Twilio Verify’s Automatic SMS Fraud Detection is now in Public Beta

Twilio Verify has launched Automatic SMS Fraud Detection in Public Beta to help our Verify customers combat fraud, improve verification conversion rates and minimize ongoing maintenance burden.

SMS fraud has been a serious concern for all companies that use SMS as a method of phone verification. Some companies have been hit with significant charges incurred due to fraudulent activities on their accounts.

Verify is Twilio’s out-of-the-box solution for SMS one-time passcodes (OTP), where customers can quickly get onboarded and start verifying their end users during account sign-up and login. While SMS is a convenient channel to communicate with end users around the globe, its convenience and success have attracted the attention of fraudsters. One type of fraud is called SMS traffic pumping, where attackers take advantage of phone number input fields to receive a one-time password, an app download link, or anything else used via SMS. The fraudsters send SMS to a set of numbers they control and receive a share of the generated revenue.

Various methods and models have attempted to catch these fraudulent message attempts both on our customer’s side and on Twilio’s internal systems to identify the fraudsters and stop them in their tracks.

Fraud detection leads to real savings

Earlier this year, we launched Automatic SMS Fraud Detection (ASFD) in a pilot with a limited number of customers who've shown significant results in blocking fraudulent verification attempts and improving conversion rates*. This approach has proven to be remarkably successful at catching fraud while not blocking legitimate users. ASFD enhanced the user experience and reduced spending by eliminating the associated charges.

Several fraud-prone countries hit one large social media business using an all-purpose SMS API with artificially inflated traffic. However, they could not block those countries entirely since they transact with real users there. They decided to switch from the SMS API to Verify for One-time Passcode (OTP) traffic.

Immediately, the business recognized a +27% increase in their SMS conversion rate, and a -42% decrease in cost-per-user. By blocking the fraudulent SMS traffic pumping, the customer saved more than $300k in the first month, with an anticipated $1.57M savings over time.

Get started with Automatic SMS Fraud Detection in your account

By enabling Automatic SMS Fraud Detection, Twilio Verify begins monitoring the traffic and eliminates the majority of these fraudulent SMS messages elegantly with minimal input from our customers**.

Automatic SMS Fraud Detection is available to you at no additional cost, as part of our Verify API. Learn more about Automatic SMS Fraud Detection.

We can’t wait to see what you build!

*Conversion Rate = Total number of correctly verified OTP codes divided by the total number of messages sent containing the OTP codes

**Customers can enable this feature in their Console

Nader Attar is a product management veteran with over a decade of experience leading teams designing and launching products within the communications, PaaS, and CPaaS industries. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology and has been with companies such as Network General and Ericsson. You can reach Nader at nattar[at]twilio.com