Many times mobile users get calls telling them that they have won a lottery, free trip, etc. and all they need to do to claim that reward is to give their bank account details. How do random people get users’ mobile numbers? We tend to share our mobile numbers quite easily. While booking tickets, reserving seats in a restaurant, etc. we tend to share our number without much prompting. It is because people feel that there is a genuine need on the part of the person soliciting it. Sometimes older people approach agents for booking flight tickets, theatre tickets, etc. give them their credit card details. People can sell these phone numbers and credit card details to the cheater.
The cheater will send SMS or E-mails and pose as bank employees or travel agency employees and lure customers with freebies in exchange for their bank account details. The SMS can ask the user to click on a link and claim their award or win gifts, etc. These are classified as phishing scams.
Authorities have been maintaining lists of numbers used for phishing scams and have also asked people to be vigilant. Efforts are required to come up with technological solutions to replace these policing ones.
QLC Chain Solution for Montnets:
Advertisement
To tackle this problem, the Chinese communication firm Montnets has teamed up with QLC Chain to provide a blockchain-based solution that will allow customers to check whether an SMS has come from a bank or not. It will also allow companies to track and record their SMS.
Allen Li, the founder of QLC, said,
In the case of private data leakage, victims can hardly verify the authenticity of the messages, which may lead to huge financial loss. Since it is hard to trace the sender’s identity, the recipient can not make a valid complaint or report. Utilising the blockchain consensus-based distributed whitelist. we could effectively address the telecom frauds issue.
The blockchain-based solution will address scamming in application-to-person messages. It covers banks, websites, and companies sending confirmation SMS. Montnets will provide source traceability for each SMS. Users can check each SMS on the QLC distributed ledger to see whether it is genuine or a scam. Even if a cheater uses a virtual number to disguise a bank’s number, the SMS sent by him will not be visible on the blockchain, and thus, the user will be saved from being scammed.
With so many phone numbers in one place, hackers can target the database itself to get hold of the user’s information. Thus, the application can potentially crate the problem it was meant to resolve. It is not possible with blockchain technology as it is a distributed ledger where multiple nodes validate each transaction, and any change will require the block to be revalidated by all the nodes again.
Advertisement
Additionally, the QLC’s public chain will use blockchain technology to give details of SMS sender, receiver, sending times, etc. Thus, all mobile numbers can be checked for detecting fraud.
