In an attempt to rein in robocall scams, texting fraud, and related scams, netnumber has developed its Fraud Prevention Registry, which it developed with cyberthreat intelligence firm WMC Global.
According to netnumber, the FBI puts the potential losses from those types of schemes at $12.5 billion.
Fraud targeting communication service providers, telecom carriers and enterprises, and other telecom stakeholders is escalating quickly, according to netnumber. It sees the Fraud Prevention Registry as a way to have a more secure telecom ecosystem because it provides a global, consortium-based registry for detecting and reporting communications fraud designed to help registry members respond quickly once a fraud attack is identified.
The Fraud Prevention Registry will provide participants with:
- Phone numbers that are used by bad actors to defraud customers of financial institutions.
- Phone numbers that have been collected as part of phishing campaigns and phone numbers that have been in data breaches, whose owners are at higher risk of being targeted by fraudsters.
“We’ve created a secure registry that enables participants to share information about fraudulent phone number activities in real time,” Steve Legge, CEO of netnumber, said in the company’s announcement.
“Industry leaders have long recognized the importance of sharing fraud data but didn’t have a safe, reliable, and real-time mechanism to do it. We believe the [Fraud Prevention Registry] will enable better fraud detection and prevention efforts and prove to be a very effective means of combating this ongoing problem.”
Among prevention methods with similar aims as the Fraud Prevention Registry is STIR/SHAKEN. A recent report from Transaction Network Services (TNS) said that major carriers — including AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Lumen, T-Mobile, UScellular, and Verizon — are using STIR/SHAKEN effectively to help mitigate unwanted robocalls.
Yet, despite industry and regulatory efforts to curtail robocalls and text scams, the problem continues to mount. Just last month, YouMail reported that robocalls had grown 8.7% from the previous month, with averages rising to 152.9 million robocalls per day and 1,769 robocalls per second.
