Why Scoring Phone Number Risks is Essential

Phone fraudsters are constantly evolving their tactics to take advantage of weaknesses in traditional identity verification processes. They use fake or stolen identities to verify their own accounts and make payments, as well as take over legitimate user accounts by compromising account security. To combat these threats, organisations need to have access to the most up-to-date and powerful Phone Number Risk Scores — a critical element in their comprehensive fraud prevention strategies.

Why Scoring Phone Number Risks is Essential

Scoring phone number risks often use the victim’s phone number to authenticate their identity and complete transactions online. By leveraging the Phone Number Risk Score during the new user onboarding process, organisations can identify high-risk phone numbers and protect their ecosystems from SIM swap, account takeover, and synthetic identity fraud.

To do this, IPQS’s Phone Risk Score API combines a variety of signals from enterprise-grade telecom phone intelligence including: location, carrier lookup (landline vs cell phones/wireless), ported dates, activity status, and more to produce a trust score for each number. This combined with a robust set of positive and negative phone fraud risk scoring metrics helps to identify bad actors, suspicious payments, risky users, and more.

In addition, the solution is able to evaluate whether a phone number is associated with a known list of fraudulent or spam phones or has a connection to a device used for p2p communication (such as a VOIP phone). By assessing this combination of factors, the Phone Risk Score is able to accurately flag high-risk numbers and prevent fraudulent activity from occurring. In conjunction with other fraud prevention techniques like 2FA and IP address location, this can significantly reduce the chance of fraudsters successfully gaining access to an account.