Phone number intelligence is a critical tool for cybersecurity professionals, law enforcement, and private investigators. It helps them uncover a variety of valuable information to prevent fraud, track suspects, and ensure public safety. This article explores a few of the top free tools to investigate unknown callers and trace potential scammers.

How to use phone number intelligence

phone number intelligence factors come into play when determining if a phone number is associated with fraud, risk, or low reputation. The combination of these signals creates a phone number reputation score that can be used to identify malicious actors, suspicious accounts, or fraudulent transactions. IPQS uses enterprise-grade telecom phone data from hundreds of backbone networks to detect ported dates, activity status, subscriber status, and carrier of record to generate our phone risk scores.

Invalid user data is often a strong indicator of fraudulent or risky behavior, so businesses should validate and maintain contact data to improve their customer service. This may include verifying the existence of a phone number and ensuring it is valid, as well as detecting SIM swaps, call forwarding, and other anomalies. Melissa headquartered in San Margarita offers a suite of phone validation tools including Data Quality Suite, Line Type Intelligence, and WinPure Verifiy API services that can help businesses of all sizes verify, cleanse and confirm data.

One of the most common scenarios that cyber criminals exploit is when a service registers an account or two-factor authentication through SMS using an inactive phone number. Fraudsters often port that phone number to another provider, enabling them to take over the original account owner’s email, online financial accounts, or other services. A phone number intelligence solution can scrub user data regularly and flag when a number has been ported to avoid this type of activity by automatically identifying and suspending accounts.