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Final Product
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Initial Mockup
Inspiration
The inspiration for Telegit is from all the issues associated with scams and fraud on Craigslist. Constantly, people are being scammed on Craigslist from fake advertisements or dangerous individuals. With the powerful anti-fraud and risk estimation features of TeleSign, it was clear that being able to check the legitimacy of a phone number on Craigslist easily is a step in the right direction of fighting the issue of fraud and scams.
What it does
Telegit is both a website and a chrome extension that makes it incredibly easy to get more information about a phone number. By utilizing the Score API of TeleSign, we can gather hidden information about phone numbers and the risk level of a phone number. This allows users to make a more informed decision as to the legitimacy of a offer on Craigslist or a phone number that is obtained through other means.
How I built it
Telegit is built on Laravel as the underlying framework for clean management of the routing, controller, and view templating logic. It uses the TeleSign Score API to obtain risk, location, carrier and phone type information about phone numbers. Results from the Score API are cached for 60 minutes to reduce load on the server. There is also an accompanying Chrome extension that converts all the phone numbers on Craigslist offers to links that open up the scoring page of that phone number. This allows users to easily find more information about the phone number in order to make a more informed decision about the legitimacy of a posting.
Challenges I ran into
One of the main challenges that I ran into was the fact that Craigslist is very protective of phone number data and it is almost impossible to scrape that information without running into captcha's. With the Chrome extension, we were able to add Javascript to the webpage but it was not helpful when we couldn't attach click handlers to the phone numbers since those don't exist on the page on load. The solution ended up being to attach a click handler on a parent element in the DOM and waiting for the click event to propagate up to that parent event from the actual phone number that was created after the load. This way, we were able to go around the captcha issues since we would be capturing the click after the phone number is displayed on the page.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The clever hacks around the click handling of the phone number data is what I'm proud of. I think with this chrome extension, it makes it effortless for people to take the extra precautionary steps to checkout the risk level associated with a phone number. It's always nice to see if an ad is associated with a landline, mobile, or a virtual number so that you can be mindful of whether you can text the person or only call. Knowing the carrier of the number can help determine if an offer is legitimate or not.
What I learned
What I learned along the way is that TeleSign is an excellent platform with really easy to use SDKs and tools for businesses to combat fraud as it relates to telephone numbers. The PhoneID and Score API make it really easy to gain more information about the capabilities of the phone number and also some insights into the risk levels associated with the phone number. With more aggregation of data, it is easy for businesses to come together and fight fraud together. TeleSign makes it incredibly easy to send SMS messages and to implement two factor authentication and mobile notifications.
What's next for Telegit
On the roadmap for Telegit is to get the chrome extension to be a bit more cleaned up and published onto the Chrome Web Store. In addition, it would be nice to integrate more extensions into other marketplace sites to easily pass those phone numbers into Telegit. When we can scale better in terms of traffic, we're able to implement reviews and some more metrics for risk assessment directly on the website and it can become one of the platforms to establish reputation via your phone number.
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