Directo is a world class carrier and industry leader with over 25 years of experience in national and international wholesale telecom services. They have real scale, carrying more than 6 billion minutes/year through over 400 interconnected carriers.
At that scale, even a small percentage of fraudulent or illegal traffic represents a massive problem. Risky traffic can lead to numerous tracebacks. It can eat up network resources. And it can lead to unwanted attention from regulators.
Unfortunately, it’s not an easy problem to solve, given bad calls can originate multiple hops upstream. The challenge isn’t just detection, it’s speed. By the time fraud is identified and partners are engaged and they figure out what’s going on, the damage is already done. The more fraud calls that get through, the more risk for the carrier.
So how does Directo minimize problematic traffic flowing through their network?
Directo’s approach leverages two services from YouMail Protective Services: Score and Watch. Together, these services combined with their own proprietary data led them to block as much as 75% of the attempted traffic on their network, and allowed them to recognize and address problematic partners and customers within days.
Using Score to Stop Known Bad Traffic in Real-Time
Score provides a dynamically updated list of numbers engaged in problematic behavior, which can be addressed accurately and with confidence. Directo integrated Score at the network level via TransNexus. Combining Score’s risk assessment with other signals allowed Directo to proactively block high-risk calls before they transit the network. It’s not a complete solution on its own, but it delivers immediate impact, helping limit the damage from fraudulent calls once a number is known to be problematic.
Using Watch To Eliminate Problematic Partners and Customers
It’s clear that blocking by ANI alone isn’t enough. Score does not, and can not, know about every possible bad number at a given time. Bad actors can always use new numbers, and not every bad number winds up getting on the the Score list. The result is that it is critical to find the source of the bad calls that are coming in, so that the originating customer (or partner) can be turned off.
Directo uses Watch to automatically review batched CDR data on an hourly basis. Watch surfaces every call record tied to illegal behavior — complete with audio evidence. Directo’s team then uses those signals alongside their own internal tools to identify responsible trunk lines and SPIDs. This enables broader, faster remediation, and there’s no ambiguity about whether the calls are illegal and action is warranted.
The Results
Since deploying Watch and Score, Directo has driven and kept fraud to a sustained near-zero baseline as a percentage of total call traffic. This is even while bringing on significant new business and scaling up existing customers. Spikes still occur as new threats emerge — but they are now resolved in days rather than persisting on the network.
These spikes in bad traffic demonstrates that Know-Your-Customer (KYC) is not enough, as both Directo and many of its partners and upstream carriers have aggressive KYC. The problem is that accounts get hacked, numbers get spoofed, calls get mislabeled, carriers make mistakes, and bad calls continue to slip through. And all it takes is an upstream not bothering or having poor KYC to let a significant amount of illegal traffic through.
There are significant benefits to having less bad traffic, going far beyond providing a backstop to KYC that allows rapid onboarding and growth. The most obvious is simply far fewer traceback requests, since problems are dealt with quickly. The most valuable is that network efficiency is improved, since various resources (DS3s, CPS, etc..) are no longer wasted on fraudulent traffic. Finally, having state of the art compliance tools highlights real carrier effort to improve their practices, leading regulators to focus elsewhere.
This approach has made a real difference for Directo. According to their CEO, Rene Brun, since working with YouMail Protective Services, they’ve been able to grow traffic significantly while keeping risky traffic to an absolute minimum and keeping their robocall mitigation efforts at very reasonable cost.
