Two Types of Online Fraud Everyone Can Do Without
DOTS Telephone Verification Steps Up Site Security
The threat from computer crimes and other online security breaches has barely slowed, never mind stopped, according to a recent survey of 538 security professionals in U.S. corporations that was conducted by the Computer Security Institute and the FBI’s Computer Intrusion Squad.1
One such crime is online identity theft, and the two most popular ways to carry it out is though Phishing2 and Pharming3. Phishers bait you using provocative fake emails that send you to fake sites, and are successful because there is still a large part of the Internet population that is unaware of their tactics. Pharmers gather unsuspecting victims by redirecting legitimate URLs to bogus sites.
Armed with the information they harvest from consumer inputs, Phishers’ and Pharmers’ activities account for billions of dollars a year in online fraud. Companies today can play a key role in protecting their customers and themselves by fending off agents of these Phishers and Pharmers; stepping up site security and making it more difficult for them to use their ill-gotten information.
Counter online crime by integrating a live telephone verification service that communicates directly with the person interacting with your site. During a transaction, after (s)he enters his/her phone number into your Web form, the service calls or texts back with a Personalized Identification Number (PIN) that (s)he must then enter into the form before continuing on. This checks to see if the phone number is working and correct. At this point, fraudsters generally fall out. They thrive on impersonating others and doing things that can’t be traced, so, most likely, their input phone numbers will be fake and they won’t be able to complete their transactions.
Take extra measures. To guard against those that try to trick the system by using others’ phones, Service Objects’ DOTS Telephone Verification goes even further by building in optional operations you can use to identify the caller or validate the information your contact types in.
Customize your security system. You can deploy one or several operations depending on the conditions you set. For example, if you know that there is a high rate of fraud coming from a particular region, you can flag calls coming in from that region, and before delivering a PIN, without delay, check the input phone number against the listed name associated with it. You might also decide to check the contact’s geographical location or other information, such as address listing, to verify that the person placing the call is who (s)he says (s)he is.
If a phone number doesn’t match up to the person interacting with your site, set a condition and create another step in your verification process requesting further information. If the contact is truly a customer, then compliance should be no problem; but if (s)he is up to no good, this is probably where (s)he will abandon his or her mission.
CONCLUSION:
As long as the Internet exists and people continue to do business online, Phishers and Pharmers are not going away. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Internet users are duped every day. You can help protect your customers and your company by thwarting these fraudsters’ attempts to use the information they harvest from unwitting consumers.
Step up the security on your site by verifying phone numbers with a live telephone verification service that not only communicates directly with each person that interacts with your site, but also has the capacity to validate that his or her information is correct.
Verify and validate: a powerful combination that helps keep your online customers and business secure.
For more information about DOTS Telephone Verification, please visit: http://www.serviceobjects.com/products/phone/telephone-verification
1 Excerpt from Computerworld, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/62002/Security_Statistics_
2 Phishing is a method of “baiting” users to give up personal information by sending out legitimate looking emails that contain links that go to fake sites designed to look equally as legitimate as the emails. Phishers are impersonators claiming to be legitimate companies (banks, popular shopping sites, etc.) in order to scam users into giving up private account information. Phishing, in a way, is similar to fishing with a net. Phishers throw their “nets” out, bait users to enter, and eventually drag in an adequate percentage of victims.
3 Pharming is more insidious in that it doesn’t just rely on bait to gather and harvest users’ personal information; even the most Internet savvy user may unwittingly become a victim. Pharmers operate by re-directing Internet users to bogus Web sites— even if they type into their browsers the exact address of their banks or other online services. So basically, someone believing that (s)he is interacting with his/her bank is actually providing the pharmer with his/her bank information, social security number and/or other private information that can be used to perpetrate a bevy of offline as well as online criminal activities.
Add comment June 11, 2010
Plug Into Web Services without Breaking a Sweat
Introducing the Address Validation
Do-it-Yourself Plugin for Salesforce.com
Click image to enlarge
Click image to enlarge
When I can get greater functionality out of my work applications without getting the tech staff involved, it makes my day. Sometimes I just need a no-muss-no-fuss solution that doesn’t require me to fill out a time and expense requisition for help. There are also times I need things done quicker than professional business manners allows for. I wouldn’t want my co-workers to confuse my enthusiasm with pushiness, after all.
I think Service Objects’ development team had people like me in mind when they came up with this new plugin for Salesforce.com. It’s so easy to install that everyone with basic computer skills can do it, and immediately start validating contact addresses, in real time, from within their Salesforce.com applications— regardless of technical background and without breaking a sweat.
Prior to the development of this plugin, implementing Address validation services required programmers with advanced programming skills, familiarity with various technologies like XML, SOAP, and web services and an understanding of Salesforce.com’s development platform as well as their proprietary programming language.
Today, no programming time or expertise is required. If you’re working in Salesforce.com and want to start validating your contact addresses immediately, then you’ve got to try out this Address Validation plugin.
To use our web services, you’ll need to sign up for a free evaluation Trial Key or purchase a Production Key for DOTS Address Validation. Use your own data with our Address validation services to compare and correct your data entries with USPS and Canada Post database information.
Download our easy 12 step installation guide and see for yourself how easy it is to install.
Add comment May 11, 2010
Reverse Phone Lookup: Token-Based Pricing Helps You Keep Your “Pot of Gold”
What do St. Patrick’s Day and a reverse phone lookup service have in common?
If the reverse phone lookup service is GeoPhone Plus from Service Objects, the answer is: a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. 
An advanced reverse phone lookup service, like GeoPhone Plus, gives you the ability to identify detailed contact information for landlines, VOIP, wireless and toll-free numbers for both residences and businesses – all from a supplied phone number.
This is a great solution but where GeoPhone also excels is its pricing model.
In standard pricing models, you would pay the same “per transaction” fee for each reverse phone lookup attempt, regardless of whether or not detailed contact data exists for that phone number. But all phone numbers and the data available are not created equally. With “token-based” pricing, you pay only when a successful match is made for the phone number. The amount of tokens charged per transaction depends on the level of detail and the quality of contact data available for that phone number.
For example:
A major grocery retailer is using GeoPhone Plus to perform reverse phone lookup on phone numbers provided by their customers. They use the detailed contact data (name, address, etc) to have a better idea of where their customers are coming from to help make decisions about targeted marketing efforts and potential locations for future stores. Each time their software service requests information on a specific phone number, GeoPhone Plus hits multiple data sources to find detailed contact information for that phone number. GeoPhone Plus returns contact information on all types of phone numbers such as landlines, VOIP, wireless and toll-free. The type and level of contact data available varies depending on the type of phone number.
In standard pricing models, you would pay the same “per transaction” fee for each reverse phone lookup attempt, regardless of whether or not detailed contact data exists for that phone number. But all phone numbers and the data available are not created equally. With “token-based” pricing, you pay only when a successful match is made for the phone number. The amount of tokens charged per transaction depends on the level of detail and the quality of contact data available for that phone number.
Contact us for more information on GeoPhone Plus and token-based pricing.
Add comment March 17, 2010
Businesses Gain Marketing and Customer Insight by Appending Contact Info to Phone Numbers
You can learn a lot from a phone number. On my home phone, my caller ID let’s me know who is calling: my Best Friend or the National Survey Calling Center? With this info, I can make a split-second decision on what to do. To answer or not to answer.
For businesses, the customer’s phone number offers a different sort of intelligence. And I am not talking about your mom’s caller ID. Reverse Phone Lookup Services like DOTS GeoPhone Plus offer businesses critical data regarding customers and prospective customers. With a service like this, a phone number can provide a business with the following information:
- Residence or Business
- Residential Contact or Business Name
- Associated Address
- Telephone Provider Info (Carrier, City, State and Latitude and Longitude)
- Line type (wireless, landline, VOIP or toll free)
So what can a business do with this data? Here are just a few examples of how some of our customers are using this information:
Online Retailer
Use phone number and appended information to track potentially fraudulent transactions by comparing the appended information with the user-entered address information.
Phone/Mail Order Catalog Call Center
Auto-populating CRM and Contact Center databases: Auto-populating customer contact data reduces the chance of human error and typos while increasing the efficiencies of call center operators.
Laser Eye Surgery Center
Analyzing address and location data to determine future marketing and media spend. Having this detailed information about callers allows marketers to know where their customers and prospects are coming from to determine where to put their money for direct marketing campaigns, tv, etc.
National Grocery Chain
By collecting customer phone numbers at Check-Out, national grocery chains gain valuable insight on a store-by-store basis regarding where their customers are coming from. This helps to inform decisions about future store locations as well as targeted marketing campaigns.
How would having this level of contact information improve your business operations?
1 comment March 11, 2010
Why Google Maps Isn’t a Good Substitute for Address Validation
What is the difference between Address Validation and Google Maps?
Deliverability, deliverability, deliverability. Okay, there are a few others, but that’s the big one. Just because Google Maps places a marker on a map when you input an address, does not mean that you can deliver mail there, nor that a property even exists at that marker.
Take the following “address”:
4130 Calle Real
Santa Barbara, CA 93110
As you can see, Google Maps says this is a valid address and puts its marker next to an empty field with no buildings. As you’d expect this is not a deliverable address and will be returned to sender.
The reason for this discrepancy is that Google Maps is not an Address Validator, it is a Geolocation Estimator that uses addresses to aid in its estimation.
Imagine two people each holding a ruler with the numbers 1 – 12 printed on it. One of them is blind-folded. If they were asked to point to the number “6″, how would each one go about it?
The one who could see all the numbers would just find the 6 and point to it. The one who was blind-folded would probably guess that 6 was printed right in the middle of the ruler and point there.
But what if the ruler was missing the number “6″? Well, the person who could see all the numbers would state that the number was invalid, and the blindfolded person would point to an empty space in the middle of the ruler.
Google is blindfolded. They know street names, and the numbers on the endpoints, but very little about the numbers in-between. Often they assume a continuous and evenly-spaced number line and point to where they’d guess your number is.
Admittedly, this is an extreme example. But what it demonstrates primarily is that Google Maps does not have a strong knowledge of valid primary numbers within street segments and therefore cannot be used to determine deliverability of an address. The only thing that can reliably determine deliverability is a CASS-Certified Address Validation Engine that can match an address against the USPS database of valid addresses.
Posted: by Donnie K.
1 comment March 3, 2010
LeadsCon 2010… Its all about Quality Leads
I am out in Las Vegas attending LeadsCon 2010. THE Lead Generation Conference. After day one, the event is off to a great start. What I have noticed is that throughout the sessions, a recurring theme is Quality.
Quality Data. Quality Leads. Quality relationships between lead buyers and lead sellers.
I couldn’t agree more. The internet is rife with bad data and bad leads. And passing off this bad data as a “lead” is one of the key reasons for friction between Lead Buyers and Lead Sellers. So what is the answer?
“Keeping honest people–honest.” Contact validation is a critical component in this process. Whether you are a lead buyer or a lead seller, contact validation can help ensure the validity and contactability of a lead. By looking at a variety of data points for each contact, Lead Validation will help determine whether or not a lead should be accepted, rejected or reviewed.
The skinny on the benefits:
Lead Sellers- Improve your standings with buyers by increasing your percentage of valid/actionable leads. Demand higher price point per lead.
Lead Buyers- Only buy the leads that are the highest quality and likelihood of contactability.
Visit us on the web to see how our Contact Validation solutions can help you ensure the leads you are buying or selling are really going to drive more business to your bottom line.
Posted by: Gretchen N.
Add comment February 24, 2010
Why Cross Checking is Important When Using a Contact Validation Web Service
I have been working with web services for over 6 years now and have helped many companies both big and small to resolve their frustration with the online world of bogus lead chaos and bad affiliate programs.
With all of the information and services available to help validate your inbound leads you need to make sure that it is doing more than just a simple check for validity. There are a lot of Lead Validation services out there claiming that they are the best, but let’s really ask ourselves, what are they doing that is so unique? How will they really be able to assure you that they are catching your bad leads?
Good Question.
Add comment February 17, 2010
Need to Verify Addresses? 5 Things to Look for in a Service Provider
Nearly every company doing business on the web today can benefit from performing simple validation and verification against the contact forms on their website. Each piece of customer contact data has the potential to hinder a company’s business processes if the information is inaccurate, incomplete or fraudulent. Perhaps the most key–and often most inaccurate–piece of information captured is the postal address.
Research shows that performing validation and verification on addresses can help businesses improve deliverability and shipments, reduce overhead spent following up on bad data, and reduce waste associated with Undeliverable Mail and over-production of direct mail pieces.
A quick search for Address Verification or Address Validation on a search engine like Google™ will yield pages of results for companies offering tools to validate and standardize postal addresses.
So how does a company seeking to improve communication with customers and reduce their direct mail waste, choose the right service provider?
Here are 5 important things to look for in an Address Verification or Address Validation service:
(more…)
Add comment February 10, 2010
What is a Credit Card BIN and How These Six Little Numbers can Protect Your Bottom Line
For businesses and consumers, processing credit card transactions has come a long way. Previously businesses needed two forms of identification, to physically look at the card, review the signature on the back…then lay the card flat on card imprinter, place carbon paper over the card and force the handle from left to right for 3 carbon copies. 
This process was neither good for the business, who had no way to actually verify if the card had funds available on it; nor was it good for the consumer, who now had 3 unsecure copies of their credit card floating around for anyone to use for mail orders or internet orders.
The advent of electronic credit card processing and later the use of Card Verification (CVV) codes have dramatically changed the game and now go a long way to protect both businesses and consumers.
The proliferation of pre-paid credit cards and gift cards, however, has chipped away at some of that protection as far as businesses are concerned. Pre-paid cards are essentially “anonymous” and businesses do not have many options for protecting themselves against the improper use of these cards. This is especially true for businesses who’s “goods” are recurring service fees or incremental fees based on usage that must be billed monthly for example. Because there is no “line of credit”, a pre-paid card holder may have the amount of the fee available for the first authorization, but will not likely have it available for subsequent months.
1 comment February 2, 2010
Service Objects Customers Benefit From Seventh Straight Month of 100% Availability
At Service Objects, our commitment to contact data quality doesn’t stop at the data services we provide. Availability and access to that data is critical to our business and our customer’s businesses. Ensuring our data is available “on-demand” is something we take very seriously. For the seventh straight month, we are pleased to report 100% Availability of our DOTS Web Services.
To monitor the performance and accuracy of our services we use several automated quality assurance tools. Our motto is to test the accuracy and speed of every service, every operation, every hour, every day: 24/7/365. On a typical day at Service Objects we perform over 2,000 internal self-tests on our delivery network for a variety of systems. We also utilize 3rd Party systems to monitor true uptime, application availability and performance of our DOTS Web Services as an additional, impartial test. One of these 3rd Party systems is AlertSite.
“External monitoring is essential for measuring and understanding customers’ experience of today’s applications, which often includes a number of participants in the application delivery supply chain,” said Ken Godskind, Chief Strategy Officer for AlertSite. “In providing full disclosure of their AlertSite metrics, Service Objects offers admirable transparency to the users that count on their services.”
AlertSite is a hosted provider of Web performance products. AlertSite maintains 40 monitoring stations in data centers on every continent but Antarctica. They ensure and provide independent analysis of our DOTS Web Service Network to track and verify our systems are always available and running at peak performance. Using AlertSite, we test our data as often as every five minutes from multiple cities around the globe. Real-time alerts are generated and logged if page errors or performance problems occur. Service Objects is the only provider of contact validation web services that uses an independent third party to corroborate the company’s performance and fulfillment of its Service Level Agreement (SLA).
“Third-party monitoring of our network, applications and performance is critical for maximum reliability”, said Geoffrey Grow, CEO and Founder of Service Objects, “not only does AlertSite give us the confidence our network is running worldwide, it also independently ensures we are meeting or exceeding our Service Level commitment to our customers.”
Since 2006, Service Objects has published its monthly performance reports to demonstrate our networks perform consistently at the preferred levels. Click here to view our archive of Performance Reports from AlertSite.
Posted by Gretchen N.
Add comment January 27, 2010
