Winner - Rocco Messaging Hackathon 2025

With an enormous collective effort from our product, business, and marketing teams, AB Handshake was chosen as winner of the 2025 Rocco Hackathon Messaging Challenge. Our solution tackled two critical problems that continue to impact the messaging industry: SMS impersonation and artificially inflated traffic (AIT).

Submission for 2025 Rocco Hackathon Messaging Challenge

In our work with operators and enterprises globally, we've seen just how serious the issue is: up to 60% of a single brand’s SMS traffic can be fake. These messages distort metrics, erode trust in SMS as a business tool, and frequently lead to billing disputes.

Existing tools like threshold filters or number databases simply can’t keep up. Our submission combines two proven technologies: 

• AI detection to prevent AIT at the enterprise level
• Out-of-band, end-to-end validation to prevent impersonation and provide evidence of delivery or trashing. 

Together, these solutions give participants the tools to block fraud in real time and resolve, or avoid, billing disputes altogether. The solution is built for scale, grounded in a patented protocol, and already proven in live environments.

Preventing Disputes from Inflated Traffic

Disputes over SMS delivery are more than frustrating—they’re expensive. Without clear evidence of delivery and trashing, either the operator or enterprise inevitably absorbs losses, which can easily run into the millions.

We address this on two fronts. First, we employ AI at the enterprise or operator level to detect and block fake messages before they are sent. Using over 300 behavioral and contextual parameters, the AB Handshake system identifies fake OTP requests and other AIT attempts.

Second, our patented validation protocol confirms the final status of messages between connected networks. This out-of-band check verifies delivery and indicates trashing or tampering, giving both parties a single source of truth. With this transparency, disputes can be resolved, or avoided, based on shared data.

Protecting the Subscriber Experience

Spoofed messages remain one of the most common fraud types, often used to trick subscribers by impersonating banks or service providers. Our validation protocol compares metadata from the A and B parties to confirm whether the sender ID is legitimate—stopping spoofed traffic before it reaches the user.

The majority of spam and scams rely on spoofing, however AI detects other fraud types that also impact user experience. Optional content and link analysis provide an additional layer of protection against prohibited content, scams, and spam.

User education has proven to be relatively ineffective; however, positive validation of messages and warnings about message content can be quite effective in protecting the recipient. In addition to enabling realtime labeling and blocking, the AB Handshake system is able to visually confirm the legitimacy of senders and trigger a secondary check based on reports of junk or suspicious messages.

Why AB Handshake?

Proven Results

The AB Handshake protocol was originally patented for voice in 2020, and later for SMS as well. Currently, our AI detection analyzes over 44 million SMS messages and blocks over 3 million fraudulent AIT messages each month. For enterprises, the return on investment is often over 100% within two months of active blocking. Operators have also seen significant increases, especially in A2P. One operator increased A2P revenue by $120,000 in a single month. 

Unlike blockchain and other proposed solutions, the AB Handshake platform has proven to be both effective and scalable across multiple deployments.

Accuracy & Usability

Our AI-based detection operates at 99.98% accuracy, maximizing legitimate traffic while minimizing disruption. 

An intuitive interface provides customizable analytics, dashboards, and reports, including visibility into next-hop manipulation. Groups and hubs can deploy the solution across multiple opcos using multi-tenancy features. Enterprise portals offer SMS delivery reports, fraud detection insights, and revenue protection summaries.

Built for Scale

Industry solutions must be accessible to all service providers, regardless of size or market share. 

Our platform supports every generation of network, from 2G through 5G and beyond. Integration is flexible via API for validation, existing SDKs embedded in SMS platforms, and direct connections to SMSCs, firewalls, and other nodes. There’s no need to change routing or install new hardware.

This ease of integration supports gradual rollout. Operators or enterprises can begin with a PoC to combat AIT. National programs can accelerate adoption by involving multiple providers at once. As more participants validate traffic, fraud is pushed further to the margins.

The system’s design supports everything from isolated deployments to full national or global rollouts, securing the global messaging ecosystem as the community grows.

Designed for Security and Privacy

Security and compliance are built in. Message content can be hashed, and all peer-to-peer communication is encrypted. There is no third-party access to message data or metadata, and traffic can be processed entirely on premises, within a secure perimeter and without transborder data transfer.

Our system is fully compliant with GDPR and other international privacy standards. Optional content analysis can be tailored to align with specific compliance requirements. This balance between privacy and fraud prevention ensures the system works globally, across different regulatory environments.

Clear Pricing and Measurable Value

AB Handshake is a neutral technology provider. We’re not a carrier or aggregator, and we don’t monetize traffic. As a technology partner to CSPs, we offer pricing models that accommodate a variety of business needs, such as per-query billing or flat monthly fees.

Operators benefit from proof-based billing, as well as the revenue protection that comes with preventing bypass and wholesale fraud. Additionally, providers can create new revenue streams by offering Fraud Prevention as a Service (FPaaS) and expanding their telco VAS portfolios with services such as delivery reports.

Enterprises stand to save up to 60% of their SMS costs by blocking fake messages and only paying for real delivery. They also protect brand reputation by reducing impersonation, and improve campaign performance by eliminating fraud-driven distortion of user metrics.

The Future of Trusted A2P Messaging

Disputed SMS traffic and impersonation not only impact revenue—SMS fraud undermines trust between operators and B2B clients.

If our industry wants to compete with OTT platforms and preserve SMS as a trusted channel, we need neutral, verifiable tools that prove message integrity across the delivery chain.

The AB Handshake SMS solution offers a globally scalable platform that brings transparency and integrity to the messaging ecosystem.