Toll-Free Traffic Pumping (Within North America)

In North America, businesses, individuals, and non-profits often buy the right to use a toll-free (8XX) telephone number to allow legitimate customers call them free of charge. They instead agree to pay their long-distance service provider to receive these “wanted” incoming calls. Unfortunately, bad actors have found ways to exploit the intercarrier compensation regime that applies to these toll-free phone numbers and use robotically dialed fraudulent calls with the intent to harm legitimate businesses, individuals, or non-profits by making them pay inflated charges for unwanted/illegitimate toll-free inbound calls.

Here are the best practices that customers can follow to prevent the flow of toll-free Traffic Pumping from their network toward ours:

• When acquiring toll-free (TF) phone numbers, put them in your DID Holding domain and don’t place them into service until you need to assign them to your customer(s). If these TF phone numbers aren’t in service, they can’t and “should not” receive fraudulent/unwanted inbound calls from bad actors.
• When holding/aging TF phone numbers, monitor inbound call attempts to this TF phone number as a way of verifying if a TF number is "clean" while it’s out of service. If you receive many unwanted/unsolicited inbound calls to this TF phone number while it’s not in service, notify the Fraud Mitigation Team immediately and alert them of the suspicious traffic.
• If you need to offer a toll-free phone number for your services, use a pool of toll-free numbers and cycle through them when placing them into use. An example of this use case would be to use a different toll-free number from a pool of numbers for every new conference call, in a conference calling service. This prevents bad actors from focusing on and exploiting a single toll-free number.
• Refrain from advertising TF numbers publicly via websites/email/social media. This type of communication can be seen by bad actors and lead to unwanted inbound traffic to TF phone numbers. This type of toll-free fraud is often seen in instances where TF phone numbers are used and publicly advertised to access conference bridges.