What risk do disposable phone numbers pose to your brands? Here's how Com Olho can assist!

Pandemic has led to a rise in fraud rates with criminals looking to take advantage of the disruption of both businesses and their clients. It is anticipated that there will be over 7.5 billion internet users by 2030, hence it’s more important than ever to think about how to safeguard your business against fraud and improve the digital customer experience. Last year, every dollar lost due to fraud cost the business $3.60, an increase of 7% from previous years. Fraud is expensive and impacts negatively on both businesses and consumers.

What are disposable phone numbers?

Disposable phone numbers (also known as temporary or discarded numbers), is a fake phone number that can be used for a limited or temporary period. This visible phone number is used during checkout or account sign-up to avoid providing a legitimate phone number and is generally used by many to get OTP account authentication for temporary access. The number expires after a certain amount of time – usually about 10 minutes. This means that those who need and use this service for longer-period of time will have to get new ones after every 10 minutes of use.

The various ways in which these temporary numbers can be used for harmful or fraudulent motives are growing day by day as maleficent look for novel ways to conceal their identity or emulate others.

1. People use disposable phone numbers in situations where they do not want to provide their permanent numbers. For example, the missing number allows the seller on a website of classified ads and community notices to stop the service from the phone number once the advertised item has been purchased.

2. Another drawback is identity theft where people are in contact with strangers for online dating or doing some kind of fraud. These temporary numbers raise a concern about the nature of online identities, as phone numbers are now associated with people's identities.

3. Fake ownership will damage the seller's services and cause great losses. For example, the committer may bypass your phone verification process and sign up for multiple accounts to take advantage of your services. This leads to CRM deterioration.

4. Another disadvantage is that if someone gets access to any information on your disposable phone number – such as your name or home address – they might locate you more easily and quickly than if they had access to your permanent phone number.

Because phone numbers are increasingly being used as unique identifiers, connecting user data across multiple databases, which also contain other users data, disposable phone numbers raise a concern about the nature of online identities. Numbers should be validated at the point of entry into your system to ensure that only real, genuine, and qualified leads are captured, keeping your user database clean and preventing fraud.

How can Com Olho help?

In our research, Com Olho’s system examined over ten thousand of websites to reveal where maleficent use of disposable phone numbers can be found. Com Olho introduced a SaaSless real time API disposable phone numbers detection which regularly scans the web and active phone numbers from a variety of sources to detect disposable phone numbers and verify fraud. At the moment, we have over 10K phone numbers currently in use around the world.

Benefits of Com Olho’s Offering:

1. Identity Theft Prevention - Disposable numbers raise a concern about the nature of online identities. Using our real time API Identify the real identity associated with the number using this offering.

2. CRM Improvement - Validate phone numbers at the point of entry into your system to ensure that only real, genuine and qualified leads are captured, keeping your user database clean and preventing fraud.

3. Real-Time API - Experience SaaSless real time API to determine the validity of the numbers entered, as well as discover and remove disposable numbers from your database.

Schedule a personalised walkthrough of this offerings.