The Next Revenue Opportunity for Communications Providers May Be Trust

By James L. Lee, CEO, Inlayer

Most people have stopped answering calls from numbers they do not know, and it is hard to blame them. Hiya reports that 86% of calls from unknown numbers go unanswered, based on its survey of more than 12,000 consumers across six countries. Years of spoofed caller ID, robocalls and scam texts taught people to ignore their phones. Or as my mother puts it, “the phone company always lies to me”. Now synthetic voices and deepfake video filters make even the calls and meetings people do take harder to trust. Trust in all forms of online communications has never been lower, reported losses never higher, and the data supports this.

The FTC says text messages were the contact method scammers used most in 2025. In Hiya’s survey, one in four Americans said they received an AI deepfake voice call in the past 12 months. Consumers reported $15.9 billion in fraud losses to the FTC in 2025, up from just over $12 billion the year before. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded $20.9 billion in losses and, for the first time, tracked complaints that referenced AI: 22,364 of them, with adjusted losses above $893 million. Those figures only count what victims reported.

Trust stopped being theoretical

Engineering group Arup lost HK$200 million, about $25 million USD, after a finance employee joined a video conference with a cloned CFO and colleagues. Hong Kong police said everyone else on the call was fake. Voice is no safer. Pindrop, a voice security vendor, reported a 680% year-over-year rise in deepfake activity in 2024 across more than a billion calls, and found about one in every 127 calls to retail contact centers was fraudulent. We experienced this first-hand at one of my previous companies. An urgent call was made to our new Controller that sounded exactly like our Managing Partner requesting help with an emergency $200k wire transfer request. The ease of fake voice and video with AI has industrialized online fraud into an epidemic crisis.

Providers are being held accountable

Customers and regulators are both looking at the network. In Hiya’s survey, Americans picked scammers over their carriers by nearly 2 to 1 when asked who is winning. 67% said carriers should bear some responsibility for scam losses on their networks, and 38% of subscribers said they were likely to switch providers if they felt unprotected from AI scams.

The FCC is pushing in the same direction. In summer 2025 it removed nearly 1,400 providers from the Robocall Mitigation Database over deficient filings, and on September 2, 2026 it cut off 14 more and ordered every other provider to block their traffic. In April the Commission advanced proposed “know your customer ” (KYC) rules aimed at originating providers, and in July Chairman Carr said every provider touching a call must know who it is doing business with. The KYC rules are still proposals, but the direction is clear. “We didn’t know who was on our network” is becoming an expensive answer.

The market already pays for trust, just not this kind

Providers are already selling trust signals. Twilio’s branded calling covers T-Mobile and Verizon, with AT&T in pilot. Numeracle pitches branded calling as a revenue-generating product service providers can launch for their enterprise customers. In March, Zoom embedded Pindrop’s real-time deepfake detection and voice authentication into Zoom Contact Center.

Each of these verifies something: a business name, a number, a voice. None of them proves that a specific human being was present, accountable, agreed or consented to what happened next. STIR/SHAKEN authenticates the caller ID, meaning a valid carrier and phone number, but not the person speaking. That gap is the opportunity.

What Verified Human Communications looks like as a service

A person taps a card, badge or sticker to their smartphone. There is no app to install or new credentials required. Each tap generates a single-use cryptographic trust token, proof that a real human is present and is who and where they claim to be at the point of origin. The tap, the ID collection and the location sharing all happen with the person’s consent – not surveillance. A provider can use that cryptographic proof as an unparalleled trust signal to filter or block unverified actors from their premium tiers of protected service. The consent and agreements behind each interaction can also be memorialized in a tamper-evident, ledger-backed vCon record that third parties can audit without seeing the sensitive data inside it.

The endpoints behind Presence by Inlayer are patented and already deployed at more than 1,100 university locations, where they verify student attendance and confirm who is really showing up to take an in-person or online exam. Inlayer is a compliance automation platform, so the same tap that proves human presence also automates the KYC and enhanced 911 (E911) location records that providers are already responsible for.

Where the revenue is attainable

The trust, consent and compliance layers are where telco operators can take share. Start with the money already being spent. Grand View Research values fraud detection and prevention at $35.3 billion in 2025 and projects $40.4 billion in 2026. Even bot mitigation, a narrow slice, is estimated at roughly $0.8 to $1.1 billion depending on the research firm. Much of that spend is software-based detection that works after the fact, and AI keeps getting better at producing fakes. A physical tap is far harder to counterfeit at scale. Operators can capture a real share of that budget by selling verified human networks instead of another detection layer.

Now the volume. There are about 4.9 trillion phone calls made per year. Calls from unknown numbers mostly go unanswered, which shows how much a verified call is worth to the person placing it. Not every call needs verification, but the ones that do can now have it. Here is the illustrative math. One percent of 4.9 trillion calls is about 49 billion calls.

Price per verified call	Revenue PER 1% adoption
2 cents	$980 million
5 cents	$2.5 billion
10 cents	$4.9 billion

These are scenarios, not a forecast, but it demonstrates the potential impact. Real adoption, pricing and operator costs will vary, but the scale explains why pennies per call matter..

MSPs and UCaaS providers are natural first channels. ScalePad’s 2026 trends report found cybersecurity is the most delivered MSP service at 55%, and compliance-focused MSPs were more likely to project revenue growth above 50%. Barracuda found about 92% of organizations are willing to pay MSPs up to 25% more for advanced support around security tool integration. A verified-human tier for help desk resets, finance approvals and board calls is a compliance service: recurring, with an audit trail the customer can show a regulator or an insurer. UCaaS providers can package it as verified human meeting rooms, verified calling for regulated teams, or a per-seat add-on. Resellers can attach Presence endpoint hardware, verified human usage and advanced compliance services as premium add-ons to the offerings they already sell..

What to be honest about

This works best today in closed-loop relationships where each participant holds a Presence endpoint: a company connecting with its customers, employees, members, or board. It does not replace detection on the open internet. It layers on top. The tap works best paired with single-sign-on (SSO) through the customer’s own identity provider (IDP). Organizations still need a plan for people without a smartphone. It will start in high-stakes use cases like financial services, healthcare, onsite service delivery, and board governance, before it becomes a universal benefit.

Where to start

Pick the place where a wrong identity costs the most: the IT help desk, financial approvals, telehealth or in-home care, board and governance calls, hiring remote employees, or regulated customer service. Pilot one use case to start, measure what it removes in fraud losses, handle time and audit prep, then price it as a premium tier justified by the value delivered. If you are an operator, provider, MSP or reseller interested in exploring this new approach to battling online fraud, we are opening pilots. Start at inlayer.com.

Disclosure: Inlayer sells Presence by Inlayer, a Verified Human Communications enabling product. Third-party statistics are attributed to their publishers, and several of those publishers also sell related products.

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