Operations BroadNet answer

What is AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic)?

Last reviewed July 22, 20261 min readReviewed by BroadNet engineering

Quick answer

AIT (artificially inflated traffic) — also called SMS pumping or toll fraud — is a scheme where fraudsters use bots to trigger huge volumes of OTP or verification SMS to number ranges they control on a complicit operator, then collect a share of the termination fees. The victim is the business paying for the messages. Left unchecked, AIT can inflate an OTP bill many times over before anyone notices.

Plain-language definitionVendor-neutralReviewed July 22, 2026

DiagramWhere an SMS firewall sits in the operator network

Inbound A2P and interconnect trafficFrom aggregators and international partners
SMS firewallInspects every message in real time
Operator SMSCOnly clean traffic is delivered
Subscriber handset

Grey routes, spoofed sender IDs and spam are blocked
Legitimate A2P traffic is identified and billed

The long answer

Everything worth knowing, nothing that isn't.

§01

How the fraud works

A bot hammers a signup, login, or 'resend code' form, requesting OTPs to numbers on a route where the fraudster and a complicit party share the operator termination revenue. The messages deliver perfectly — that is the point — so the only visible symptom is a sudden spike in OTP volume and cost to a handful of destinations. See /answers/what-is-sms-pumping.

§02

How to defend against it

Layered controls: validate numbers with HLR Lookup before sending, rate-limit OTP requests per IP and per number, apply geo-velocity and destination-anomaly checks, add CAPTCHA on abused forms, and fail over to Flash Call where SMS is being pumped. Monitor OTP conversion by country so a bad route stands out. See /products/hlr-lookup and /products/myotp.

BNWritten by the BroadNet engineering team·Operating carrier-grade messaging since 2003, headquartered in Dubai·Editorial standards

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