To combat the growing amount of fraud in the VoIP industry, Flowroute offers several fraud prevention platform features.
IMPORTANT: These tools are provided as a courtesy by Flowroute and do not guarantee to prevent fraud. You are still liable for any damages incurred due to vulnerabilities in your security policies or practices.
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.
View Your Fraud Control Options
Log in to Flowroute Manage Portal.
Click Preferences on the left panel, and then select the Fraud Control tab. The Fraud Control page contains your current settings and allows you to set any level of restrictions on your account that you desire. Click on any of the items below to jump to its corresponding section:
Disable Outbound SIP Credentials (IP Authentication)
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.
If you wish to disable outbound SIP credentials in the Manage Portal, first confirm the following:
Your telephony supports a static IP address and it has been added to the Outbound Allowed IPs list (one of the tabs under Interconnection in the Manage Portal).
You have read this article on Setting up IP-Based Authentication for Outbound Calls.
Once you are ready to disable outbound SIP credentials, navigate to Preferences and select the Fraud Control tab. The first option on the page displays a toggle for Outbound SIP Credentials. Set the toggle to Disabled.
Maximum Outbound Rate
This feature sets a maximum rate for outbound calls. When a call attempt is placed to a destination (usually outside the US) that costs more than the set value, Flowroute will automatically 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, refer to this article on how to Set a Maximum Outbound Rate.
International Calling
When International Calling is disabled (applied by default):
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 you 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). This will exempt the calls from our fraud detection system so that calls will not get auto-blocked after a burst of high call volume. Use this to guarantee delivery of calls to the destinations you frequently call.
Strict Whitelist
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 article.