Disrupting Phone Number Scams at Scale: Why It Matters and How to Do It Right

The Situation

Phone number impersonation – whether via calls, text messages, or online prompts – remains one of the most damaging and persistent cybercrime threats organizations face today. In 2024 alone, impersonation scams cost victims $2.95 billion, including a median loss of $1,480 due to phone calls and $1,000 due to scam texts, as reported by the FTC. These evasions capitalize on the trust of individuals in voice communications and established methods of contact by using fake numbers to call back or hotlines that convince victims to surrender credentials, transfer money, or provide criminals backdoor access to their devices. At an organizational level, this equates not only damage to customers, but reputational damage and a mountain of abuse reports that eat away at security teams and customer support.

Why Current Efforts Miss the Mark

Most organizations are still attempting to address phone number impersonation manually. Many organizations are triaging customer reports of impersonation and submitting takedown requests to telecom providers manually for takedown. This is a laborious and manual process that can take days or weeks, creating an opening for the criminal to potentially continue exploiting victims. Some organizations obtain services from competing organizations attempting to fill that gap; however, those organizations may have limited carriers or slower response times, meaning a large number of threats go unresolved, and the attack continues. Even worse, many of these solutions do not provide any transparency to teams regarding which numbers were taken down, the speed with which those numbers were taken down, as well as where the next threat may come from. Fraudsters take advantage of these scenarios, shifting around temporary numbers, and quickly scaling their operations faster than defenders can respond.

A Better Way to Disrupt Phone Scams

Netcraft designed its Phone Scam Disruption solution to resolve these challenges. Instead of addressing each scam as an independent effort, Netcraft provides high volume, automated takedowns with continuous coverage and comprehensive reporting. By combining human verification with automated processing, we take down malicious numbers fast, in addition to providing the detailed intelligence necessary for organizations to understand the general patterns of carrier attacks and to help determine how best to respond and mitigate any future scenarios.

Cut Off Phone Scams with Netcraft

It's about speed, specificity, and scale. Early results show a median takedown time of only 21 hours, making the malicious phone number and associated account permanently inactive, long before they can continue targeting victims. Automation is what allows organizations to move from hundreds of takedowns to the thousands in a matter of a month, without needing to add any additional headcount to the program.

It also covers a variety of phone scams: tech support, impersonating an executive, impersonating someone with crypto and gift cards, fake reservation numbers, etc. In the background, Netcraft’s long-standing relationships with major wireless carriers and international telecom partners allow for takedowns to happen quickly and across more than seventy carriers worldwide. Every takedown submission includes evidence, screenshots, transcripts, or recorded calls, which ensures unreasonable removals of legitimate numbers don’t occur and demonstrates to internal stakeholders the action taken is justified.

Customers also receive a dynamic reporting dashboard, which illustrates carrier-specific trends, confirms the status of every action, and details measurable risk reduction for executives and boards. For organizations equipped with pre-verified numbers, Netcraft can go a step further, by taking that feed of numbers and building it directly into an automated intake process, where malicious numbers are acted on almost instantaneously.

One large financial institution stated that Netcraft’s ability to automate carrier attribution has drastically reduced the cumbersome process that was followed for phone-based attacks. The volume of fraudulent calls that one large online retailer was receiving from a telecom provider dropped from 67% to just 4% once Netcraft began performing takedowns, representing more than a twenty-to-one reduction in the volume of attacks. Additionally, Redpanda, whose brand faced malicious job scams, reported takedowns happening within hours instead of days or weeks. Redpanda reported a 95% reduction in time spent on takedown processes.

The Scale Benefits

Organizations using this approach have the benefit of improving customer protection immediately due to the reduction of fraud losses and users being protected from scams. When customers see a company actually fighting for their protection, brand trust increases. Externally, security and trust-and-safety teams reclaim valuable time as they navigate slow telecom processes; and internally, leadership have the visibility to show ROI and to anticipate the next problem.

Overcoming Common Barriers

Some organizations are hesitant to take action because it’s difficult to develop and maintain a consistent process to collect evidence to support phone number activity. We’re able to help organizations by establishing an abuse phone inbox for abuse reports and/or automating the reporting workflow to  ensure high quality submissions. Some worry about false positives; however, this evidence-first approach and human verification reduce the risk of taking down legitimate numbers to near-zero. And, for teams with limited resources, an automated approach provides a way to scale defenses without additional headcount.

The Time to Act

Phone number scams are not slowing down. Neither should your organization's response. If your organization is inundated with scam reports, unable to make it through telecom's takedown processes, or just simply trying to protect your customers more effectively, the time is now to automate the process. Netcraft has purpose-built a solution to help you act faster, smarter, and at scale. Click here to learn more about Netcraft Phone Scam Disruption.