Customizable Phone Verification means OnVerify.com

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Automated Phone Verification is the number one way to combat online fraud, eliminate anonymous bad usage, attacks and unbeatable captcha alternative.

If you do online business, you are open to fraud, bad usage, anonymous bad signup, invalid leads; the common denominator is time and money loss.

OnVerify.com provides you a 100% customizable Automated Phone Verification solution, ready to go. You can integrate it in a couple of minutes to your existing business flow, with minor changes.

By Customizable, I mean 100% customizable; you can set any text to be said, any wav file to be played at any step during the call flow. Not only that, you can put a step to get a pin from phone, or record the customers name. All included, free of charge, from easy to use web interface.

Customization is not limited to call flow; you can also customize the language of the verification and also customize per call variables.

From online merchants, to online food order business; from single person companies to Fortune 500 companies use OnVerify.com to reduce fraud, authenticate users, send fax orders, do important sms notifications.

OnVerify.com has got following services:

  1. Phone Verification – Announce Pin on the Phone. Get Pin on Web Site
  2. Reverse Phone Verification – Display Pin on Web Site, Get Pin on the Phone
  3. Call In Phone Verification – Let the customer call you, and do one of the above verifications
  4. Copy Paste HTML Code – Real Captcha Alternative. Stops any form from processing better than Captcha way and does phone verification. Just copy and paste the html code to your form’s html
  5. Fax Notification – If you need to bridge your online business with offline business/suppliers, we provide a worldwide fax delivery solution at a very cost effective way
  6. SMS Notification/Verification – If you want to send something urgent to a mobile number or just want to verify mobile number, we suggest SMS.
  7. Free or Paid Phone Types Information. Validate phone numbers with us at 1 cents/each

OnVerify.com is very responsive to customer requirements. We always listen you, and add features according to your needs. That’s the final point of customization.

Can Call In Phone Verification be an Alternative to SMS/Phone Verification?

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Dear Friends,

Nowadays I am thinking of form of “real contact” verification methods. By “real contact”, I mean phoning, text messaging, forcing customer to act for a phone call or sms, rather than getting a reply to e-mail.

E-mail confirmation and verification is good indeed, but just for validating your further communication channel; not for validating and verifying that you are contacting with a “real” person.

Phone Verification (automatically) calls given number, plays prerecorded script. In the script there is a need to announce a password or pin to access a secure page or complete a transaction. Costs to merchant, your customer pays nothing.

Reverse Phone Verification is a step to make Phone Verification a little more complex; it’s again an automatic call, but password or pin is not announced, rather is gotten on the phone. Your customer need to enter “pin” or “password” on the phone. A callback is fired to your web site. Again costs to the you, your customer does not pay anything.

SMS Verification, is another method of delivery of the pin/password to your end user. You send out an SMS (Text message) to your customer. Well, your customer need to provide some personal mobile number. Usually merhants pays all, but in some cases, customer may be billed by his operator. Delivery may be delayed due to operator, mobile phone coverage, and some other issues. But it’s worldwide, and really cost effective.

In Call In Phone Verification, your customer need to call a local/domestic/toll-free number  from the registered phone (number). Your customer either gets a “pin” or “password”, or enters the pin. This will cost to the business, and may also cost to the end user.  This method lowers your automatic verification costs. Providing a local phone number, you limit your customer base to be local in a way. The advantage over the SMS Verification is that your customer does not have to provide his mobile number, he may register and call from any phone number.

There are several ways to automatically verify your customers using phone calls or sms. I tried to summarize them, and I think “Call in Phone Verification” is really a good alternative to “SMS Verification” by means of cost, easy of use.

Let me know what you think

Are Phone Verifications Customizable at OnVerify.com?

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Yes, 100%. Verifications are customizable with templates and template parameters.

A template refers to a call flow, and you can set your steps in the call flow like. “Say Text”, “Ask Pin”, “Record”, “Play wav”.

Not only you can set the steps, but also you can also customize each verification with  verification initialization parameters. For example, you can use the same template to verify your customers but you can customize the template to say the customer’s name on the phone.

When you sign-up for a free account at OnVerify.com, you can access template management interface without a limitation. If you need more help just drop an e-mail to support@onverify.com

How to add two factor authentication to your web site using phone verification by onverify.com

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Securing a web business has never been hard as now. As a web business owner or developer, you may have added several mechanisms to combat hacker from stealing passwords. To access a membership site, you probably implemented username and password checking together with several anti-hacker solutions, like checking last ip, checking logs for suspicious activity, etc. But still passwords, shared computers, passwords in e-mail are your weakest part in overall security.

I want to show how you can add more security to your web site, as a general algorithm. In my example, I will point to phone verification, but it’s also possible to do it with reverse phone verification or sms verification.

Your current flow is possibly as this way, providing you a one point to check the user

  1. Display login form
  2. Get username and password
  3. Check username and password from database
  4. If matches, give access

I do not suggest you to change this flow, it will be same. But I will suggest you to add another step, to get a two factor authentication with otp (One Time Password) tokens, tokens to be announced on the phone:

  1. Display login form
  2. Get username and password
  3. Check username and password from database
  4. If matches, start a phone verification to the number on file
  5. Ask for the “token”/”pin” that’s announced on the phone
  6. Check entered pin
  7. If matches, let the user access

With this method, you’ll have a real two factor authentication and a second password token that is generated on the fly; cannot be stolen by a third party.

Check out a live Phone Verification Demo at onverify.com. Drop us an e-mail to get ideas, and implementations. We like to hear and help.

Copy Paste HTML Code Phone Verification by OnVerify.com

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Dear Friends,

We listen to our customers, last month we got a special request from our customers. The request was a copy paste html code to be inserted to an html page to work together with a phone verification. The HTML code required to do phone verification without any code on the server side.

At first this looked not a normal request; till now, what we learnt in the Phone Verification market is that, you need to integrate with custom coding over HTTP or SOAP APIs, this is totally an upside down feature.

Later, during our meetings with sales and tech team, we figured out that it’s possible and very good feature indeed for several Internet users who only know of some html knowledge, but they are developing content and fetching information from their customers/users.

So, we have a solid solution with HTML and Javascript technologies. There is no single code needed to integrate or there is no single change need in your standard form processing. This solution stops the current form from submission, and starts a phone verification according to your set up.

Let me explain the steps required to use Copy Paste HTML Code Phone Verification:

  1. You need to open a free account at OnVerify.com
  2. You will have a default Phone Verification template. You can edit it from Templates menu item.
  3. Go to Developers, than Copy Paste HTML Code menu item
  4. Add your site to the list. This is an important step as we must know where you put html code
  5. Then customize your form according to your needs. We need to know form name and phone number field name in the form.
  6. Then get the generated code and paste it to your html page, just before </body> tag.

Viola! You have a phone verification feature, which is powerful solution to captcha, and a real captcha alternative.

Drop me your comments, ideas to here or support@onverify.com. I’ll be happy to see them, and answer them. If you have a new feature idea, please do share; we are here to provide you the best solution in Phone Verification market.

How to Send SMS from your website using OnVerify.com

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SMS, which is abbreviation of Short Message service, is the most commonly used feature of a mobile phone after the phone call. Although it’s limited to 160 characters, sending an sms text is very popular in several cases like;

  • A phone call is not possible
  • A phone call will cost more than sending an sms message
  • It’s more fun to send sms text rather than talking at that time.

There are just a few samples for individuals use sms text to communicate.

But if you own a web site, adding an sms service to your site, can be cool, and cutting edge. Also adds another form of communication with your customers, and your web site.

Some of the examples of sms service at your web site can be listed, but not limited to:

  • Customer Verification with SMS message
  • Notification of special events/products/discounts via SMS text
  • Notification to your self about some cases at your web site
  • SMS Text Marketing of your opt-in lists (You cannot just send sms to any number without a prior approval)

Samples continue.

There are several sms service providers in Internet world. But at OnVerify.com, we provide the easiest solution with standard features, at a competitive price. You don’t need to write long sms software to send sms text from your web site.

Firstly you need to open a free account at OnVerify.com. It’s free, gives you $0.25 credit when you complete Phone Verification process automatically. Then get your userid and apipass from documentation or profile page, and paste the code below in your favorite php editor:

$f = file(“http://www.onverify.com/sms.php?userid=youruserid&apipass=apipass&msg=test&number=number”);

That single line of code will initiate a sms text sending from your web site easily. Let me explain the parameters:

userid=youruserid, this is the userid you get from onverify.com,  we need to recognize you

apipass=yourapipass, this is the api password you get from onverify.com to authenticate you

msg=test, this is the text message we will send to the mobile number. remember to urlencode your message before feeding it to here.

number=number, this is the number we will send sms text message to. It must be in international numbering format; country code + area code + number (like 18581234567)

On return, you’ll have a single line. Which is a numeric code, that you may want to check.

switch($f[0]) {
case “2”:
echo “username or password is wrong”;
break;
case “3”:
echo “balance is not enough”;
break;
case “4”:
echo “number wrong”;
break;
case “6”:
echo “ip restriction”;
break;
case “7”:
echo “dublicate vid”;
break;
default:
if ($f[0]>100) echo “sms is queued”;
}

Let me explain. At first step we send to request to OnVerify.com’s sms service. We get a numeric code from that page, which can be 2,3,4,6,7 or >100.  each meaning something.

2: username or apipass is wrong. please re check and compare them with OnVerify.com

3: balance is not enough. OnVerify.com works from positive balance. But don’t worry during the tests and integrations. Just drop us an e-mail to support@onverify.com. Ask for more credits, and explain your project. We are more than happy to help

4. number wrong. Yes it must be in international format. Which is country code + area code + number

6. restricted ip. You can limit the server’s ip that the calls with be initiated from

7. dublicate vid. This is used for callback firing. At the end of sms sending we fire a callback to your system explaning the status of the sms. (sent, unsent, cost, etc)

Sending a SMS text is asynchronous at onverify.com. Which means, when you initiate a sms sending, OnVerify.com will return you immediately if this call is accepted or not. Later, it will notify you with sending a request to the callback url that you set at sms text message initiation step.

In this article, I tried to show how easy it’s to send sms text message to any phone using OnVerify.com’s services.  In order to send sms text, you dont need to setup/develop big sms software, just use the sms service feature of OnVerify.com

How to add Phone Verification to your website with OnVerify.com’s Services

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Adding a phone verification to your web site consists of following steps:

  1. Display form to get number
  2. Get number, generate pin code
  3. Initiate verification call over OnVerify.com
  4. Display Form to validate announced pin
  5. If entered pin is right, mark verification completed
  6. If entered pin is wrong, ask pin again

Display Form to Get Number

Here is a simple form to get number:

<form method=”post”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”a” value=”call”>
<input type=”text” name=”number”> (must be in international format ie 18581234567 (country code+areacode+number)
<input type=”submit” name=”verify” value=”verify”>
</form>
Get Number, Generate Pin (PHP)
$number = $_POST[number];
if ($number) {
$pin = sprintf(“%s%s%s%s”, rand(1,9), rand(1,9), rand(1,9),rand(1,9));
$_SESSION[pincheck] = $pin;
}
Initiate Verification
youruserid and apipass is provided in your account when you logged in to OnVerify.com. yourtemplateid is listed under Templates tab. You can change the flow of the call from OnVerify.com
$f = file(“http://www.onverify.com/call.php?userid=youruserid&apipass=yourapipass&pin={$pin}&template_id=yourtemplateid&number={$number}”);

Display Form to Get Announced Pin

a verification call is on the way, please enter the pin announced on the phone here to complete

<form method=post>

<input type=hidden name=a value=getpin>

<input type=hidden name=a value=getpin>

<input type=text name=pin>

<input type=submit name=verify>

</form>

Check Entered Pin

if ($_POST[pin]==$_SESSION[pincheck])  {

echo “all ok. continue with other processing<br>”;

}

else echo “wrong pin<br>”; // redisplay pin entrance form

Integration of OnVerify.com’s Phone Verification is simple and straightforward. You can open a free account at OnVerify.com to see it in action and to test. A real-time automated demo is located here.

Download complete sample phone verification code

One Time Password with Phone Verification by OnVerify.com

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Today, I want to discuss One Time Password solution with Phone Verification, definition, benefits and how to implement it with OnVerify.com.

One Time Password is a password that’s valid only for the current session or transaction, by it’s definition. So, rather than asking the same password, your customer needs to enter a password that can be used only once and specific to the transaction he wants to conduct. It helps to solve a couple of problems like

  1. Stolen Password
  2. Forgetten Password
  3. Brute Force Attacks

One Time Password adds another security level to the transaction.

On the implementation side, you need to provide One Time Passwords to your customers before they want to do a transaction. One of the solutions is to sending a token generating small device to your customer. But this brings delivery issues with itself, and it’s not immediate.

Another solution is sending the One Time Password via SMS (short text message) to the mobile number on file. OnVerify.com provides worldwide delivery of SMS. It’s suitable if you have the mobile number of the customer. This method has got a high security property. You don’t need to send a device to your customer. It’s immediate. But this method won’t work if you do not have the mobile phone number of the customer.

A %100 working solution would be sending the One Time Password via an automated Phone Verification call. The password is generated on the fly, that’s bound to specific transaction. When your customer wants to login your services, an Automated Phone Verification will be initiated to the phone number on file. When customer picks up the phone, he will hear the password as voice. He needs to enter the password on your system to access and complete a transaction.

For more information how to setup One Time Password with Phone Verification please contact us or send us an email to support@onverify.com

Eliminate Fraud with Phone Verification

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Let’s face it: If you re doing business online, your business is open 24 hours a day.  It’s still reachable at 3am when you are not watching it.

Another fact is that there are several fraudsters out there trying to order with stolen card, trying to access unauthorized accounts. And they do that this way or that way.

One another thing is that, while you try to reach real customers, you may find out that a fraudster filled several records in your database.

I can extend the samples a lot, but the main point is, you need to identify “good” and “bad”. Yes, by your business experience you can do till a certain point. But there are so many user profiles out there that you cannot identify only by your experience.

OnVerify.com here helps you and provides an automated way to distinguish “good” and “bad” with automated phone verifications.

For example, you are accepting free sign-ups for lead generation, a classical flow is:

  1. Display the offer
  2. Ask the customer’s details
  3. Record Details
  4. Send a welcome e-mail

OnVerify.com’s phone verification system can be placed in between 2 and 3; ask the customer to verify himself, easily, with an automated phone call.(It’s easier than sending an e-mail). So your new flow will be

  1. Display offer
  2. Ask the customer’s details
  3. Initiate a verification via OnVerify.com
  4. Ask announced pin
  5. RecordDetails
  6. Send a welcome e-mail

Adding an automated phone verification usually takes 2 hours to 2 days. There will be no setup or monthly fee, you will be charged only for the answered calls. See a live demo at http://www.onverify.com/a/demo

Bridging Your Online Business with Offline Processing with Phone Confirmation by OnVerify.com

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There are several business cases where your business is online, but your suppliers/sales personnel/providers are offline; so you cannot connect via internet. Some of the examples:

1. Online Food Ordering Business, where there are several restaurants,

2. Sales Personnel at field, where he cannot access internet

3. Online Florist (Flower Ordering) in a big geographical span where several florists need to be working.

In this business model, you need to gather order from internet, process payment and need a way to communicate with offline supplier/provider. You need to pass the order to supplier and also need to confirm that order.

OnVerify.com has got a complete solution package to this problem:

1. Most of the business has got dedicated fax machines. You can send fax to any worldwide destination only using html formatted documents.

2. Reverse Phone Verification / Phone Confirmation will help you to get confirmation from the supplier/provider. This is a call to supplier and ask a pin to confirm.

3. Sms/Phone Notification will help you to notify your supplier about a new order, and to notify your customer

4. Call In Phone Verification is a dedicated intelligent call center that you can set specific actions when your supplier calls your call center number. Like playing the last order, accepting or rejecting the last order, etc…

Visit http://www.onverify.com/a/services for more information or just drop an e-mail to support@onverify.com