Why should you care?
Phone fraud is becoming a real problem in the UK, costing businesses £953 million. It can result in bill
shock and service loss, which can be disruptive to your business operations.
According to a survey commissioned by ITSPA, which surveyed 1,000 businesses across the UK, 27% had
been hacked in the past five years, costing each business £12,000 on average.
How do they succeed?
- Hackers scan the internet looking for IP addresses and also PBX’s with security weakness or which
haven’t been configured properly. - Hackers will typically target holiday seasons such as Christmas, Easter and bank holidays when the office
is quieter and closed for a longer period of time. - The time period 2 am – 6 am is particularly popular as most businesses will not be operating as normal and
fraudulent activity is more likely to go undetected.
The most common losses
- Compromised PBX – hacking of PBX and setting up of premium rate/international numbers
- Calls made from elsewhere using SIP credentials
- Calls made from VoIP accounts using stolen credit
cards
Phone fraud has become more sophisticated and is a growing concern for many businesses. There are three
types of fraud attempt:
- Unauthorised calls by individuals with physical access to your PBX system. Therefore, you should
ensure that the telephone (PBX) system is held in a secure place where only authorised employees have access. - Malicious disruption – hackers who deliberately manipulate tools, not for fraudulent reasons but
because they want to cause mischief or exploit security systems. - Organised crime – sophisticated hackers who are looking to generate money quickly.
What can we do to help?
Phone fraud is a problem; however, rest assured, you can trust us to protect your business. We work with one of the UK’s largest voice services and voice applications, which offer several features to mitigate phone fraud risk.
- Free call-barring on all our on-network services (SIP and Horizon). We can set up a call bar plan at a company level which can be edited on a per user basis.
- Free account monitoring alerts – we set a threshold for total spend on your account; we send an email and or SMS when the threshold is hit. If it looks fraudulent, we can deal with it.
- Free call alert thresholds – we can set a spend threshold on any line identification (CLI); we will be notified if this exceeds the threshold and can help support you.
- Financial indemnity – we set an agreed spend level per customer. Once it hits 100% of the daily limit, we set a cap; effectively, it’s financial indemnity for your peace of mind; we will pick up any cost of fraud above this capped level.
- We can stop the calling of network barred ranges earlier in the process.
- Early monitoring of Wholesale line rental (WLR) calls – third party BT Call Detail Record (CDR) distribution is a day or so behind, so we actively report on their unrated CDRs to catch it earlier.
Phone fraud is a concern for all as costs can quickly accumulate. Therefore you need a knowledgeable and proactive supplier to support your organisation in mitigating the risk of telecoms fraud.
To find out more please contact us, one of our team will be happy to help.
01344 307817
mac@ascot.london
