To our Partners and Valued Customers:

The ever growing list of malicious and fraudulent activities seems to be spreading across the country like an out of control forest fire. Every day we hear or read about some new scheme or plan that has been uncovered to exploit the innocent, in an effort to make a buck.

The Hospitality industry is no exception to this threat. The latest scheme that we are hearing of involves criminals negotiating or manipulating a voicemail auto attendant to reach a guest room, with malicious intent.
Once contact has been made with the occupant, the caller passes themselves off as a member of the hotel staff and attempts to gain access to the guest’s credit card information.

Innovation Technologies Worldwide, Inc. wants to assure our Distributors and End User clients, that there are methods available to deter these fraudulent attempts from taking place, in all of our InnLine products.

Built in Deterrence

In order to greatly reduce or even eliminate the possibility of the aforementioned threat, ITW highly recommends setting up the Guest Transfer settings to eliminate all guest transfers from the Auto Attendant.

Even if the property doesn’t use a full time or overflow attendant, there is still a slight risk that the automated attendant can be reached or exploited. It is recommended that this setting be enabled on every Innovation Voice mail system in the field.

If the property insists on allowing call transfers to the guest rooms, there are some available features to help make it more secure. For example if  “Always allow call transfers to guests” is selected, it allows access to the “Transfer Security” feature.  If  “Require entry of first 3 letters of last name”  is selected, the caller will be prompted enter in the first three letters of the guest’s last name, before the VMS will allow the transfer to be completed.

(Note:  guest name must be supplied by PMS, during check-in, in order for this to feature to function properly)

An alternative to “always allowing call transfers to guests”, would be to select the “Follow schedule” feature, which will allow for transfers work only at certain times of day and/or days of the week.  If you use the first three letter requirement as noted before, the PMS will need to supply guest names during check-in.

The final option would be to allow all transfers and not use guest securities.  This of course, is not recommended.

If you have questions or need assistance implementing the recommended settings, please contact the ITW support department at 800-424-6757 and choose option 1 from the Auto Attendant or email techhelp@innovationtw.com