OTTs – If it looks too good to be true, You’re probably being scammed - Part 1

There’s a terrific short story by the sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury called?The Crowd.?At the start a man is involved in a car crash. As he comes around, a crowd gathers. He is frightened by this gathering of ghouls. They seem threatening – like circling hyenas. Later in the story, we realise that a crowd assembles after any accident??– and they are always the same people.

I think of this story when I hear about some new form of malpractice in the business messaging space. Whenever our industry finds an exciting new market for its services, you can bet that – shortly after –?the fraudsters will descend. Quite often, they are the same bad actors as before.

Well, guess what. It’s happening again.

The fraudsters have come up with a new twist on fake traffic. And this time, they’re targeting the authentication messages sent by (mostly) OTT companies. This is an obvious target since?hundreds of billions of these texts are sent?every year.?

Here’s how it works.?

The fraudster develops an emulator that signs up as a new user to an OTT service. For the sake of argument, let’s say Facebook.?

The emulator fakes the behavior of a real person. It signs up, and waits to receive its one time passcode. It enters the passcode and is approved as a new user.

Thereafter, it obviously does nothing. No posting. No sharing. However, it might ping Facebook to report a lost password, so that it can go through the entire process again.

Clearly, this user is of no use to Facebook (and its advertisers). It’s not a real person. But unlike other fake traffic, this ‘user’ does at least appear like a real human. It completes the sign-up process after all.

Please enjoy the rest of the article on VOX Carrier blog.