Is Artificial SMS Traffic Fraud as Bad as Elon Musk Says?

Elon Musk is rarely out of the news, but we never expected he would generate headlines by talking about a topic that we in Symmetry have been quietly researching since the middle of 2022. During an hour-long conversation with his followers, Musk briefly stated that 390 telcos were collectively defrauding Twitter of $60 million each year by using bot accounts to generate two-factor authentication SMS messages. Many in the telecoms industry were outraged when they learned about Musk's comment, but many others said they were not surprised at the scale of A2P SMS fraud using Artificial Traffic Generation (ATG).

The news about Musk and Twitter being defrauded by businesses in the SMS ecosystem also grabbed our attention because we have been investigating the scale of this kind of fraud for months. Our PRISM intelligence-gathering protocols were designed to give customers information that they use to prevent fraudulent voice traffic, but the same protocols have also given us increasing insight into SMS fraud too. We have spent recent months refining our approach and will soon be ready to launch a product currently codenamed 'PRISM-SMS' because of its relationship to our best-in-class service for voice fraud prevention.

Please use the form below to register your interest in our new 'PRISM-SMS' fraud prevention service.

We have also been speaking to experts in SMS and fraud from other businesses who are helping us to ensure the quality of the intelligence we have gathered. Please get in touch if you would be interested in working with us in exchange for visibility of the intelligence we have gathered.