Verify Fraud Shield is a built-in security feature that helps protect your Verify applications from SMS pumping attacks. It monitors your SMS verification traffic in real time and blocks suspicious messages before they are sent, reducing your exposure to fraud and unwanted costs.

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Enabling Fraud Shield for Messaging

Fraud Shield is enabled by default for all Verify apps. No setup is required, though you can adjust the protection level or disable it from your app settings. For most use cases, we strongly recommend keeping Fraud Shield enabled to maintain protection against SMS fraud.

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Protection Levels

Each Verify app can be configured with a Fraud Shield protection level based on your business needs:
  • High – Strongest filtering, best suited for high-risk scenarios. May result in more false positives.
  • Medium (default) – Balanced filtering with fewer false positives.
  • Low – Minimal filtering, suitable for apps with a higher tolerance for fraud risk.
You can adjust this setting in Plivo Console > Verify > App Settings > Fraud Shield. Note - A “false positive” refers to a legitimate verification attempt that is incorrectly blocked. While rare, they can occur, especially at higher protection levels.

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How it works

Fraud Shield is built on top of Plivo’s proprietary detection model. It analyzes current and historical SMS traffic patterns to identify anomalies in destination countries, carriers, or number sequences that may indicate artificially inflated traffic. These insights are combined with known fraud patterns to block potentially harmful activity before it results in charges or abuse. If an SMS delivery is blocked by Fraud Shield, you’ll see error code 452 in your error logs. While we’ve built this system to help mitigate SMS pumping fraud as effectively as possible, please note that no system can offer a 100% guarantee of protection. We’re continuously refining our detection algorithms to provide the best possible coverage.

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Preventing False Positives

Like any fraud prevention system, there’s a small chance that legitimate verification attempts may be flagged and blocked. Our team is committed to continually refining our models to reduce the risk of false positives while maintaining strong protection. Read this article to learn more about how to reduce false positives.