ETHERFAX & FaxCore Support LexisNexis® Risk Solutions & National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC) is a private, non-profit organization whose mission is to help find missing children, reduce child sexual exploitation, and prevent child victimization. NCMEC works with families, victims, private industry, law enforcement, and the public to assist with preventing child abductions, recovering missing children, and providing services to deter and combat child sexual exploitation.
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions provides customers with solutions and decision tools that combine public and industry specific content with advanced technology and analytics to assist them in evaluating risk and enhancing operational efficiency. In 2000, LexisNexis Risk Solutions partnered with NCMEC and created the ADAM™ Program to help locate missing children as quickly as possible.
NCMEC uses the ADAM Program to broadcast and dispatch information about missing child cases across email and fax. LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ technology integrating etherFAX is used to quickly distribute information and posters containing a photo of the missing child and case details to police, news media, schools, businesses, medical centers, and individuals within a specific, targeted geographic area. The program is named in honor of Adam Walsh, who went missing in 1981 and helped inspire the founding of NCMEC in 1984.
In 2019, NCMEC assisted law enforcement and families with more than 29,000 cases of missing children.
Challenge
When a child goes missing, time is of the essence. Any delay in distributing information could prevent missing children from being recognized and recovered safely. Fax is a vital component of the LexisNexis Risk Solutions technology stack used by the ADAM Program. Busy signals, failed transmissions, and network downtime is unacceptable.
NCMEC sends posters via the ADAM Program to law enforcement agencies, businesses, and organizations within a targeted geographic region and a reliable fax solution was needed to help bring these missing children home.
Prior to implementing ETHERFAX, LexisNexis Risk Solutions used another fax platform to distribute posters for the ADAM Program. Over time, this platform had started to adversely affect these critical communications resulting in transmission delays and preventing near real-time delivery.
“We needed to look for a new solution that was more reliable and could accommodate our needs,” said Marcus Henley, manager, Systems Engineering at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “With the amount of fax volume and time-sensitive information needing to be transmitted very quickly, a more robust and dependable platform was required.”
Solution
Working with Ingenium, a technology service provider, LexisNexis Risk Solutions evaluated several fax service providers, and ultimately selected ETHERFAX and FaxCore. The combination of etherFAX and FaxCore utilized the Cloud to provide secure, reliable, and ultra-fast document delivery.
ETHERFAX and FaxCore currently support over 100,000 faxes per month for the ADAM Program. Leveraging the ETHERFAX Secure Exchange Network (SEN), high-resolution posters containing images and information about missing children are sent with superior color and clarity to law enforcement, media, schools, businesses, medical centers, libraries, retail stores, and churches. Information is also emailed to ADAM Program participants along with a link to the poster so that it can be easily shared.
“In just 24 hours, we typically send more than 16,000 alerts to targeted locations,” said Patti Willingham, director of Case Management Services at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “These alerts used to take days to process with our previous system. With ETHERFAX, they can be processed in minutes.”
With 48 fax lines dedicated to the ADAM Program and NCMEC, ETHERFAX ensures that LexisNexis Risk Solutions maintains deliverability, uptime, and business continuity at all times. ETHERFAX Disaster Recovery (DR) provides four nines reliability while built-in redundancy eliminates the need for phone lines, fax boards, and servers. ETHERFAX DR manages high-volume, peak overflow fax operations, eliminates busy signals, and ensures up-time even when existing telephony equipment fails.
Results
The ADAM Program has been credited with the recovery of 185 missing children and has assisted in the recovery efforts of countless other cases.
“ETHERFAX has helped us with the rapid distribution of thousands of posters each month,” said Willingham. “With the built-in reporting capabilities that ETHERFAX provides, we can easily monitor the success rate of our poster distributions and also measure volume of pending alerts. This has proved beneficial when a critical case needs to be prioritized to the top of the outgoing fax queue.”
“Nearly 200 recoveries is proof that technology that we take for granted everyday can make such a huge impact to benefit the community and help bring missing children home,” said Trish McCall, director, Program Management, and Co-Founder of The ADAM Program at LexisNexis Risk Solutions.
In addition to the ADAM Program, LexisNexis Risk Solutions has used ETHERFAX to securely transmit background check and police reports to assist law enforcement agencies and charitable organizations.
“ETHERFAX is a godsend. We no longer experience busy signals and my team spends significantly less time managing faxes,” said Henley. “Given the success of ETHERFAX with the ADAM Program, we are looking for ways to further leverage the technology across other fax solutions in our business.”
“By moving to next-generation fax technology from ETHERFAX and FaxCore, LexisNexis Risk Solutions has achieved significant performance gains, a lower cost of ownership and a very happy end customer,” said Doug Olive, president of Ingenium.
ETHERFAX is a godsend. We no longer experience busy signals and my team spends significantly less time managing faxes.
Marcus Henley Manager of Systems Engineering, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Alerts used to take days to process with a previous system.
With ETHERFAX, they can be processed in minutes.
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