Verify email and phone

An email address and phone number are often the only direct line between your team and a business you’re onboarding. They are also the easiest identifiers to fabricate: anyone can create a mailbox or provision a phone number in minutes, and neither leaves the paper trail that a registered name or address does.

Corroboration turns a claimed contact into evidence. When a submitted email address or phone number also appears on the business’s website or on third-party platforms the business does not control, the contact has a public history that is difficult to fabricate. Middesk corroborates submitted contact details against these sources and reports what it finds, complementing name and address verification in a KYB program.

How Middesk verifies email addresses and phone numbers

Middesk extracts email addresses and phone numbers from sources the business presents publicly:

• The business website. During web presence analysis, Middesk crawls the business’s website and parses contact details from its pages.
• Third-party profiles. Middesk matches the business to profiles on Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google Places, and extracts the contact details published on each profile page.

Merging submitted and discovered contacts

Middesk reconciles every extracted contact with the entries already on the business:

• A discovered email address or phone number that matches a submitted one merges into the existing entry. The entry keeps submitted: true and gains a source describing where the contact was found. For example, a submitted email that also appears on the business’s Facebook page gains a source of type profile with metadata.url set to the profile page URL.
• A discovered contact that does not match any submitted one becomes a new entry in email_addresses[] or phone_numbers[] with submitted: false.
• Each corroborating profile adds its own source, so a phone number listed on both a Yelp page and a Google Places listing carries two profile sources.

The following entry shows a submitted email address corroborated by the business’s Facebook page:

1
{
2
  "object": "email_address",
3
  "id": "c3d4e5f6-7890-12ab-cdef-3456789012ab",
4
  "email": "[email protected]",
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  "submitted": true,
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  "sources": [
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    {
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      "id": "d4e5f6a7-8901-23ab-cdef-4567890123ab",
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      "type": "profile",
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      "metadata": {
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        "url": "https://facebook.com/acmecorp"
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      }
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    }
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  ]
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}

Source types

Each entry in email_addresses[] and phone_numbers[] carries a sources array describing where Middesk found the contact. Each source is an object with an id, a type, and a metadata object whose contents depend on the type.

How to verify email and phone

$
curl -X POST https://api.middesk.com/v1/businesses \
>
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
>
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
>
  -d '{
>
    "name": "Acme Corporation",
>
    "addresses": [
>
      {
>
        "address_line1": "123 Main Street",
>
        "city": "San Francisco",
>
        "state": "CA",
>
        "postal_code": "94105"
>
      }
>
    ],
>
    "email_addresses": [
>
      { "email": "[email protected]" }
>
    ],
>
    "phone_numbers": [
>
      { "phone_number": "+14155550100" }
>
    ],
>
    "website": {
>
      "url": "https://www.acmecorp.example"
>
    },
>
    "orders": [
>
      {
>
        "product": "website",
>
        "subproducts": ["web_analysis"]
>
      }
>
    ]
>
  }'