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Experian Phone Validation is a real-time REST API that you can use to validate phone numbers and obtain additional information about them. For example, you can determine whether the numbers are landline or cell phone numbers.
You can use the API in many different scenarios, depending on your specific needs. A frequent use case: you have a web form or a shopping cart and want to validate the information the user enters before saving it, to ensure it's accurate, and that the user didn't make a mistake.
See it in action: Try out our live demo to see Phone Validation integrated into a website.
Live status is the ability to determine whether a Phone Number is truly contactable, and influences our response confidence levels. For most countries, this comes as standard for Mobile, with limited coverage for Landline. Due to a few regional limitations, the live status for either Mobiles, or Landlines, may not be supported with the standard service, and you will need to include the request parameter supplementary_live_status
to ensure the confidence level returned is as accurate as possible. Supported countries found here.
Up until recently, there has been an industry wide limitation on providing the live status for mobile numbers in USA. Experian Data Quality is one of the first Phone Validation providers to now provide the option to surface the live status of a US Phone Number. If enabled, we carry out a secondary check on the Phone Number, and provide an accurate confidence level based on live status. Without supplementary live status enabled for USA, we use the standard industry check for US Mobile numbers, which checks formatting, type and carrier level information, amongst others.
landlines
If you wish to understand whether a landline number in the UK is connected, and contactable, to enable you to reach clients or leads, then enabling supplementary live status for GBR landlines will allow you to do so. If enabled, we will carry out a secondary check on the Landline Number, and provide an accurate confidence level based on live status. Without supplementary live status enabled for GBR, we are unable to retrieve live data on the landline and will return a confidence of No coverage, alongside the metadata elements for this phone number.
Mobile live status for GBR is supported in the standard call to Experian Phone Validation.
Costs
Disposable (or temporary) mobile numbers are considered the digital version of a burner phone. People use these numbers for situations in which they don't want to give out their permanent/real numbers or for fraudulent purposes. This poses an increasing fraud risk to businesses and prevents them from contacting their customers when required. The API will identify mobile numbers that are known to be from a disposable network or have been found on websites or applications advertising disposable numbers.
The API will return a confidence level as expected (Disposable Phone Numbers tend to be verified, and technically contactable), however you will see an additional metadata item for disposable number, flagging if we know it to be disposable.
Using enhanced portability information, Experian Phone Validation allows customers to return the last known ported date for a Phone Number within a select number of countries. The API can confirm if a number has been both ported, what network it was ported to/from and the date on which it was ported. Recently ported numbers can be a good indicator of fraudulent activity and should be considered within risk calculation.
Costs