YouMail Protective Services (YPS) expanded its market leading voice and vishing intelligence and disruption solutions to include capabilities for intelligence and disruption for SMS phishing (smishing) attacks that are impersonating US-based enterprises and organizations. This expansion makes YPS a one-stop shop to detect and disrupt phone-based impersonation scams and eliminate the damage these scams cause both to consumers and to the brands that are impersonated.

Vishing and smishing attacks are growing in scale and impact, making it critical for brands to take action to address these scams.

The FTC recently announced that reports collected through its Consumer Sentinel Network showed a five-fold rise in scam-related losses reported by consumers from 2019 to 2022. In 2022, these reported losses reached $330 million due to just text scams, with a median reported loss of $1000.

The FTC indicated that 40% of the reports of text scams in 2022 impersonated a bank, were about a gift, delivery or job, or they claimed to be Amazon. These text messages impersonating well known businesses not only cause financial harm to the consumers who fall victim to their tactics, but also make it more difficult for those businesses to continue to conduct business through voice, SMS and email as consumers become wary of each and every communication potentially being fake.

Further, a recent survey by YM Protective Services suggests that these impersonation scams are currently ubiquitous, with 78% of respondents saying they have been targeted, 45% saying they are getting 10 or more scam calls or texts each month, and 47% suggesting that they are less likely to accept calls or texts from brands that are being impersonated.

The YouMail Protective Services platform takes advantage of recently expanded capabilities from YouMail's consumer apps, trusted by nearly 14 million registered US users, to collect and classify real SMS threat evidence reaching real consumers each day. This SMS smishing evidence can then be leveraged through YPS Fastlanes to rapidly shutdown these SMS smishing attacks, oftentimes in just 1-2 hours from their onset.

"With YouMail's addition of smishing capabilities to its market leading voice threat intelligence and disruption capabilities, both consumers and enterprises can benefit from rapid detection and takedown and everyone is just that much safer from these types of attacks," said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. "This launch marks an important advance in containing the damage across the full spectrum of mobile phishing attacks."