- KLINT FINLEY BUSINESS
MOST WEB COMPANIES want to attract as many users as possible. But they don’t want scammers, spammers, and bots using their web applications. Companies use everything from email verification to IP address bans to increasingly complicated CAPTCHAs to keep problem users out of their systems.
Starting today, web developers have a new option: the PhoneID Score, a new reputation tracking service from mobile security company TeleSign.
It’s sort of like a credit score for your phone number. A PhoneID Score won’t affect your ability to qualify for a loan, but it might affect your ability to sign up for a web service.
TeleSign provides authentication services for companies with a strong need to verify the identities of its users, such as Dwolla, a money transfer service, and oDesk, a freelance job marketplace.
If you sign up for a new web service that’s using PhoneID Score and provide your phone number, the service will send your number to TeleSign. It then evaluates your number and sends back a rating.
The service can then choose to block a sign-up from a user with a “high risk” phone number, or require that user to jump through extra hoops to get an account.
To determine your rating, TeleSign looks at a wide range of factors, such as what type of phone number you’re using — whether you’re using a land line, a mobile phone, or VOIP number. Land lines are considered the safest and VOIP numbers — such as Google Voice or Skype In numbers — are considered the least safe.
For mobile numbers, it considers where the phone is registered and whether you’re using a pre-paid phone or if you’re on a contract. If you’re using a pre-paid phone in, say, Indonesia, where most phones are pre-paid, then TeleSign won’t ding you, says CTO Charles McColgan. But in the U.S., pre-paid phones are more commonly associated with fraud, so this will affect your score. But the pre-paid provider matters as well. TracPhones are more likely to be used for fraud than MetroPCS pre-paid phones, McColgan says.
It also considers factors such as whether the number has been used for fraudulent activity before, whether the number is part of a block of numbers associated with fraudulent activity and whether the number has been used to sign up for a suspiciously large number of accounts recently.
But the big question is: How can you find out your score? Unfortunately, you can’t — for now. “It’s something we’ve talked about, but we don’t have a way to share scores yet,” says McColgan.
Reference: http://www.wired.com/2013/11/telesign/
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