BillingScore, which provides security and insurance against artificially-inflated traffic (AIT), has announced the launch of a solution designed to protect and insure SMS aggregators and service providers against fraudulent activity.

The company notes that AIT currently costs the premium rate and mobile purchasing industry, both financially and in terms of credibility. Launching with the award-winning mobile messaging provider Txtlocal as its first customer, BillingScore says it will save money for providers, while at the same time improving the credibility of the mobile purchasing industry.

“We’ve already saved tens of thousands of pounds with the BillingScore solution,” says Txtlocal managing director, Darren Daws. “On top of that, we’ve been able to detect and limit other potentially fraudulent transactions. This solution provides a sense of security to a service provider such as ourselves, and as more and more service providers and aggregators adopt the service, we will be able to drive out fraudulent activity from our sector.”

BillingScore notes that, while being a valuable and important way to transact, like any payment method, the mobile purchasing industry has long been the subject of spurious activity. Through a variety of methods, it has lost a lot of money to fraudsters. One of the main reasons for this is thaty with such high volumes of legitimate traffic, it can be hard to spot the fraudulent transactions.

BillingScore assesses traffic in real-time, across a number of different data points, looking for patterns and unusual behaviour that might indicate AIT. The system provides a value for each transaction and can even block the transaction from taking place if it fails to meet pre-set criteria.

“Sometimes, for service providers and aggregators, looking for fraud within their extremely hard-working systems can be a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack,” says BillingScore CEO, Chris Newell. “BillingScore is designed to root out those needles to provide added security against fraudulent transactions. “We aim to give the service providers and aggregators the peace of mind that they will never again have to face an operator clawback. We even offer a money-back guarantee against that.”