You all know the old scam about the foreign prince, right? He’s in trouble abroad and needs YOUR help. If you can float this mysterious royal some cash to get home, they will let you in on some crazy investment opportunity and make millions! Maybe, you’ll even be partying on your new friend’s yacht in Bali to celebrate after. It all sounds too good to be true, right?The problem is that there is no prince, there is no investment opportunity, and sadly, there is no yacht. No, the foreign prince scam is one of the oldest examples of phishing. And while the foreign prince scam is shockingly somehow effective, phishing scams have evolved over the years. Some enterprising criminals are now using Covid as cover for their scams. The Reserve Bank of India has even issued a warning to its citizens about the dangers of phishing and how the recent boom of online banking has opened consumers and platforms alike to more fraud; account takeover (ATO), chief among them. Fortunately, Telesign has had a presence in India for years with the flagship digital identity solution Score and we can help you keep your protect your users and your platform.Telesign’s Score delivers reputation scoring based on phone number intelligence, traffic patterns, and global data consortium. It is a holistic way of evaluating potential users at onboarding and the transaction level. It can fight fraud attempts from account takeover and synthetic identity to spam calls and International Revenue Share Fraud, as discussed in the recent case study with Skype. While user validation is a strong use case for Score, could it be inferred that Score could fight phishing?Back to our friend His Royal Highness, let’s assume one of your users fell victim to this scam and sent over some credentials, perhaps banking information. The “Prince” still needs to log on to your platform with your user’s credentials and transfer it out. The fraudster will also likely change the number on the account to bypass 2FA loops. At this point, Score will instantaneously do its work in the background.What type of phone is making the transaction? Does your user usually leverage this type of device? To what country is the device registered? Is it reasonable your user would be there? Is it a post-paid phone, or is the account being accessed on a burner? Telesign instantaneously looks at dozens of information points and then provides a recommendation to your platform. You can then act on by allowing the transaction to continue, blocking the sale, or sending it to manual review. You know, long enough for you to call your customer and ask them if they want someone they met on the internet to empty all bank accounts.This is good news for platforms and good users. Bad news for fraudsters, and I suppose fans of The Crown.That’s not all the only way Score and Telesign can serve the Indian market.
Know-Your-Customer Challenges
Typically used in the financial services industry, Know-Your-Customer is indeed an essential step towards providing services. With more companies focused on micro-credits and catering to customers that don’t fall under the traditional financial system, it often becomes difficult and costly to conduct background checks for every applicant.Telesign’s services can be utilized as a more affordable pre-cursor to determine and exclude bad actors upfront. This alternative offers tremendous cost-saving potential since companies will have intelligence into the bad actors before performing expensive background checks.Telesign has been connecting and protecting online experiences for over 15 years. We support the largest web properties in the world and we’re prepared to help you. Contact Telesign now and for all of your security needs. As the pioneers of phone-based security, we are a one-stop-shop for all of your digital identity and programmable communications needs.
