In this blog, we have gone through telecom fraud and the necessary prevention one can follow telecom fraud prevention. We have also covered revenue assurance and its importance in today's world. We have also discussed roaming frauds and the effects of telecom scams on Revenue.
Introduction
No telecom service provider is immune to fraud. Fraud of any kind hurts an organization's profitability, harms good consumers, and reduces operational efficiency. The true costs may surpass lost income and include unjustified network, investment, resource diversion, and customer displacement. The true impact is seldom quantified, which reduces visibility and efficacy.
The Fraud Control System equips you with the technical and commercial knowledge to support strategic and tactical fraud management activities. It acknowledges that resources are finite and works quickly to identify profit-enhancing alternatives.
Protection Against Telecom Fraud
Telecom fraud is on the rise globally and is one of the leading causes of revenue loss for any telecom operator or service provider. Businesses currently invest millions of dollars in defending themselves against scammers. They are mostly in a reactive and defensive phase, with bottom lines under extreme stress.
Telecom Fraud Prevention
We are all aware that prevention is better than cure. The same is true in the case of telecom fraud management. Attackers are always devising new methods to breach networks, so fighting telecom fraud requires a proactive strategy. There are a few necessary countermeasures that MNOs and MVNOs should always use to combat telecom fraud.
Password Security
Always use strong passwords, ideally a mix of alphanumeric characters, to secure your software systems. Passwords should also be changed at regular intervals of time.
PBX System Monitoring
Attackers should carry out their assaults after business hours, on weekends, and holidays.
During these times, monitoring PBX systems for any abnormal activity is crucial.
Remove the Clutter
We often store outdated files in our systems that are no longer useful. However, it is critical to remove any garbage files and directories from the system and disable unnecessary functionality such as extensions.
Validation and authentication
A company needs to cross-check and confirm the information of its subscribers to weed out the bogus ones. Using two-factor or multi-factor authentication is another step toward assuring security.
Keep an eye on your spending.
A corporation may keep an eye on any fraudulent behavior by doing a sophisticated study of how much spending occurs in a month. Many businesses do not do this, but keeping track of your spending might help discourage telecom fraudsters.
Make Use of Security Software
Security software is critical in covering all bases when it comes to security. To keep telecom threats at bay, use sophisticated security software.
Telecom Fraud Prevention Through a Community-Based Approach
Traditional telecom fraud prevention systems rely on reactive tactics with each of their operators, who gather and analyze the data on their networks. This implies they can only acquire insight into calls occurring on their networks and nowhere else.
Because telecom fraud schemes may route a single call over many networks, these systems miss a lot of data. The latest approach for telecom fraud detection is for several operators to collaborate and share call data to prevent any fraudulent calls from connecting.
Such coordination may enable a community of operators to work together proactively to monitor and verify calls across various providers. This is quite similar to what the SWIFT system provides for banks receiving and sending payments all around the globe.
What is Roaming Fraud
When subscribers transfer from their home public mobile network to a visiting public mobile network, they utilize services without meaning to pay for them. This is known as roaming fraud.
Fraudsters use operators' poor data roaming exchanges to generate high-cost foreign revenue-sharing calls through premium-rate lines, ultimately paid for by operators and customers. Because analyzing this information takes time, fraudsters use this to increase their income. Stopping roaming fraud requires quick discovery and response.
What exactly is Revenue Assurance in the Telecom Industry?
Revenue assurance means that a telecommunications business may charge for goods and services by the contractual agreement with the customer while avoiding revenue leakage. It maintains the integrity and correctness of all grading, invoicing, and billing systems.
Significance of Revenue Assurance
Revenue leakage increases when a telecom business cannot accurately charge a customer for items and services supplied. Maintaining the integrity of the billing system, which directly impacts the bottom line of telcos, is a difficult undertaking with a client base of millions of subscribers and frauds. Here are a few reasons why revenue assurance should be at the top of any telecom company's priority list.
Profits: With fierce competition and low money from messages and calls, telecom carriers must seek other revenue sources.
One of these is to monitor and fix income leaks in their current procedures and systems.
Regulatory compliance: Telecom providers must appropriately disclose their yearly income.
Revenue assurance assists them in doing so.
Technology innovation: Businesses always innovate and launch new services for their clients.
This necessitates the use of updated backend systems and agile technology.
New technologies make operations easier and more profitable.
At such times, revenue assurance must be noticed.
Mergers and acquisitions: When telecom operators combine, or one buys the other, the different Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operations Support Systems (OSS) must be integrated (OSS).
B2B sales channels: Indirect sales via wholesale and brand partners concentrate attention on billing systems and their integrity.
Launch of complex services and products The introduction of next-generation services/bundles such as home security, Cloud, streaming audio/video, and so on implies that formerly 'locked' telecom systems are now similarly vulnerable to fraud attempts encountered by IT businesses.
What Effect do Telecom Scams have on Revenue?
Telecom scams that cause income leakage are getting more difficult to identify due to the proliferation of goods and services and many billing slabs.
In summary, below are some frequent telecom frauds:
International Revenue Sharing Fraud (IRSF): Con artists rent a premium phone line and contact a company's phone system.
This results in a significant call volume for the company.
A portion of this goes to the con artist.
SIM box fraud occurs when a fraudster purchases a local SIM card and then uses a SIM box or a GSM gateway to make international calls.
They make cheaper international calls, and the telecom provider must suffer losses.
PBX hacking: A PBX is an internal network of a corporation that connects to an external phone network.
If hackers get access and utilize the PBX system to make calls, income is lost.
Wangari scam: It occurs when a fraudster contacts you and disconnects the call. You call back, certain that you have missed a crucial call. However, the call is routed via a high-cost destination controlled by the fraudster.
Fraud Management in Telecom
In these unpredictable and uncertain times, most organizations, particularly those in the telecom, banking, retail, finance, and e-commerce industries, have found fraud detection difficult. By delivering quicker and more accurate fraud control solutions, Secgen assists these organizations in growing safely and maximizing profitability.
Our complete range of fraud detection and prevention analytics products combines strong domain, data science, data, and visualization expertise to build and implement customizable fraud solutions to generate business results. We assist businesses in analyzing massive and complicated data sets to uncover abnormalities, eliminate false positives, and deliver end-to-end sophisticated fraud control solutions.
Conclusion
In recent years, there has been a worldwide increase in the prevalence of telecom fraud, which is a major contributor to the financial losses experienced by the telecom industry. Millions of dollars are being spent by businesses to protect themselves against scams. We need to follow the necessary guidelines for telecom fraud prevention.
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