Introduction
Working with a South African tier 1 telecoms operator struggling to deal with the impact of international bypass fraud, Squire Technologies’ MavenShield fraud prevention solution was integrated and deployed as part of a comprehensive Network Protection System.
Background
In some countries, including South Africa telecom operators are taxed on the international communications that are made in and out of the country.
This taxation has seen the rates charged by operators for international calls escalate, which in turn has driven an industry in international bypass fraud.
SIM box or Bypass Fraud is when fraudsters set up SIM boxes with multiple low-cost prepaid SIM cards that are used to terminate international calls through local phone numbers to make them appear as if they’re local calls.
Scope and Challenges
The operator runs a Network Protection System which combines a Big Data platform with an ‘Intermediate’ product that provisions their HLR and routing server. Here the Big Data platform detects fraudulent on-net calls routed through illegal SIMboxes.
While the operator was utilising their own products for active and passive fraud detection within their own network, they faced challenges in terms of being able to detect and block fraudulent off-net (other local operator) calls in real-time.
The Solution
Our MavenShield anti-fraud solution is a highly adaptable product designed to integrate with existing BSS, Fraud Prevention and Revenue Assurance solutions.
It provides operators with the opportunity to rapidly take proactive measures, in this case call blocking upon the detection of suspect traffic.
The operator integrated MavenShield, making it an integral part of their Network Protection System (referring to it as a routing server), to facilitate real-time call blocking of fraudulent off-net calls. Here MavenShield pulls down a regular data stream from the Intermediate product including up to the minute Blacklist and Whitelist databases.
Connected directly to the operators STP’s MavenShield receives CAMEL IDP triggers, and based upon the INAP IDP message content it either accepts or rejects calls.
MavenShields’ appeal is in its high degree of flexibility, with network managers and engineers able to configure any number of rules to identify fraudulent traffic, including database lookups to outside network components. Here the operator has set up rules including screening of E.164 numbers (to comply with South African numbering plan regulations), rules to identify whether the calling party number belongs to the correct service provider and whether they’re using assigned or unassigned numbers.
The decision to block calls is based upon a combination of the data stream from the Intermediate and the configured set of rules within MavenShields business logic. This particular deployment also sees MavenShield set to export all the transaction data records from off-net calls for provisioning into the operators HLR.