How Telnyx Shuts Down Call Fraud and Phone Scams

Telnyx is committed to eliminating phone hacking, call fraud, number spoofing and any other kind of fraudulent activity from our network through the development of automated account protection measures.

Similar to how a credit card company monitors your account for fraud and sends you alerts and updates about suspicious activity, our goal is to identify scammers and hackers and restore your account before they can hurt your bank account or your brand.

The Impact Of Call Fraud

In 2016, one in every 10 Americans lost money to some kind of phone scam, totaling $9.5 billion. What’s more, the problem gets worse every year: 2016 saw 56% more defrauded income than the year before. That’s partly due to the ease that the internet has brought to setting up and manipulating phone systems, meaning more scammers making more calls with better targeting and more data about their potential victims.  And, since phone hacking or hijacking is also becoming more common, legitimate businesses are often left to clean up the mess.

This is a problem Telnyx does not abide. Telnyx takes fraud seriously because it undermines our customers’ systems, costs our community billions of dollars a year, and tarnishes the call experience for users on our network. The convenience of hosting your phone system or embedding voice communications into your app isn’t worth it if it opens you up to new security risks. Since we’re the last line of defense, we want to give you all the tools you need to identify fraud, freeze activity and restore your account before the damage becomes irreparable.

Only 1% of Telnyx accounts have ever had confirmed fraudulent or illegal activity.

Telnyx wants no part of illegal scams and won’t allow them to be run on our network under any circumstance.  That’s why we’re continually improving how we identify scam accounts and combat fraudulent activity. Telnyx has three lines of defense against fraud:

• Account limits
• A dedicated anti-fraud team
• Automated fraud protections

Reasonable limits stop phone hackers

If your spend or call frequency changes unexpectedly and exorbitantly, our platform locks down activity on that account immediately. This response is reserved for extreme examples, like a sudden increase in calls that originate from a location you have never called from before. These limits keep a compromised account from becoming a liability — before hackers can spend large amounts of your call credit.

As an additional measure, by default Telnyx applies a $700 (USD) daily limit on the amount you can spend on international termination calls. The purpose of this limit is to reduce the financial toll inflicted by abusive calls, while preventing disruption to other services on your account. For more information, or to adjust this limit for your account’s needs, please reach out to our support team.

Our anti-fraud team analyzes activity daily

Our anti-fraud team looks for more subtle instances of fraud. They analyze our internal datasets, looking for suspicious spending or changes to accounts, as well as new account signups that appear to be fraudulent. When potential suspicious activity is spotted, they’ll dig deeper into an account’s historical usage and reach out to the business to understand how the account is being used. Accounts confirmed to be fraudulent or being used for illegal activity are immediately locked down as well.

Fraud detection on the fly

Finally, our anti-fraud team has built a model of how fraudsters and scammers use Telnyx and steadily improves that model with new data and screening techniques. We use that model to deploy automated alerts and fraud protections that keep your account safe. Similar to how credit card companies notify you of suspicious spending or non-standard account activity, our system might ping you when large-scale routing changes are made or when important account information is changed.

Phone system hacking is rare, but it can be devastating for the companies targeted. Telnyx active fraud prevention keeps your account safe and your calls secure, because being your own carrier doesn’t mean you’re on your own.

For more information on Telnyx and security, check out how our network infrastructure keeps your communications private with TLS and SRTP/ZRTP encryption.