To combat the growing amount of fraud in the VoIP industry, Flowroute is offering some fraud prevention features.
How fraud prevention works
Flowroute analyzes your outbound call patterns to various destinations and creates an average metric that accounts for call duration and cost. If there is a sudden increase in traffic to a destination, the account is flagged, and in-progress calls become automatically suspended. The user receives a notification via e-mail and can either reauthorize the destination or leave it blocked.
To view your Fraud Control options
- Log on to Flowroute Manage.
- Click Preferences on the left panel, and then select the Fraud Control tab. The Fraud Control page appears, showing you your current settings and allowing you to set as deep of a level of restrictions on your account as you want. Click on any of the items below to jump to its corresponding section:
Outbound SIP Credentials
The default option is Enabled. Only click on Disable Credentials once you've made sure your IP address is on the "Outbound Allowed IPs" list (one of the tabs under Interconnection), and have read our article on Setting up IP-Based Authentication for Outbound Calls.
Setting up IP-based Authentication and disabling outbound SIP credentials prevents an outsider from using your SIP credentials to place fraudulent outbound calls on your account and helps secure your account against known avenues of compromise.
Maximum Outbound Rate
This feature sets a maximum rate for outbound calls. When a call placed to a destination (usually outside the US) costs more than the value set here, we will deny it. The maximum outbound rate tool prevents you from calling expensive locations and generally prevents an intruder or a compromised system from dialing high-cost areas on your account. To set this up, check out our article on how to Set a Maximum Outbound Rate.
International Calling (new) - disabled by default
When International Calling is disabled:
- Destinations outside of the US and Canada are always blocked.
- Whitelisting and destination restriction settings for countries outside of the US and Canada are ignored.
Destination Restriction
By default, your account is protected by a fraud detection system that continually monitors and profiles your common call destinations and call volume. Should your call volume suddenly spike to unexpected or previously undialed locations, this system may block specific destinations that are out of character for your account. If this happens, check the list on this page again. You'll see the destinations that have been blocked by this fraud system and can choose to unblock them.
Destination Whitelist
This setting is ignored when international calling is disabled. If you add destinations to this whitelist, calls to those destinations will never be auto-blocked by our fraud system (international calling must be enabled for this purpose). Exempt from our fraud detection system and will never be auto-blocked after a burst of high call volume. Use this to guarantee delivery of calls to the destinations you most commonly call.
An additional feature is a toggle for the "Strict Whitelist" - enabling this feature will altogether disable our automatic fraud detection system, and calls will only be allowed to destinations on the whitelist. This setting is ignored when international calling is disabled. For a more detailed description, see Set up a Destination Whitelist.