宇都宮氏㊨と藤井氏（Mr. Utsunomiya (right) and Mr. Fujii）

NTT Townpage, in collaboration with Tobira Systems, has been offering the “Fraud Prevention by NTT Townpage” app, certified under the National Police Agency’s recommended system, free of charge since March.

This app is the first to be recommended by the National Police Agency and aims to prevent special fraud cases that begin with phone calls to smartphones. It has had a strong start, exceeding 400,000 downloads in just one month since its release.

Mitsuru Utsunomiya, head of the iTownpage division at NTT Townpage, commented on the current response: “The fact that a National Police Agency-recommended app is available for free is a major factor. The ease of setup and user-friendliness have also been well-received.”

The app has received the “National Police Agency Recommended” certification in recognition of its fraud prevention functions and operational system.

Mr. Takashi Fujii, Executive Officer of Tobira Systems, explains, “Our company provides filtering services through telecommunications carriers, and we have approximately 15 million users across our three services: mobile phones, landlines, and corporate phones. We review logs collected from users and register phone numbers suspected of being fraudulent or malicious in our database. A key feature is our blacklist-based filtering system.”

Furthermore, the company has a long-standing cooperative relationship with the National Police Agency and receives information from the police regarding phone numbers actually used in crimes. This information is also utilized in their filtering.

Meanwhile, NTT Townpage operates iTownpage, an online telephone directory with approximately 5 million registered businesses. Their app displays the names of real registered businesses, providing an environment where users can easily determine whether they can safely answer a call using a whitelist-based system.

The key functional point is that they employ both blacklist and whitelist-based fraud prevention measures.

Mr. Utsunomiya stated, “The National Police Agency requested that we prevent fraudulent calls from being received in the first place, so the app is initially set to block numbers of concern. This is one of its distinguishing features.”

Operational aspects are also a point of differentiation. For example, phone numbers used in crimes are temporarily forcibly terminated, but after a while, those numbers are reassigned to regular users.

If the system were operated without any checks, regular users’ phone numbers would end up on a blacklist as numbers used in crimes. To avoid this situation, Tobira Systems has a continuous checking system in place.

Mr. Fujii said, “The most important thing in operation is recycling numbers that have been registered on the blacklist. We use various methods, such as actually making phone calls, to detect termination. We constantly check whether a number has been terminated and whether it is still being used.”

The paper telephone directory had been published for 136 years, but it ceased publication with the March edition this year.

Mr. Utsunomiya mentioned, “Through our telephone directory business, we have thoroughly confirmed the existence of local governments and companies and accumulated this data. We want to continue to make effective use of these assets in the future.” He then added, “Since the days of the telephone directory, our company has not charged users and has made business support for businesses our main source of revenue. Users can also use the app for free. As the number of users increases, for example, if the number of registered businesses in iTownPage increases further, it will be possible to create new businesses from there.”

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