Telephony related fraud continues to cost billions of dollars and impact a huge swath of consumers.  The FTC’s consumer sentinel report issued in February, 2024 had at least $2 billion in consumer reported losses that started with an e-mail or text.   YouMail’s recent consumer survey suggested that 78% of consumers had encountered a brand impersonation scam, and that 15% of consumers have lost money from these scams.

To combat the threat actors perpetuating these scams, YouMail Protective Services is proud to introduce carriers to Fastlanes; a free collaborative program that alerts carriers in real time if/when YouMail’s threat team confirms an enterprise is being defrauded via telephony impersonation.  This allows the carriers to quickly investigate and potentially address the problematic source of the telephony impersonation calls and texts.

How The Fastlanes Program Works

YouMail  Protective Services can often identify the originating network of a call or text threat when one of our enterprise clients confirms evidence of fraud,  If that carrier is a partner in Fastlanes, we will provide call evidence and details to their team to further investigate.  Participation is completely voluntary, but we request each carrier commit to taking action against the threat actor and provide as much evidence back to our team as possible.

To do this, YouMail Protective Services leverages America's most robust telephone sensor network to identify and provide zero-hour protection against illegal calling campaigns and cyberattacks.  This sensor network, which is recognized as one of the largest in industry, combines data from users of YouMail services, as well as from millions of honeypots.   Together this sensor network is monitoring and answering calls for tens of millions of different numbers each month, given it unique insight into billions of voice calls reaching the public live every month, across all major US carriers.   This sensor network is also used to provide the YouMail Robocall Index™, the nation’s definitive source on telephone network activity and attacks. 

Carriers interested in participating in Fastlanes need only e-mail fastlanes@youmail.com to get started.  As a carrier: sign up is easy, free and completely voluntary.  All that is required is an email distribution and escalation contact.

Why Join The Fastlanes Program?

By detecting and helping shut down imposter traffic that can lead to financial or brand damage, , YouMail PS Fastlanes detects and helps carriers stop bad traffic originating, traversing, or terminating on carrier networks

As a result, carriers that join Fastlanes start to limit their risks from the negative impacts of phone-based fraud.  They are notified by YouMail when YouMail detects they are the source of the problem, and they are provided evidence that helps them verify their traffic is behaving illegally and needs to be investigated.    The Fastlanes evidence includes:

• Source number(s) or sender ID(s)
• Affected destination numbers
• Exact date, time and time zone
• Proof of reason for the mitigation / disruption:
  • Text content of message(s) for both voice and SMS
  • Audio recording, if voice related
  • Confirmation from impersonated enterprise as well as proof of agency

Importantly, evidence includes irrefutable proof of harm, which is typical one of the slowest steps in making decisions about terminating enabling accounts.

Every passing hour that a threat actor is able to deliver unlawful voice and SMS communications to consumers results in more harmed consumers.  That’s bad enough, but it also increases risks and liabilities for carriers.  So being provided proof of the problem before significant harm results reduces those risks.

Further, once an actor is nestled into a network, it is hard to get rid of them.   YouMail’s real time insights make it easy to detect and disrupt threat actors, before they are able to ramp across multiple carrier accounts, campaigns and scams, which just increases to the risk further.

The Alternatives To Fastlanes Aren’t Great

One alternative is for carriers to try to solve the problem on their own.  However, carriers face many challenges when looking to enhance and scale capabilities that can detect and shut down these threat actors.   While carriers can sometimes find threat actors on their own, it’s often too late.  That happens only after threat actors have run wild for extended periods of time, long enough to catch the eyes of regulators, enforcers, other threat actors, and even other carriers.

And the threats are only increasing and evolving.  Even the largest carriers have an overwhelming task in staying atop their own networks and the daily evolution and morphing of these illegal communications.  

Without Fastlanes, all too often the notification that a carrier’s network is being used to deliver fraud comes days to weeks after the threat actor has delivered thousands to millions of communications.

Summary

 The goal of the Fastlanes program is to enable carriers to take faster action as they remediate phone numbers used for unauthorized voice calls.   This works through prompt detect and reporting of threats to carriers, along with carrier remediation and feedback.  This helps providers combat illegal robocalls and imposter communications, and helps disrupt fraud as quickly as possible to minimize harm and risk to consumers, enterprises and carriers alike. 

So join Fastlanes to reduce risk and liability for enabling or delivering fraud and spam calls.  The regulatory risk and fraud losses are only growing, making it critical to take actions to reduce that risk.

E-mail us at fastlanes@youmail.com to get started now!