Alerts - Overview

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NOTE:

To add this product to your account, contact a Telesign expert. This product is available for full-service accounts only.

Telesign Alerts enables you to track your end-users' phone numbers for important events, helping you identify potential fraud and then take necessary steps to protect your users and your business.

Every 24-hours, if any of these events occur, Telesign sends you an alert you can use to take further action.

Events tracked

The service tracks the following events for your subscribed phone numbers:

• Number Deactivation - The user disconnects their phone number completely.
• Number Porting - The user keeps their phone number while changing carriers.
• Number Change - The user keeps their carrier, but changes the phone number tied to their account.

Documentation by category

• Reference:
  • Alerts - Subscription files - Send one of these files to the service to add or remove phone numbers.
  • Alerts - Rejection files - Receive one of these files from the service when a subscription file cannot be processed.
  • Alerts - Rejection codes - Contains a description of each possible code that can appear in a rejection file.
  • Alerts - Error files - Receive one of these files from the service when one or more numbers in a subscription file cannot be processed.
  • Alerts - Error codes - Contains a description of each possible code that can appear in an error file.
  • Alerts - Alert files - Receive one of these files from the service when one or more tracked events occurred for your subscribed numbers in the previous 24-hour period.
• How-to Guides:
  • Alerts - Subscribe/unsubscribe numbers - This page walks you step-by-step through how to subscribe new numbers to the service for monitoring and how to unsubscribe existing numbers.

How it works

The operation of the product occurs in three steps.

Step 1: Subscribe phone numbers

When your account is opened, we create a dedicated directory for you on an SFTP site and send you access details for that site. You can then subscribe new phone numbers for monitoring at any time by uploading a subscription file to this directory. The service checks for new subscription files once per hour. You can also unsubscribe numbers using this same file.

Step 2: Process subscription file

If there are problems that prevent processing of the entire subscription file, we upload a rejection file to your SFTP directory that gives you details about why the file is rejected.

If there are problems with the processing of individual records in the subscription file, we send you an error file with details about each record-level error.

If the file is not rejected, each new record successfully processed results in the new phone number you specified being added to the monitoring DB (or if an unsubscribe operation is specified, removing it from the DB).

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CAUTION:

It can take up to 90-days from the time the service receives an unsubscribe request for a phone number for that operation to be processed. So you may still receive alerts for that number in the meantime.

Step 3: Send alerts

The service checks with carriers on an ongoing basis for tracked events, for all subscribed phone numbers in the monitoring DB. Every 24-hours, if any of these events occurred over that period for a subscribed number, an alert file is uploaded to your dedicated SFTP directory with details about each event. We recommend that you create a process in your system to check periodically for the appearance of these alert files, so you can take appropriate action.

System architecture diagram