Operators and other members of the telecom ecosystem are looking for innovative ways to tighten fraud prevention practices. But finding ways to outwit increasingly sophisticated scammers is no easy task. It means leveraging the right tools and strategies — but what do those look like?
Increasing Regulatory Pressure
As illegal robocalling, call spoofing and a host of other communication scams continue to frustrate phone customers around the globe, regulators are fighting back with new and beefed-up regulations.
These regulations, such as Ofcom’s stricter rules around Calling Line Identification data in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) STIR/SHAKEN regulations in the United States, are ratcheting up the heat on telecom providers to find better ways to screen for phone number fraud.
If implemented on ALL phone numbers in your system, netnumber GDS’ solutions will provide a  footprint as you onboard, communicate, enable and protect phone numbers and their end users. When running into fraud, these valuable data insights will allow you to backward track suspected fraud and flag it for elimination.“
Most recently, port-out fraud and illegal SIM swapping, popular and growing communications schemes, have raised the ire of U.S. regulators resulting in the presentation of new, tighter regulations by the FCC’s Privacy and Data Protection Task Force on July 11th.
If approved by the full commission, the rules would require wireless providers to adopt more secure customer authentication methods before redirecting a phone number to a new device or carrier, a practice known as porting.
The regulations also propose requiring providers to notify customers whenever a SIM change or port request is made on customers’ accounts.
The Essence of Fraud Prevention – Phone Number Verification
While scam approaches may vary, one constant lies at the heart of fraud prevention – quality number verification. Such tools utilize the power of phone number intelligence data to reliably and accurately validate phone numbers from any country in the world.
By doing so, telecommunications providers can screen for potential fraud in real time and stop the attempted deception in its tracks.
The best of such tools use comprehensive data sets, DNO (Do-Not-Originate) number information and sophisticated logic to enable granular number verification that tightly aligns with the customer use case and traffic type. Quality number validation tools provide the ideal fit when addressing telecom, financial, or other fraud methods, securing messaging and voice transmission from origination to termination.
Regarding quality tools, the netnumber GDS portfolio of solutions are excellent for implementing anti-fraud efforts.
Taking Number Validation to New Heights with NumeriCheck
At netnumber GDS, the road to expert number verification and other solutions has been simplified by a realignment of product groups into three key operational pillars: Provision, Route and Trust. Working within these three pillars, CSPs, Mobile Network Operators and enterprises can easily architect more efficient, reliable and secure operations.
This is accomplished through authoritative registry resources, robust number lookup capabilities and innovative fraud prevention opportunities.
These solutions are foundational and designed for use across a client’s total ecosystem.
If implemented on ALL phone numbers in your system, netnumber GDS’ solutions will provide a  footprint as you onboard, communicate, enable and protect phone numbers and their end users. When running into fraud, these valuable data insights will allow you to backward track suspected fraud and flag it for elimination.
Within netnumber GDS’ three-pillar ecosystem, NumeriCheck stands out as an extremely powerful number verification solution. He described NumeriCheck, part of the company’s ‘Trust’ pillar of solutions, as a comprehensive global number verification and validation solution that utilizes real-time phone number intelligence to determine the status of phone numbers.
With NumeriCheck, phone numbers are flagged as invalid when one or multiple checked indicators are reported as negative. With a simple API-based implementation, NumeriCheck 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.
NumeriCheck is backed by netnumber GDS’ 20 years+ of experience at the forefront of telecommunications, providing market-leading real-time phone number data intelligence and routing solutions to Enterprises as well as Messaging and Communication Service Providers that power communication networks globally.
