Why should you care about telephone fraud?
Telephone fraud is becoming a real problem in the UK. It can result in bill shock and loss of service, which can be disruptive to your business operations.
According to a survey commissioned by the ITSPA which surveyed 1,00 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 which hasn’t been configured properly.
- Hackers will typically target holiday seasons such as Christmas, Easter and bank holidays when the office is quieter or closed for a longer period of time.
- The time period between 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
Telephone 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. You should, therefore, ensure that the 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 wish to cause mischief and or to exploit security systems.
- Organised crime – Sophisticated hackers who are looking to generate money quickly.
What can we do to help?
Telephone fraud is a problem, however, rest assured, you can trust Green Telecom to protect your business. We work with one of the UK’s largest providers of voice services and voice applications, who offer a number of features to help mitigate the risk of phone fraud.
- Call-barring – We can set up a call bar plan at a company level which can be edited on a per-user basis.
- Account monitoring alerts – We can set a threshold for total spend on your account, we will notify you when the threshold is hit. If it looks fraudulent, we can deal with it.
- Call alert thresholds – We can set a spend threshold on any CLI, we will be notified if this exceeds the threshold and help support you.
Telephone 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.
