How Telco Network APIs Are Becoming a Powerful Weapon Against Financial Fraud

Financial fraud is no longer confined to banking systems alone. Today’s fraudsters operate across digital ecosystems, exploiting gaps between industries especially the invisible boundary between telecommunications networks and financial platforms.

As digital banking, wallets, and instant credit continue to scale, mobile numbers have effectively become default financial identities.

This convergence has created a new reality: Some of the strongest fraud signals no longer live inside banks but inside telecom networks.

This is where network APIs, standardized through initiatives like CAMARA and GSMA Open Gateway, are quietly reshaping fraud prevention.

The Missing Link in Financial Fraud Prevention

Traditional fraud systems rely heavily on:

• Transaction history

• Device fingerprinting

• Behavioral analytics

• Rule-based and ML models

  
  

While powerful, these systems are often reactive. They detect anomalies after a transaction attempt begins.

Telecom networks, on the other hand, observe ground-truth signals:

• SIM lifecycle events

• Network-verified device attributes

• Real-time number status

  
  

These signals are extremely difficult for fraudsters to fake.

The challenge historically was access and standardization.

That barrier is now falling.

Enter CAMARA and GSMA Open Gateway

GSMA and leading telecom operators have collaborated to launch Open Gateway, a global initiative exposing standardized network APIs defined by CAMARA.

The goal is simple:

Make powerful, privacy-aware telecom network signals available to developers, fintechs, and banks consistently, securely, and at scale.

These APIs are already live across multiple countries and operators.

Key Network APIs Transforming Fraud Prevention

1. SIM Swap API

The single most impactful fraud signal for banking

A recent SIM swap is one of the strongest predictors of :

• Account takeover (ATO)

• OTP interception

• UPI fraud

• Credit line abuse

What the API provides:

• Whether a SIM swap occurred

• Time elapsed since the swap

• Network-verified confirmation (not self-reported)

Financial use cases:

• Step-up authentication after SIM change

• Blocking high-value transactions for cooling periods

• Real-time risk scoring during login or payment

  
  

2. Number Verification API

Silent authentication without OTPs

OTP-based authentication is vulnerable to:

• SIM swap attacks

• SMS interception

• Social engineering

Number Verification APIs allow applications to:

• Verify that the device accessing an app genuinely owns the phone number

• Authenticate users silently via the mobile network

Use cases:

• Secure login for banking and wallets

• Fraud-resistant onboarding

• Reduced reliance on SMS OTPs

3. KYC Match API

What it tells you:

Whether subscriber details (name, age band, or identity attributes)

align with the information provided during onboarding

without exposing raw telco KYC data.

Why it matters:

Prevents identity mismatch, impersonation, and

low-effort synthetic identity creation at scale.

Operational benefit:

Telco-verified identity checks add a high-trust, independent signal 

that complements Aadhaar-based, document-based, or bureau-based KYC

especially valuable in remote onboarding flows.

4. Device Swap API

What they tell you:

Whether a user has recently changed devices,

SIM-device pairings, or is reusing the same device across multiple identities.

Why it matters:

Fraud rings often reuse devices or

rapidly rotate SIM-device combinations to scale attacks.

5. Scam Signal API

What they tell you:

The API checks for suspicious network patterns or

concurrent activities that might indicate the user is being scammed

(e.g., being manipulated during a phone call).

Why it matters:

Authorised push payment (APP) scams often look “legitimate”

inside banking systems because the victim authorises the payment themselves.

Real-World Impact Already Visible

• A leading UK bank using a CAMARA-standardised SIM Swap API processed 3.1 million checks in one month. Only 1% were flagged as recent SIM swaps, but preventing even a fraction of those avoided up to £930,000 in monthly fraud losses while significantly reducing false declines and manual reviews.

• A digital lender using SIM swap intelligence to block high-risk loan applications reported:

  70% reduction in broker-driven fraud

  0.5% of loan applications automatically blocked due to suspicious SIM changes

• Banks using Scam Signal solutions that combine telco call data with payment flows have achieved:

  44% reduction in scam-related fraud losses

  55% reduction in false positives

  
  

  This is one of the clearest examples of cross-industry data collaboration directly saving customers from irreversible losses.

Why Cross-Industry Data Collaboration Matters

Fraud does not respect industry boundaries.

A typical digital fraud journey may span:

1. Social engineering via call or SMS

2. Account takeover at a bank

3. Money movement across wallets and accounts

No single institution sees the full picture.

To address the growing scale and sophistication of digital fraud, PryvX has launched

TelcoSignal platform a unified access layer to standardised, telco network APIs, enabling financial institutions to consume fraud prevention signals seamlessly across multiple telecom operators worldwide.