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SMS Pumping Protection for Programmable Messaging

SMS Pumping Protection uses automatic fraud detection to block messages flagged as being suspicious for SMS pumping fraud from being sent. It works by analyzing your current and historical SMS traffic for unusual patterns. When there are unexpected fluctuations in your SMS traffic for a specific location, or system-known malicious activity, this feature will automatically block messages to phone numbers associated with the suspected fraud.

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Pricing

For pricing information on SMS Pumping Protection for Programmable Messaging:

Navigate to the SMS Pricing page.
Select the country you are interested in.
Check the Features section of the page.

Note that, for the United States and Canada, SMS Pumping Protection for Programmable Messaging is provided at no additional cost, therefore you may not find a line item in the Features section of their SMS Pricing pages.

Alternatively, you can contact Sales for pricing information.

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Verify and Fraud Guard

If you're using Programmable Messaging to send one-time passcode (OTP) verifications, consider migrating to Verify which includes Fraud Guard with customizable protection levels at no extra charge.

Enable SMS Pumping Protection

You can find the SMS Pumping Protection settings by navigating to the Twilio Console > Messaging > Settings > General page. From there, select Enabled to activate SMS Pumping Protection on your account.

RiskCheck parameter to adjust the level of risk protection for individual outbound messages. Using the RiskCheck parameter, you can determine whether to apply SMS Pumping Protection to a specific message giving you more flexibility when sending messages for multiple use cases with different risk profiles using the same phone number.

For example, you may want to send messages for two different use cases using the same phone number:

SMS messages with one-time passcode (OTP)/two-factor authentication (2FA) content
Marketing SMS messages

Account- or phone number-level risk protection settings are not granular enough if you want to treat these two use cases differently for purposes of SMS Pumping Protection. However, to achieve this goal you can:

Set the RiskCheck parameter to enable (default value) when creating an OTP/2FA message to take advantage of the built-in SMS Pumping Protection.
Set the RiskCheck parameter to disable when creating a marketing message which does not need SMS Pumping Protection.

Other actions

You can also take these actions if you suspect false positives:

Fall back to a different messaging method like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger
Create a separate subaccount for your legitimate users which has SMS Pumping Protection disabled
Reach out to your Solutions Architect or contact Twilio Support through the Console or Help Center

Monitoring

Error 30450 will show in the Twilio error logs when an SMS delivery is blocked by SMS Pumping Protection.

You can use the Messaging Intelligence SMS Pumping Protection Insights dashboard to answer questions such as:

What are the projected monthly savings from using the SMS Pumping Protection for Programmable Messaging feature?
What is the volume of sent messages that were blocked by SMS Pumping Protection?
How do SMS pumping fraud activities break down by geography?