Protecting government’s most personal service channel

A call from a court office warns that an arrest warrant has been issued. A voicemail from an unclaimed property department claims the state is holding funds in someone’s name. A message from a public benefits agency flags an issue with an application and asks the recipient to confirm personal information.

Each scenario has just enough urgency to create an immediate emotional response, playing on fear, financial stress or the promise of money. Plausibility is what makes government impersonation scams so effective. Fraudsters lean on vague familiarity while using spoofed or cloned phone numbers, social engineering and, increasingly, AI-generated voices or deepfakes to pressure people into sharing information.

“It can be pretty convincing,” said Scott Straub, senior director of market strategy for public sector planning at TransUnion. “If you didn't recognize it as a robotic voice, it's a good scam because, of course it’s possible you might have unclaimed funds with a state that you've never lived in, and of course you're going to want to share information because they have money they want to give you.”

The threat is growing quickly. According to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, government impersonation scam complaints nearly doubled from 2024 to 2025, with approximately 32,000 reported incidents and about $800 million in losses.

Many government services have steadily moved online, allowing agencies to strengthen digital identity verification and limit opportunities for fraudulent activity. The phone, however, has remained a central channel for the service experience, and unfortunately one of the most vulnerable. 

“It's really important because it's personal,” Straub said. “At the end of the day, when somebody has a question or a comment, they still want to interact with a human and talk to somebody because they have a question that's unique to them.”

Individual fraud losses are damaging enough, but when scammers impersonate agencies, they also exploit the trust constituents place in public institutions. This can erode confidence in legitimate outreach and negatively impact the relationship between citizens and government.

TransUnion helps agencies strengthen trusted outreach

TransUnion is working to address that challenge through identity and communications capabilities built for today’s fraud environment.

Though TransUnion is commonly recognized as a credit bureau, its expertise extends into public records data and, through its acquisition of Neustar, the telecom ecosystem. Straub said the company now provisions caller ID for more than 90% of U.S. phone numbers and operates as a carrier. 

TransUnion’s Trusted Call Solutions suite leverages that reach to help agencies strengthen the integrity of their communications and reduce impersonation risks. 

Branded Call Display adds verified context to outbound calls, including the agency name, logo and reason for the call. Caller Name Optimization can help prevent real calls from being mislabeled or blocked, while Spoofed Call Protection and call authentication capabilities help reduce the risk of bad actors using trusted numbers or agency identities to deceive constituents. Global Trust Lab also supports the broader telecom ecosystem by helping test and validate caller authentication standards.

TranUnion is already making an impact across government. 

For example, the company worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs as it faced missed connections tied to inaccurate spam tagging, call blocking, mislabeling, unknown caller labels and suspected fraud across millions of outbound calls. After implementing Branded Call Display and Caller Name Optimization, the agency saw a 20% increase in answer rates and a 35% decrease in call attempts. TransUnion also helped mitigate spam tagging on about 13% of total call volume, representing almost 7 million outbound calls.

“If they used to make 100 million calls, now they're only making 90 million calls but serving the same number of veterans, that's a big change in efficiency,” Straub said. “Veterans are answering the phone more often, they're having higher quality calls, and then the total number of calls is going down. So, it's an overall higher experience for that consumer.”

TransUnion saw a similar effect during COVID-19 contact tracing in Virginia, when public health outreach depended on getting urgent calls answered. After the Virginia Department of Health implemented Branded Call Display, the agency saw an almost immediate 105% increase in answer rates, helping residents recognize legitimate calls during a crucial public health effort.

Identity must work across every channel

Protecting the phone channel is only one part of the larger identity challenge. Constituents may engage with agencies in person, online or by phone, and fraud can move across those channels. Agencies need the means to determine whether the person on the other side of any interaction is who they claim to be.

“Since we’re a large data company, we have that identity information aggregated fairly well across many consumers in the U.S.,” Straub explained. In addition to call solutions, TransUnion supports document verification and authentication for in-person interactions. Online, its tools can evaluate device identity and suspicious activity patterns, including signals from a data consortium with thousands of contributing companies. Together, those layers help agencies make more informed identity decisions without adding unnecessary friction for users.

“One of the things we like to say at TransUnion, because it's very accurate, is that if you don't get identity right from the start, everything else you do with it afterwards is wrong,” Straub said. “For us, it's all about connecting the consumer across all those channels to make sure that if someone is using the phone, interacting in person or coming in through digital means, it's still the same person across all three.” 

Agencies do not have to choose between stronger fraud prevention and accessible services. The goal — especially as agencies work to modernize customer experience and fraudsters keep adopting new techniques — is to apply the right safeguards at the right point in the journey, so constituents can access services while agencies detect suspicious behavior sooner. 

Ultimately, trusted communication is part of how government preserves confidence in the services the nation relies on.

“There's so much confusion in the market being created by all these spam texts and scam calls,” Straub said. “That’s where our role comes in. We’re one of the few companies that can actually instill trust across all three channels very consistently.”

Learn more about how TransUnion can help your agency rebuild and maintain trust in communication channels.