Phone Number Fraud Check: Preventing Fraud with Phone Number Verification
Email verification is no longer enough to identify your customer. Learn how you can use mobile numbers to prevent fraud, fake accounts, and more.
Fake is everywhere you look online: trolls, news, profiles. The digital world is under ever-growing pressure to fight fake accounts, which have become the vehicle of questionable political agendas, “sextortion” on dating sites, social engineering, and so many other threats. Cybercrime has become truly sophisticated and dangerous; however, major online platforms insist in using email verification only to onboard customers, recover and manage accounts.
Email verification is very convenient – and can be leveraged at nearly zero cost. By sending an email that includes a link back to the website of use, email verification easily checks the validity of an email address. Even though email is the epitome of customer convenience, creating an email account is too easy; hence, fake accounts have become rife. Malicious actors use email constantly to steal identities, have access to bank accounts and more.
With the increasing use of smartphones globally, users are accessing their digital accounts on their mobile phones. Phone number information has become a key field of user identity, providing an easy-to-verify handle to connect an account to a real person.
Phone Number Verification How Does it Work?
When creating a new account or accessing an existing one, businesses can associate a unique and valid phone number to each user account, leveraging the wealth of real-time phone number data to prevent fake accounts and fraud. Instant phone number information may include whether the phone device is present (on/off), location, and roaming information.
For example, social engineering has become a widespread fraud practice for online merchants. It’s common that fraudsters reach out to the merchant via the contact center when an order has been flagged. Relentlessly, they try to convince the contact center that the order is legitimate — and in many cases they succeed. When phone validation process is in place, it’s easy to verify the phone number and make sure that the phone and billing name on the order match. Such a simple procedure can increase security massively for online account access and transactions.
Consumers tend to hold on to their mobile numbers, providing a powerful linkage between a person and a mobile phone number. Utilizing this data to verify identity enables businesses to upgrade the verification process, making it much harder for fraudsters to create fake profiles and even takeover accounts. Phone numbers provide various benefits when used as an identifier, including:
- Phone numbers are unique and universal: 70%+ people worldwide have a mobile phone number.
- Phone numbers are difficult to steal, requiring professional skills, knowledge, equipment and access.
- People notice immediately when their phones are stolen and take action, making it harder for malicious actors to bank on their mobile phone number.
- Phone numbers can be used for running additional security diagnostics that prevent SIM swaps and fraudulent account takeovers or transactions.
- Phone numbers can be verified constantly, powering your continuous security effort.
- The phone number is a really valuable data point that can be matched to other data points, e.g. email address, billing information, etc., providing merchants with more accuracy to pinpoint the right user identity – and therefore grant access or payment authorization to the customer.
Digital identifiers need to balance customer experience and security. Phone numbers provide a great digital identifier that can be used as standalone or as a complement to additional identify verification processes; alongside email, for instance.
Reduce Fake Accounts and Prevent Fraud with tyntec’s Phone Verification
When it’s critical to determine the transaction risk or raise your chance of conversion at a specific timeframe, turn to tyntec’s Number Verification. By accessing live data about the phone, it helps you identify the network, phone status, and geographic data.
Companies in the fraud detection market can easily utilize the phone number data point to enrich their identity and security portfolios. Enterprises with existing fraud management platforms can place can easily scale this platform-agnostic service to augment their own efforts in minimizing fraud, fake profiles, and account takeovers.
Authenticate Users with 2FA
In addition to our Number Verification service, we provide a 2FA API that supports your phone verification especially in the digital onboarding process. It’s a feature-rich, robust API that detects the phone number type (mobile or landline) and sends the passcode via the appropriate channel (SMS or voice). Complete with multi-language and customization support, further minimizing fake profiles.
A phone verification powerhouse, tyntec’s number information platform runs on tyntec’s patented technology and delivers best-in-class latency and high throughput, supporting your plans to prevent fraud.
Learn more with our additional resources: