Fraud Prevention Features and Tips to Prevent, Mitigate and Manage Fraud from Flowroute

Posted on January 20, 2020

Our award-winning customer success team works with our partners and customers every day to prevent telecom fraud. We are also active members of key industry and regulatory organizations that are all working hard on solutions designed to prevent and detect consumer fraud and abuse.

Flowroute also has a robust knowledgebase of fraud-related articles and tutorials to assist you in keeping a handle on your own fraud prevention and management programs. Below are some resources you may want to explore.

  • Set Account Restrictions for Fraud Prevention in the Flowroute Self-Serve Portal:
    • Set 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.
    • Set a Maximum Outbound Rate – 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.
    • 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.
    • Set Up a Destination Whitelist – A Destination Whitelist allows you to choose countries that you’ll always be able to call, regardless of the outgoing rate. You can use a whitelist in addition to setting a maximum outbound rate.
  • Additional Flowroute Fraud Prevention Tips – To maintain integrity on our network as high as possible and to help protect our customers, Flowroute has implemented additional fraud prevention tips and features.
    • Fraud Prevention Tips:
      • Ensure your Flowroute password is very secure.
      • Ensure that all SIP accounts or phone extensions on your PBX use strong passwords.
      • If your PBX has a setting for allowing anonymous inbound calls from the Internet, please disable it.
      • Do comprehensive security audits of your systems.
      • If you are using IP Tables or a nix-based system, you can further automatically “ban” an IP address that is attempting to breach your system if it fails more than a certain number of authentication attempts.
      • If you are using an Asterisk-based system, see our Asterisk Security tips section.
      • Use IP Tables to restrict web traffic and even SIP traffic to your system.
      • Review access logs regularly and keep up to date on security patches and practices for your network services. You may use SIP auditing tools such as SIPvicious.
    • Common Issues in Making an Outbound Call to International Destinations – Due to the higher rates in some destinations, most common fraudulent calls occurs over international destinations. Because of this, we place some basic security measures to protect you.
    • IP Based Authentication in FreePBX – Steps to prepend your Flowroute Tech Prefix to dialed numbers to use IP-Based Authentication in FreePBX.
    • Setting Up Auto-Replenish – Auto-replenishment allows you to automatically top up your account when your balance reaches a certain level in order to save you time.
    • Manual Review Process Guidelines – There are times where our automated fraud detection system will flag an account for additional manual review.
    • SIP Response Codes – Some SIP phones and all PBXs display errors or a prompt using the SIP Response codes, this document contains a list of SIP codes which can help you diagnose problems.

If you are interested in partnering with provider who takes fraud prevention seriously, Sign-up for a Flowroute account today.