The continuing increase in complexity of modern telecommunications networks and products has produced a very difficult situation for Telcos to keep up with fraudsters. Whilst many frauds are undeniably 'low-tech', these people appear to have unusual capacity for uncovering quite sophisticated vulnerabilities and are quite prepared to spend inordinate amounts of effort in exploiting them. They will also mix and match different frauds, for example cascading a PBX fraud with a Split Revenue fraud. A Telco whose fraud losses are running at around 0.2-1% of revenues can be considered to be doing quite well in risk management terms. The effects on QoS are fairly clear although not part of the usual measurement set. Customers harbour (usually) unvoiced expectations of the fraud resistance of the products they buy. These range from simple wireline access through to expensive and complex customer premise equipment like PBXs. More easily visualised in QoS terms is the impact on availability of services which may be occupied with fraud traffic. An example of this was the sudden increase in circuit availability to a distant country when a large scale operator-services fraud was closed down. As a corollary it can be seen that a degradation in QoS performance might be an indicator of a fraud problem. Therefore, traditional QoS measures can provide a useful input to a fraud management system. Modern fraud detection systems are able to detect unusual traffic patterns rapidly and create cases for a 'Mark 1 Human' fraud manager to progress. They are mostly, by design and of necessity, reactive in nature and so must be supplemented by a proactive approach to product design to minimise fraud exposure at the outset.
Telecommunications fraud, Page 1 of 2
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