XConnect and GSE unite telecoms and internet fraud signals

XConnect, the numbering intelligence subsidiary of US registry operator Somos, has formed a partnership with the Global Signal Exchange (GSE) to combine telecoms-layer fraud data with internet-layer threat signals. The tie-up is designed to give public agencies, financial institutions, digital platforms and brands a unified view of scam networks that operate across phone calls, fake domains, marketplace listings and payment journeys simultaneously.

The partnership is notable less for what either organisation contributes individually and more for what joining the two layers enables. Historically, telecom carriers and internet-platform operators have held siloed datasets: a carrier can flag a spoofed CLI (calling line identity), but cannot see the fraudulent domain that the same scammer registered an hour earlier. GSE, a UK non-profit owned by Oxford Information Labs and co-founded with Google in January 2025, was built specifically to aggregate threat signals across those silos. XConnect, and its parent Somos, bring authoritative global numbering data, real-time network signals and mobile identity APIs including SIM Swap detection, call-forwarding checks and KYC match services.

Closing the multi-service gap

The commercial logic maps directly onto how modern fraud actually operates. As XConnect CEO Eli Katz put it: "A single scam may involve a spoofed number, a text message, a fake domain, an online account, a marketplace listing and a payment journey. Collaboration is the only way we close those gaps."

The scale of the problem gives that framing some urgency. Europol estimates that caller ID spoofing alone accounts for roughly EUR 850 million in annual financial losses worldwide, with phone calls and texts representing approximately 64% of reported fraud cases. Those figures come from a Europol position paper on caller ID spoofing and are company-cited rather than independently verified here, but they align with the broader trajectory of fraud reporting from UK Finance and the US FTC over recent years. In the UK, the Telecommunications Fraud Sector Charter formalises a government-and-industry commitment to expand cross-sector data sharing and increase uptake of fraud-prevention APIs, providing a regulatory tailwind for exactly this kind of partnership.

Cross-sector capital and regulatory read-across

The convergence angle matters beyond the fraud-prevention market itself. Financial institutions are the most obvious downstream beneficiaries: banks already absorb the bulk of authorised push payment (APP) fraud liability under UK rules introduced in late 2024, giving them a direct balance-sheet incentive to consume richer upstream signals. Integrating telecoms-layer intelligence into core fraud-decisioning stacks reduces false-positive rates on legitimate transactions, which has a measurable effect on payment conversion and customer drop-off, metrics that sit squarely inside a bank's commercial P&L rather than just its compliance function.

For digital platforms and marketplaces, the implications reach into trust-and-safety infrastructure. Fake seller accounts, synthetic identities and fraudulent listings are a growing source of regulatory scrutiny across the EU's Digital Services Act and the UK's Online Safety Act regimes. A clearing-house model that surfaces phone-number intelligence alongside IP and URL signals gives platform operators a cheaper path to compliance than building proprietary detection stacks in-house.

The GSE's multi-stakeholder, non-profit structure is also worth noting for investors watching the fraud-intelligence market. Where commercial threat-intelligence vendors compete on data exclusivity, GSE operates on a pooled-contribution model, closer in design to the financial sector's fraud-sharing consortia such as CIFAS in the UK. XConnect's integration signals that telecoms data, long underutilised outside carrier billing and routing, is becoming a recognised input in the broader fraud-signal economy. As that recognition grows, the value of numbering-intelligence assets held by companies like Somos is likely to attract renewed attention from both strategic acquirers and cross-sector data infrastructure investors.