With Christmas and New Year just around the corner you must be vigilant as the holiday period can be a prosperous time for fraudsters, especially during a time when businesses are known to be closed for extended periods.
Toll fraud is when an unauthorised individual hacks into your telephone system< in an effort to gain control and use it to make calls at your expense. These calls are often to destinations with expensive rate charge such as international or premium, resulting in you being handed a huge bill.
Toll fraud can potentially cost businesses thousands – especially during the holidays
Over the holiday period many businesses only run a skeleton staff or are closed. Fraudsters know this and take advantage, with fewer people around they could be undetected for a longer period of time. Keep in mind these general guidelines to protect your business from toll fraud this Christmas:
- Monitor calls to make sure there is no abnormal activity
- Restrict outbound calling outside of your working hours
- Restrict call forwarding and transfer features to only numbers you trust
- Change all default passwords and settings on your telephone system
- Look out for anything that points towards hacking – the inability to get an outbound line could be an indicator of high volumes of traffic through your system.
Toll fraud detection products
At Datasharp we realise toll fraud can have a significant financial impact on your business and have developed a real time toll fraud detection product to help protect our customers. ‘LineGuard’ monitors all your accounts in real time, to quickly identify and take action to reduce the impact of any toll fraud should it happen. We are provide this service to all of our customers free of charge. Other products are available to prevent unauthorised access to your telephone system such as voice firewalls.
