Introduction
SMS is one of the most unavoidable communication channels in the world as every mobile phone has this facility. These days Enterprises and financial organizations are backing away from this channel and looking for secure paths to deal with their customers as SMS is no longer believed to be a secure path.
SMS fraud also known as Smishing, or SMS phishing is the act of committing fraud through text messages and trying to get potential victims who can easily pass their personal information. These victims unknowingly, get trapped which enables fraudsters to steal sensitive financial and personal information without having to break through the firewall security defenses of a computer or network.
SMS fraud is very harmful as they lead to identity theft, network manipulation, and moreover financial theft, thus ruining the customer’s trust in the primary communication channel. Unfortunately, people tend to ignore such cautions and lose money and thus giving chance to fraudsters to fool and defraud people.
How are SMS Fraud Alerts Being Set Up?
Some of the well-known fraud types are as follows:
SMS Spoofing – The location and identity of the sender are spoofed to imitate a known organization.
SIM Farms – Several SIM cards are used to issue business / organizational SMS to avoid paying enterprise SMS rates.
SMS Faking – Signalling parameters like firewall security are manipulated to fake the operator’s details, causing customers to receive unsolicited SMS.
SMS Bypass – Traffic is routed through alternate networks leading to a loss of revenue for telecom industry
SMS Spamming – SMS is embedded with a callback premium rate number thus incurring high charges.
SMS Malware – Hackers breach MNO (Mobile Network Operator) systems to steal sensitive user information.
The two main ways of doing SMS fraud, which is highly prevailing these days are:
1) Payment link scam:
In this scam, the fraudsters send fake text messages to trick you into giving them your personal information like your password, account number, or Social Security number. Once these details are shared they gain access to your email, bank, or other accounts. This information can also be sold to other scammers. Scammers often ask you to click on links in text messages by promising you something like free gifts, lottery, gift cards or coupons. These SMS also offer a low or no-interest credit card or a promise to help you pay off your loans like home loans, vehicle loans, or even student loans.
2) Auto-installing mobile malware:
Scammers also send fake messages which confirms that they have information about your account or a transaction through links and SMS forwarding app. These carry messages like they’ve noticed some suspicious activity on your account or claim there’s a problem with your payment information or send you a fake invoice and tell you to contact them if you didn’t authorize the purchase or send you a package delivery notification. These messages generally show urgency, threat, or warning to try to get the recipient to take immediate action. Some messages might install harmful malware on your phone that steals your personal or financial information without you realizing it.
In both scams, fraudsters make contact through text messages, social media, or phone calls, pretending to be like a bank official or customer-care executive from a service provider company.
How are Telecom providers working to protect against SMS fraud?
To secure their SMS ecosystems Telecom companies need a diverse ecosystem of SMS players to forge international connections between people and businesses. The FBI has reported of $54 million was stolen through smishing and phishing scams in 2020. Around 2,40,000 victim complaints were reported in 2020, whereas it was just 1,14,000 in 2019 and 26,000 in 2018. Therefore, we can say that the numbers are really staggering. SMS messages which aimed at stealing their personal data are reported to be received by one in every four smartphone users. and 71% of mobile users are concerned about smishing scams.
Cyber security firm Cloud SEK has found several simple online complaint portals with domains like online- complaint.com or customer-complaint.com which targeted Indian banking customers. There are multiple domains like accountsecureverify.com, online-complaint.accountsecureverify.com, and secure accounts which use the same method of doing things as the original one and have identical templates. Therefore, our telecom providers must work on upgrading their fraud management system to mitigate any form of risk proactively and protect against SMS fraud.
The ways by which these companies can protect against fraud through SMS can be summarised below:
1. Advanced machine learning methodologies
Develop advanced supervised and unsupervised models with historic data and enforce machine learning with the help of which the operator can make decisions based on information as it happens, empowering them to anticipate and take proactive action in identifying the calls and SMS for any deviations. Thus, it can help detect unexpected messages with an accuracy of 98.5%.
2. Signalling Security
Operators’ FMS (Flexible manufacturing system) should monitor signaling traffic from layer 3 to layer 7 in real-time to secure the network signaling exploitation on Voice, and SMS services. With signaling, security operators can detect and prevent scam calls like Wangiri, IRSF, and CLI spoofing in real time.
3. Voice and SMS Firewalls
SMS firewalls are among the most popular approaches therefore a carrier-grade threat-focused firewall capable of overturning threats should be installed by operators. These firewalls monitor the outgoing and incoming traffic from/to your network and block malicious/spam calls depending on the rules configured within the firewall.
Techniques such as real-time signaling analytics, heuristics, and advanced ML techniques give the users visibility into SMS interactions so operators can identify any SMS fraud.
4. Real-time threat Intelligence
Operators should have access to real-time threat intelligence so that they can hotlists or block scam calls in real-time.
5. Subscriber/Customer Awareness
The operators and the government through social media should frequently make the customers aware of the increased number of scam calls and the ways they can use to avoid becoming the victim of these calls. This will help the customer in reducing their monetary losses. Though scam calls and SMS cannot be eliminated, by having the right fraud protection strategy and following it can reduce these frauds. The operators should deliver high-quality service to their customers while protecting and ensuring that customers do not fall prey to these scams.
A few things that the customers should be made aware of are:
1) Never open any link or share your financial details on messages received from an unknown person or entity.
2)In case of any grievance against a bank or a card company, they should visit their official website or look for customer care numbers and then contact that number or email only.
3)Never search for contact numbers or customer care numbers on the internet of bank and credit card companies.
4)Never respond to an unknown caller's request to visit any portal or click to open any link sent on message (SMS/email) or download any app as suggested by the caller.
Conclusion
Always remember that banks and credit card companies have all your personal details, and they NEVER ask you to share these details via phone or email or submit it online. Use a good quality anti-virus to protect you from viruses, malware, ransomware, and remote access.
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