SMS in A2P Messaging: Why It Still Matters in a Multi-Channel Ecosystem
SMS remains a widely used and reliable communication channel across industries, from financial services and healthcare to e-commerce and public sector operations.
- OTP and 2FA delivery are key use cases, enabling secure user verification in fintech, healthtech, and identity platforms.
- E-commerce platforms depend on SMS for order updates, delivery notifications, and personalized marketing.
- Telecoms and CPaaS providers handle A2P (Application-to-Person) messaging at massive scale, delivering billions of messages globally each month.
However, with this scale comes risk. According to a recent industry report, more than 50% of service providers expect SMS fraud to increase in 2025, driven by evolving fraud techniques and vulnerabilities in digital systems.
SMS Fraud in A2P Messaging
As businesses continue to rely on A2P messaging for critical communications, the threat landscape is evolving just as rapidly. A recent report indicates that over 50% of service providers expect SMS fraud to increase in 2025, a trend driven in part by the growing sophistication of fraud tactics like SMS pumping.
SMS pumping, also referred to as artificially inflated messaging traffic, is a scheme in which bad actors exploit test or verification processes (often tied to OTP or 2FA systems) to generate large volumes of illegitimate SMS messages. These are often routed through expensive or revenue-sharing destinations, resulting in unexpected charges for the sender, typically a business, financial institution, or digital service provider.
This activity is a form of Artificially Inflated Traffic (AIT) and is increasingly recognized as a key concern in the realm of SMS fraud. While the message content may appear legitimate, the intent behind the traffic is fraudulent, designed solely to trigger charges and profit intermediaries or rogue network operators.
How SMS Pumping Exploits A2P Channels
While SMS pumping may resemble normal messaging activity, it is engineered to exploit gaps in A2P delivery systems and monetization models. Below, we explore how this fraud works and why traditional filters often fail to prevent it.
1. Exploiting Open or Unprotected Endpoints
Fraudsters typically target SMS-triggering features in mobile apps and websites, such as:
- Account registration forms
- OTP-based login pages
- Phone number validation tools
- Password reset functions
- Staging/test environments inadvertently left exposed
These workflows often trigger SMS messages with no additional verification, making them easy entry points for fraud.
2. Automating Traffic Generation
Using bots or scripts, attackers can send thousands of requests to trigger SMS messages in quick succession. Since the triggers come from legitimate flows, this abuse often bypasses detection by standard fraud filters.
3. Routing Through High-Cost or Revenue-Share Numbers
Fraudsters profit by routing these SMS messages through premium-rate or revenue-sharing destinations, particularly in regions with International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF) exposure. In these cases, a portion of the message fee is returned to the carrier or aggregator involved in the fraud.
This turns normal A2P message delivery into a billing attack, with the enterprise footing the bill for traffic it never intended to send.
4. Bypassing Traditional Security Filters
Standard telecom and enterprise security measures are often designed to stop spam or phishing, not behavioral volume abuse. SMS pumping often goes unnoticed until billing anomalies or usage spikes surface, by which time significant financial damage may have occurred.
Without real-time fraud intelligence, AI-powered detection, and advanced fraud analytics, identifying the intent behind seemingly legitimate traffic can be a challenge.
Solving AIT with IRSF Intelligence and AI-Driven Fraud Detection
AIT-related fraud, including SMS pumping, continues to challenge the integrity of A2P messaging ecosystems. These threats are difficult to detect using conventional monitoring methods and require more than manual reviews or traditional blacklisting, as they often mimic legitimate user activity.
This has prompted a more advanced approach to detection, including IRSF (International Revenue Share Fraud) intelligence, real-time fraud analytics, and AI-based mobile fraud prevention tools.
1. IRSF Intelligence and Route Risk Scoring
By continuously analyzing SMS routes and monitoring for revenue-sharing destinations, IRSF detection technology helps identify high-risk channels used in AIT schemes. Route scoring flags suspicious carriers before fraudulent traffic causes damage.
This type of telecom security intelligence is essential for identifying unusual traffic flows, particularly from niche regions or underregulated jurisdictions, where SMS pumping is commonly monetized.
2. AI in Fraud Prevention
AI-based fraud prevention tools leverage machine learning models to detect behavioral anomalies in real time. These systems can distinguish between legitimate user actions and automated or scripted abuse, even when traffic originates from typical entry points.
AI enables messaging platforms to detect:
- Abnormally high OTP request volumes
- Repeated traffic from the same device or region
- Behavioral patterns that deviate from normal user journeys
This allows businesses to automate threat response while minimizing false positives.
3. Advanced Fraud Analytics
Fraud analytics engines aggregate data across users and regions to identify suspicious trends over time. Unlike static filters, these platforms adapt to emerging attack methods and generate actionable insights. They support:
- Volume-based anomaly detection
- Carrier route comparisons
- SMS cost monitoring and threshold alerts
- Segmentation by campaign, channel, or geography
These insights are critical for both mobile fraud prevention and broader business fraud prevention strategies.
4. Real-Time Fraud Intelligence Platforms
The most effective way to prevent AIT is to stop fraudulent traffic before messages are sent. Real-time fraud intelligence platforms integrate with your SMS delivery pipeline to inspect traffic patterns continuously.
These platforms can:
- Flag suspicious message bursts
- Identify irregular sender/recipient patterns
- Block delivery to known IRSF destinations
- Enforce mobile security best practices through dynamic rulesets
Proactive Defense with Neural Technologies' IRSF Intelligence
A proactive strategy to combat Artificially Inflated Traffic (AIT) starts with reliable, accurate, and continuously updated datasets designed to identify fraudulent destinations and behavioral patterns.
Neural Technologies’ IRSF Defense Solution includes:
- Real-time IRSF fraud intelligence
- An up-to-date registry of high-risk international premium-rate numbers (IPRNs) and fraud-associated number ranges
- Monitoring across both SMS and voice channels to secure all vectors of abuse
- Anomaly detection that identifies sudden traffic spikes and repeated interactions with suspect numbers
- Flexible deployment — available standalone or integrated into existing infrastructure, with support for both cloud and on-prem environments, backed by fraud management experts
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