It’s estimated that up to 84% of South West organisations could be vulnerable to a growing trend in ‘toll fraud’, which is when hackers gain unlawful access to your phone system and begin making calls to international or long distance numbers using your telephone lines.
Toll fraud itself has been around for a while, with the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA) estimated that $46.3 billion in losses were attributed to toll fraud in 2013; the worrying element is that four years on and that figure has swelled, as have the number of businesses that remain vulnerable to attack. Should it fall victim,it could be your organisation that is left out of pocket.
So what can you do to protect your organisation?
We use the NEC InGuard system to defend our clients against potential toll fraud. This works in a similar way to your bank’s security systems by looking for suspicious transactions. With InGuard your outgoing calls are monitored 24/7 for suspicious activity and as soon as anything out of the ordinary is detected an alert is sent to the designated recipients within your organisation. In a way it’s very similar to a bank’s approach if there were purchases deemed unusual on your bank card or account.
In the event that there’s a lot of unusual activity the system can prevent further calls from being made instantly before more calls are made because a toll fraud bill can quickly rack up.
How would it work with your organisation?
The important thing to say here is that the system won’t be sending you daily emails alerting you to run of the mill calls that have been made, nor can it listen to the calls nor save them anywhere for data security purposes.
The simple set-up of our Toll Fraud is based around your organisation’s specific call patterns, e.g. office hours, public holidays, length of a call, excessive calls rates, etc. From these parameters a set of rules are created. If a rule is broken, an alert is sent. Not only does this detect a suspected toll fraud attack, it can also help prevent internal abuse of the phone system. You can make amends to your rule settings (e.g. changes in office hours) remotely via a browser for easy administration.
Ten reasons your organisation needs this toll fraud protection
1. The average cost of a toll fraud attack is £13,000 and there can often be no way of recovering this cost.
2. Occurrences of toll fraud have increased by 15% in recent years.
3. It is estimated that 84% of organisations could currently be vulnerable to a toll fraud attack.
4. The system helps to reduce the risk of these attacks being successful.
5. The system reacts instantly to attack.
6. The system is tailored specifically to the needs of your organisation and call patterns.
7. The system can act as a strong deterrent to internal telephone abuse.
8. There is no maintenance required – the system ‘sits in the background’ until any alerts are triggered.
9. There are no extra costs to your computer servers (unlike some other solutions currently on the marketplace).
10. The system is easy to use and alerts can be simply switched off when telephone usage is found to be legitimate.
For more information on how Equations Voice and Data can protect your organisation from potentially expensive toll fraud attacks please give the team a call today on 01237 420010.
