Around the world consumers of business services all face the same challenges of dealing with scams, spam and identity theft. While businesses have been improving their security systems to ensure they protect your data that they hold, we haven't seen the same level of increased protection being available for consumers (You)!

Scammers often target consumers with various techniques, with one of them as simple as masquerading as a business to steal your personal information. Almost all the readers would have experienced a business calling you and requesting you to provide personal information such as your full name, date of birth, home address and so on as a form of identity verification without knowing who the caller is or how to verify them.

• How do you identify who you are talking to?
• How do you verify a caller is from the business they say they are from?
• Do you ignore calls from unknown numbers?
• At what point are you suspicious and hang up a call?
• How do you know when you are being scammed?
• Would you know what to do if you knew you were scammed?
• How do you protect your identity and personal information?
• Who is helping you protect your identity?

We are all faced with the same challenges when it comes to interacting with another person or machine. Today, the general advice you will read on websites, from businesses and security experts to consumers is to:

• Be aware of consumer scams.
• Be suspicious of all unknown callers.
• Don't trust caller ID.
• Ask Questions.
• Call them back.
• Call them back.
• Report suspicious phone calls.

While the above advice is reasonable, you are still gambling on the fact that every phone call you answer is possibly a scam.

With that in mind, do you think senior citizens and vunlerable people are equipped to protect their identity?

How do you engage with legitimate businesses when the general advice is not to engage with anyone over the phone, SMS and email?

The consumer identity verification processes that most businesses have put in place to protect your personal information is in fact flawed. These processes encourage the consumer (You) to initially share your personal information to a caller in an attempt to verify you. This process opens up additional attacks on consumers by scammers armed with your personal information to commit fraud.

Guard Point is changing the perspective, looking for the business initiating the interation with a consumer to first verify themselves before asking for the consumer verification.

Read more about our solution in the below section.

If you would like to read more on a few of the forms of social engineering attacks from wikipedia:

• Phone call attacks - Voice Phishing (Vishing)
• SMS attacks - SMS Phishing (Smishing)
• Email attacks - Phishing
• Voice Cloning attacks - Phishing

Guard Point - A universal business-interaction verification app.
After you as a consumer has signed up and a participating business on Guard Point.

As a consumer you will need to review the business verified contact information to determine if you believe the business is legitimate or not and make a decision as to whether you wish to answer/engage with the caller. If you do encounter a scam, spam or identity theft you should report this to your local authorities as well as reporting this to Guard Point within the app.

While our process is not fool proof, it certainly must be one of the best solutions in market focusing on consumer cyber protection. We are trying to reduce scam, spam and identity theft and we believe this is a great step forward in achieving that.