On toll fraud, VanillaIP's stance is unequivocal. "It's time for service providers and Tier 1s to take responsibility rather than passing the buck to resellers and their clients," stated CEO Dave Dadds. Backing up his words with actions Dadds announced that VanillaIP is introducing a Toll Fraud Guarantee. "The buck stops with us," he emphasised. "This guarantee should give great comfort to resellers that are rightly concerned about dial through fraud.
"Industry figures show this is a multi-million pound problem with single instances running into hundreds of thousands, even millions in some cases."
Dadds confirmed that VanillaIP fully supports initiatives from industry trade bodies including FCS and ITSPA, particularly around the stopping of fraudulent out payments. But ultimately, service providers and Tier 1s must grab the bull by the horns, he believes.
"Our experience in the cloud space over the last 10 years with SIP trunking and hosted PBX has shaped our view that SIP trunking will always be inherently more susceptible to fraud because there are third party 'boxes' located on site, all of which can be under the control of different parties and software revisions.
"For this reason we have excluded SIP trunking from our guarantee scheme."
The VanillaIP Guarantee is based on Uboss which enables partners to allocate daily credit limits to the end user HPBX extension.
Using near real-time rating all call traffic for both 'in Flight' and completed calls is rated to calculate spend. At 80% a warning email is sent and at 100% the extension is automatically blocked and existing calls disconnected.
"The guarantee itself is simple," explained Dadds. "The reseller will pay no more than 3x the User Daily Credit limit, or £50, whichever is the higher. This is because the reseller is in full control of credit limits.
"Cyber fraud is on the increase across many industries but when it comes to dial through fraud, much like if your credit card is cloned and money stolen, the bank will reimburse you. The buck stops with us."