Toll fraud is a phenomenon, which is affecting more and more businesses. It is the term given when an unauthorised individual(s) attempts to gain access to your telephone system. This is usually via external voicemail passwords, in an effort to gain control of the telephone system functionality.
Once access has been achieved, they then hijack the system and route calls, often to destinations with an expensive rate charge such as international or premium destinations, through the telephone system as though someone is making those calls directly from a handset connected to it.
Toll Fraud can potentially cost businesses thousands
Openreach manages the UK’s telephony infrastructure and manages all calls over its network. It then passes on these costs to the communication providers. Openreach’s view is that it is unable to distinguish calls made legitimately or otherwise from a network perspective. Therefore all calls made from a customer’s telephone system will be charged for irrespective of whether the calls are the product of illegal activity or not.
Initially you may not even be aware that the activity is taking place. This illegal activity often gets carried out at night or weekends. The first a business knows about it is when they receive an invoice from their communications provider for potentially thousands of pounds.
Real-time Toll Fraud detection
Datasharp realises that the effect of Toll Fraud can be financially significant and will seriously impact a business. As a result, our team have worked incredibly hard to produce a real time toll fraud detection product, which enables us to help our customers protect themselves from this activity.
Protect your business from Toll Fraud
At Datasharp we receive your call records from Openreach on an hourly basis and our detection software ‘LineGuard’ monitors all your accounts, in real time, to quickly identify and take action to reduce the impact of any toll fraud should it happen. We are pleased to provide this service to all of our customers free of charge.
LineGuard protection runs 24 hours a day 365 day per year. Should we detect fraud, we will alert you to the situation and advise of the action we can take to prevent further unauthorised activity. If we are unable to contact you, we will automatically take action to prevent further calls being made until your system has been secured.
Other products are available to prevent unauthorised access to your telephone system including voice firewalls for example.
