Technical Details

The Device Location Verification API allows you to verify the location of an end-user device within a specified area. The API uses cellular network positioning techniques to locate the device, providing several benefits over GPS positioning including:

• Secure and Trusted: Cellular network positioning uses information directly from the CSP networks, eliminating the risk of GPS spoofing and circumvention via VPN.
• Simplified integration: The API can easily be integrated into your applications, reducing software development complexity and effort.

Use Cases

Some fraud prevention use cases where the Device Location Verification API is useful:

• Ecommerce User Verification: Ecommerce and content platforms face challenges with users consuming services, content and licenses outside the region for which they have been licensed. The Device Location Verification API allows these platforms to verify if an end user's location is within the authorized region for the service, content or license.

• Point of Sale Verification: When a user is making a purchase at a store using their credit/bank card, sometimes their financial provider will want to verify if that transaction is fraudulent. The Device Location Verification API could be used with the phone number entered into their banking application to query the location where the transaction was initiated, to confirm the user is at that location.

• Location Based Content: Verify a user's location during sports events or concerts to enrich their experience with custom content, such as goal replays, different angles, useful information, and more.

Verification Results

There are four potential verification results you may see when using the location verification API:

• If the network's estimation of the device's location is fully contained within the specified area, the verification result is TRUE.
• If the network's estimation of the device's location does not overlap with the specified area at all, the verification result is FALSE.
• If the network's estimation of the device's location partially overlaps with the specified area, or it fully contains the requested area (because it is larger), the result is PARTIAL. In this case, a match_rate may be included in the response, indicating an estimation of the likelihood of the match in percent.
• If the network cannot locate the device, the verification result is UNKNOWN.

API Reference

The OpenAPI specification for the Device Location Verification API is available here.

Registration

A prerequisite to using Device Location Verification is the registration of your application with Vonage and the Communication Service Providers (CSP). Vonage’s Network API Registration service automates the registration process through a common dashboard interface and sends the information to the CSPs for approval. Vonage’s Customer Dashboard portal is the single source for registration across all participating CSPs.

More detailed information on how the Registration product works can be found here.

Sandbox

Currently, the Device Location Verification API can only be used in the Sandbox with a Virtual CSP, which provides predefined and deterministic API responses based on the parameters of the API request. This allows for the discovery, development and testing of Network APIs in scenarios where access to a live CSP is unavailable.

See the Sandbox guide for more information on how to set up your account, and the Virtual CSP guide for more information on the preconfigured requests and responses.

Authentication

See our guide on Server Authentication for code samples and more information on how Server Authentication works.