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How to prevent SMS scammers from impersonating your business?

Customers reach out to you about strange text messages they have received from your company. After investigating the matter it turns out that thousands of scam SMS messages have been sent in your company's name. 

Too many companies and organisations have been in this situation. At worst, SMS scams can lead to your customers losing a lot of money or having their personal data leaked. Every scam campaign inevitably also damages the reputation and reliability of the targeted company. Therefore, companies should do all they can to prevent scams. 

By spoofing the text message sender information, criminals have been able to make their scam messages appear in a familiar SMS message chain, where other messages are genuine customer messages from the company. This increases the risk that the customer clicks on a phishing link in the message. DNA and other Finnish telecommunications operators have, together with Traficom, now created an effective solution to this headache: SMS Sender ID protection. 

The SMS Sender ID is the name that appears on the recipient's phone screen as the sender of the text message. Companies can now register their own business name as an SMS Sender ID with Traficom and thus reserve it only for themselves. Once registered, any other party will no longer be able to send text messages in Finland with the same ID – and will therefore not be able to include scam messages to the company's real message chains. Finnish operators are responsible for the technical implementation of traffic blocking, which requires them to actively maintain and monitor the service. 

I want to protect my SMS Sender ID – what to do? 

You can register your SMS Sender ID by filling out the form on the Traficom website. In practice, however, the registration blocks all messages in Finland using that specific ID. If you still want to – and most likely you do – send messages to your customers or other stakeholders after the registration, you must enter into an agreement with the partner(s) you use for sending the messages, such as a telecommunications operator. The agreement must be in force and implemented within three months from Traficom's registration decision.  

DNA can deliver messages sent from your registered SMS Sender ID to all Finnish mobile phone numbers. To do this, you will need to add DNA SMS Sender ID as a supplementary service to DNA Message or DNA SMS Gateway A2P. It allows you to use the registered ID and continue to reach your customers via SMS – more secure than ever.

 

Read more about DNA SMS Sender ID service and prevent SMS scammers from impersonating your business.