BillingScore, a new solution which provides security and insurance against artificially inflated traffic, recently announced the launch of its new service that will protect and insure SMS aggregators and service providers against fraudulent activity.
Artificially inflated traffic (AIT) currently costs the premium rate and mobile purchasing industry both financially and in terms of credibility. Launching with the award-winning mobile messaging provider Txtlocal (www.txtlocal.co.uk) as its first customer, BillingScore will save money for providers as well as improve the credibility of the mobile purchasing industry.
“We’ve already saved tens of thousands of pounds with the BillingScore solution,” said Darren Daws, Managing Director at Txtlocal. “On top of that, we’ve been able to detect and limit other potentially fraudulent transactions. This solution provides a sense of security to a service provider such as ourselves and as more and more service providers and aggregators adopt the service we will be able to drive out fraudulent activity from our sector.”
Whilst being a valuable and important way to transact, like any payment method, the mobile purchasing industry has long been the subject of spurious activity. Through a variety of methods the mobile purchasing industry has lost a lot of money to fraudsters. One of the main difficulties of spotting such traffic is that as such high volumes of legitimate traffic pass through the various systems, it can be hard to spot the fraudulent transactions.
BillingScore assesses the traffic in real-time, across a number of different data points. By using the proprietary algorithms developed through years of experience in the sector, BillingScore can look for patterns and unusual behaviour that might indicate AIT (artificially inflated traffic). The system provides a value for each transaction and can even block the transaction from taking place if it fails to meet the pre-set criteria.
“Sometimes for service providers and aggregators, looking for fraud within their extremely hard-working systems can be a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack,” said Chris Newell, CEO of BillingScore. “BillingScore is designed to root out those needles to provide added security against fraudulent transactions.”
Newell continued, “We aim to give the service providers and aggregators the peace of mind that they will never again have to face an operator claw back. We even offer a money-back guarantee against that.”
To launch the service, BillingScore is attending Virtual Goods World Europe, held in London between 15th-17th November. The show will look at many different facets of the virtual goods world, of which payment is a big element. Chris Newell of BillingScore will be speaking at the event today about Mobile Payment Fraud.
With services such as Premium SMS already well established and the rise of such services as Payfoit, mobile purchasing is growing and growing in popularity. Retailers recognise that in most markets more people own mobile handsets than credit cards and so will push out more and more services through mobile purchasing. However, as mobile purchasing grows and the number of transcations increase, it will be even harder to spot the fraudsters without services like BillingScore.