Fraud Best Practices

What is Fraud? You may have received a notification from Support indicating that an account on your partition was disabled for Fraud. 

It's easy to hear this and get worried that something bad is happening on one of your customer's accounts, but the way our Fraud application detects and disables a "fraudulent account" may not be based on actual Fraudulent activity. We'll be going over the types of fraud actively detects, and what triggers may cause them to occur.

High Fraud 

We characterize High Fraud as calls made to areas that are or have known to be fraudulent areas. These may include places where the price per minute exceeds a certain threshold. For example, there is a town in France that costs 14 dollars a minute just to call! Calls to this place, or places like it, are automatically blocked, and if too many calls go to that same number over a certain amount of time, the account is automatically disabled. A list of what determines to be "High Fraud" areas is located at the bottom of this page.

From here, an email is sent out from Support alerting the partition (an email address should be provided to Support for these situations) that the account is in breach and has been disabled. The account will be unable to make any new calls, local or otherwise, until the account has been reactivated. 

The Threshold counts for High Fraud are 20 calls within a 3600-second time frame (1 hour), 15 calls in a 300-second time frame, or 10 calls in a 60-second time frame. 

International 

Accounts disabled for International Fraud have made too many calls to international numbers within the set time frame. For example, a US customer making calls to England, or a Canadian customer making calls to Argentina. These are all allowed calls, provided they are allowed to make them, but if they go over a certain limit, the account is automatically disabled. 

These thresholds work a bit differently. There are two instances that has noticed when actual fraud occurs with international dialing. The first instance where an account is disabled is if 10 international calls are made in the first minute. The second occurs when 25 international calls are made in 5 minutes. The third instance is it they go over 50 calls within an hour. They are automatically disabled, and support will notify the email specified for their partition. 

National/High Call Volume

Accounts that are disabled due to National or High Call Volume are accounts that make over a certain number of calls per time frame. This might get confusing for businesses, but we have the ability to provide custom thresholds per account, if they make a lot of calls, are a call center, or are periodically reaching the fraud thresholds. Generally, these are set to 150 calls per 5 minutes. 

Thresholds

A threshold is a set number of calls allowed to be made within a certain time frame. If this is ever breached, support gets notified.

These thresholds can be tweaked for higher volume accounts. Please feel free to contact Support or your Customer Success Manager to find out if the thresholds are correct for the account in question.

High Fraud Areas