The Fight Against Voice Fraud: Maximising Margins with Global Numbering Intelligence

The carrier was seeing a high occurrence of IRSF across its network. IRSF is committed by pumping voice traffic to international destinations where the destination number provider shares the termination revenue with the traffic originator.  According to the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA), IRSF is ranked number one across the various types of telecoms fraud worldwide. It estimates IRSF accounts for more than $5 billion in losses to telecoms operators globally.

The challenge was to decrease losses from IRSF without adding to the complexity and cost of buying and integrating another anti-fraud solution. The carrier had strict budget, resource, and time constraints that meant it needed a way to enhance its existing approach to fraud and not reinvent it. Its existing fraud management systems were identifying some suspicious traffic and enabled them to create block lists, but were also delivering false positives when analysing voice traffic.

IRSF was having an immediate impact on the carrier’s bottom line, while also causing losses for its carrier partners. It recognised an opportunity to contribute to the overall health of the voice carrier ecosystem and support the delivery of legitimate traffic across its network as well as its partners. In addition to increasing its own margins, the carrier wanted to take action to support the carrier community and deny profits to organised crime.

While it had its own data sets for IPRN and other high risk ranges, there was an opportunity to expand both the granularity and accuracy of global range allocations.  Rather than investing in new systems, the carrier could increase the precision and performance of its fraud management systems.