Overview

Skyetel takes fraud very seriously, and do everything in our power to prevent your Skyetel Balance from being fraudulently used by an account hack. This is especially true with our High Cost Calling gateways. 

While our High Cost Calling Gateways are able to limit your account's ability to place new international calls, our domestic gateways maintain significantly higher load. As such, they are unable to provide the same level of granular control and call blocking. Additionally, our network is not able to accurately distinguish between what is an intended high volume calling pattern from a fraudulent one in domestic locations. Lastly - due to the distributed nature of our network and our router siloing, we are not able to provide a great way to limit your channel utilization. Boo. 

Channel Utilization Thresholds

Instead of blocking your ability to place calls to specified areas, or limiting your channels, we have developed a method to identify when one of your endpoints has exceeded a specific channel threshold. 

Image Removed

By default, all endpoints are automatically assigned a limit of 50 channels. You can adjust this limit higher or lower based on your expectations on how many channels your PBX should be using. We also provide a quick stat to help guide your decision when you set the threshold. 

Image Removed

What Fraud Looks Like

Channel Threshold Alerts works primarily because once an attacker compromised your PBX, they blast it with a ton of traffic all at once. This is a real example of one of our accounts being compromised:

Image Removed

In the above case, our Fraud Threshold Alert kicked in when the admin passed the 50 channel limit and so he was able to intervene and prevent more abuse. 

Important Things To Know

We do not stop your ability to place calls

These threshold limits do not block your outbound calling ability, or limit the amount of channels your endpoint is able to use. Instead, we will send you an email and optional SMS to let you know that your endpoint is using more than expected traffic. 

Alerting Takes about 10 mins

In order to prevent false positives, we alert you only when your PBX exceeds the Channel Threshold for more than 10 minutes. 

You are still responsible for the cost of fraudulent traffic

While this is the standard practise in our industry, we don't like it. However, if your endpoint is compromised your account will be billed for that traffic.