# SMS pumping explained

There is a fraud scheme that targets exactly one thing on your product: the form that sends a verification code. Nothing gets broken into, nothing gets stolen, and no account is needed. A bot simply asks your form for codes, thousands of them, pointed at premium-rate numbers that pay out to whoever operates them. Your form does what you built it to do, and you get the bill. In this video we walk through the whole loop, and then the two defenses Bird ships switched on.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn876fqEmQ0 (2:11)

## What we cover

- What SMS pumping fraud looks like
- How it inflates your sending costs
- Bird's protections, and what you can turn on yourself

## Transcript

_Auto-generated from the video._

Hey, and welcome back to another video. Today we're going to be talking about SMS pumping. A bit more serious topic, but one that I do want to make sure that you're aware of of its existence. And don't worry, these are rare situations, but in the event that they do happen, we want to make sure that you understand exactly what we do and what you can do to make sure that this doesn't harm your business. When you've got SMS verification set up, you allow your customers to trigger a verification SMS whenever they sign up or need to go through a registration process. Now, in the event that you've been targeted by SMS pumping, malicious parties will trigger bots on your sign up flows, triggering multiple SMS straight from your platform.

This will quickly be draining your balance, especially cuz they're usually sending to premium rate numbers in premium rate countries. They do this because they actually own some of these premium rate numbers, meaning that every message that gets delivered to these numbers gives a small payout back to the users that are actually triggering these bots.

Now, in order to prevent this, there's several things that you can do to keep yourself safe. Firstly, you can set a country layer, ensuring that you only send messages to countries that you know your customers are in. This prevents any countries outside of your reach to ever be triggered whenever you the user tries to sign up.

Additionally, we have Bird Verify. With Bird Verify, you hand the entire verification process over to Bird with additional abuse controls that come with it. One of which is automated retry delays, basically ensuring that a cool down has happened per recipient, making sure that a number can never be triggered multiple times.

Now, I hope this was a bit helpful. I don't want to scare you off, but it's important that you know what's going on. Regardless of everything, as always, happy sending.

## More SMS guides

- [Sending your first SMS](/en-it/learn/sms/sms-first-send) — 2:17
- [Sending an SMS with a template](/en-it/learn/sms/sms-templates) — 3:20
- [Registering your SMS sender ID](/en-it/learn/sms/sms-sender-id) — 4:39
- [Control where your account can send](/en-it/learn/sms/sms-destinations) — 2:31
- [SMS segments: why one emoji doubles the cost](/en-it/learn/sms/sms-segments) — 4:33

## Resources

- [Documentation](/en-it/docs)
- [Learn more about SMS](/en-it/products/sms)