Global phone number fraud continues to escalate while telecoms, brands and subscribers pay the price—about $12.5 billion according to the FBI. While the vast majority of industry players have fraud protection programs in place, there is currently little data sharing between them. This makes it easy for fraudsters to move around the industry and use the same techniques to exploit the same blind spots.

Industry players have long recognized the importance of sharing fraud data, but haven’t had a safe, reliable mechanism to enable it. The challenge is developing and maintaining a centralized fraud number database that can be updated and accessed in real-time by those who need it. In the absence of such a resource, scammers continue to wreak damage, undeterred and unabated. Thankfully, those days may be over.

In this MEF webinar, Catalin Badea, netnumber VP of Product Management, and Ian Matthews, President and CEO at WMC Global, will dive deep into a first-of-its-kind industry tool, the netnumber Fraud Prevention Registry (FPR), co-created with WMC Global.

The FPR is a global consortium-based phone registry for identifying and reporting communications fraud. The registry contains all numbers confirmed to have been involved in fraud and is continuously updated by FPR participants and maintained by netnumber. The result is a single authoritative database that is shared among telecoms and other industry members for the sole purpose of fighting communications fraud