Banks and ATMs are heavily policed. The phone network lets a scammer in for a hundred dollars. The cheap place to stop fraud is before the phone rings, so that is where we work.
Where we come from
Why a crypto ATM company
built a phone shield.
PhoneShield is a sister company of Byte Federal, a network of cryptocurrency ATMs across the United States, and was founded by members of its team. For years that team had a front row seat to phone fraud at the one place it becomes visible: the moment a frightened person walks up to a machine with a stranger still on the line, telling them how much to send.
Byte Federal built warnings, holds and staff training to stop those transactions, and often did. But by then the damage was mostly done: the fear, the secrecy, the hours on the phone. The call was the crime. PhoneShield is the answer to a simple question that kept coming up: why did that call ever ring?
Read our articles on the scripts that still work and why the agencies are losing.
What the ATM floor taught us.
Scam victims are not careless. They are polite, frightened and alone with a voice that will not let them hang up. The only reliable defense is to make sure that voice never reaches them, which is why the shield works before the phone rings.
Byte Federal has fought this fraud for more than a decade. Its machines carry what we believe are the most thorough defenses in the industry: systems that detect a coached transaction, interrupt it, and talk the customer out of it. They stop a great deal. They also taught us two things. The government stands by and watches, while honest operators and fintechs are buried in compliance costs that do little for the actual victim. And by the time someone reaches a machine, the scam has already been running for hours.
Two years ago Byte Federal launched a fraud-prevention education program. Then we went looking for something that addressed the source. The source is the call. That search became PhoneShield, and Byte Federal’s casework still informs the shared scam list.