Blog

Bypass fraud along with IRSF has proven they are highly costly types of network fraud in the modern telecommunications environment. The menace of telecom fraud has made the telecom operators and the regulators face staggering annual revenues losses numbering in the multiple billions in US Dollars. Bypass fraud is more predominant in countries where the cost of terminating international call is much higher than the cost of a national call by a substantial margin or the countries where government carriers monopolize international gateways. These fraud committers (fraudsters), who can be both individuals and organizations, through the use of various bypass contrivances, sell capacity to terminate calls cheaply in these countries, either on the open market or via direct connections with interconnect operators. Operators sending outbound international traffic are then attracted by these interconnect operators with lower interconnect rates, usually with lower quality and no delivery of CLI. This leads to loss of revenue for terminating network operators as well as causing potential social harm to society. Premium rate services have been hit with IRSF (international Revenue Share Fraud) that exploits the interconnection of premium rate services. The major way to commit IRSF is by significantly increasing the number of calls to a premium number in a variety of ways to increase the revenue. These are two types of international fraud which account for a major portion of operator’s network fraud losses. The purpose of this paper is to discuss comprehensive and best in class solutions to combat bypass fraud and premium number hijacking.