Learn how Arkose Bot Manager protects your enterprise from SMS pumping and international revenue share fraud (IRSF).
Have you ever wondered why it's often the CFO who first uncovers SMS toll fraud? It's because they meticulously track financial transactions and expenditures, making them more likely to spot the unusual patterns and discrepancies that signal these attacks. In SMS toll fraud — also known as SMS fraud, IRSF (International Revenue Share Fraud) or SMS pumping — bad actors exploit high-volume, high-cost SMS messages to premium-rate phone numbers. They move through the registration process with lightning speed, abandoning flows immediately after triggering the SMS send. By the time your organization realizes you've been charged for non-existent registrations, the scammer has disappeared with their share of the inflated charges, and the money is almost impossible to recoup.
The threat has intensified dramatically. What once required manual coordination and human effort now operates through highly sophisticated automation at unprecedented scale. Modern SMS fraud attacks demonstrate capabilities that fundamentally change the threat landscape. These threat actors:
The financial impact is staggering. A large gig-economy organization without proper protection experienced losses of $300,000 in just 12 hours when the SMS fraud protection feature was temporarily disabled. Even sophisticated companies with traditional security measures in place are vulnerable. The pattern is clear: attackers are professionalizing and scaling their operations faster than traditional defenses can adapt.
During a 60-day period in late 2025, Arkose Labs saved customers over $12.3M in prevented SMS fraud losses while actively defending against coordinated attacks from 43 countries.
$300,000 lost in just 12 hours — the cost to one gig-economy company when its SMS fraud protection was temporarily disabled.
Arkose Titan's unified API coordinates device fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, email risk scoring and challenge-response mitigation in real time. When device intelligence flags anomalies, the engine automatically calibrates difficulty and risk signals flow instantly to downstream fraud tools.
Our next-gen challenges combine Proof-of-Work computation with multimodal reasoning tasks that cost attackers via LLM vision APIs. Each challenge adds substantial time per attempt, so fraud operations burn through compute budgets fast.
Multi-layered device identification tracks returning devices while behavioral biometrics establish baseline patterns for mouse movements, typing cadence and interaction velocity. Real-time signals create risk assessments accurate enough to pass 99% of legitimate users with zero challenges.
Every authentication generates detailed telemetry: 175+ telltale rules showing why we assigned each risk score, complete device intelligence and behavioral analysis. Security teams see our decision logic as it happens, enabling immediate investigation.
Threat patterns identified at one customer instantly inform protection across our network. When Arkose Labs spots new threats, every customer benefits from updated detection rules within hours.
After attacks quadrupled year-over-year and fraudsters evolved tactics continuously — from basic bots to machine learning solvers to human fraud farms — a prominent fintech implemented Arkose Labs protection and achieved:
The company faced millions in losses as attackers used bots to trigger OTP verifications at scale through premium-rate SMS fraud. The challenge was unique — its customer base was extremely sensitive to friction, making aggressive verification difficult to achieve without harming legitimate users. After implementing Arkose Labs protection:
SMS fraud attacks exploited a feature so aggressively that the company made the decision to completely remove this valuable customer acquisition tool from its website. After implementing Arkose Bot Manager protection, it successfully restored the SMS invite flow and brought back the customer acquisition channel.
With AI accelerating SMS fraud to unprecedented levels, the question isn't whether you'll be targeted — it's how much you'll lose before you act. SMS fraud is theft with receipts, visible as hard line items on your telecom invoices. The money lost this month funds the fraudsters attacking you next month. Unlike other security investments that involve theoretical risk reduction, SMS fraud ROI is immediate and measurable.
Are you ready to stop writing checks to fraudsters? To see how Arkose Labs can protect your organization from SMS toll fraud, schedule a call with an expert today.
Stopping bots, AI agents, and fraud before they reach your users.
