How to prevent voice fraud before it occurs

Voice fraud is an incessant threat, needlessly diverting the attention of an organisation from its core business. In this article, Robert Benlolo, Associate Director, Product Management, FPaaS, Enterprise and Wholesale Voice, at Tata Communications, explores how organisations can prevent voice fraud before it occurs.

Various frauds can be perpetuated on the voice network, threatening organisations with severe financial and reputation damage in addition to tremendously wasted resources. According to CFCA (Communications Fraud Control Association) & numerous fraud prevention associations, globally, voice fraud amounts to billions in losses yearly.

In the first of a series of blog posts, let me delve into an interesting scenario.

“Voice fraud can be divided into two distinct parts: intrusion and traffic generation.”

An intrusion occurs when there is a breach of an organisation’s telecom system due to a lack of configuration/security. Once a customer has fallen victim to an intrusion, hackers will attempt to monetise the breach. Hackers know they have a limited time frame to exploit the compromised system before being detected. They are in a race against time and are unaware about what destinations the customer’s carrier(s) have opened on their behalf.

What occurs next is a flurry of activity – namely, the hacker generating massive call attempts to identify what destinations/ number ranges are ‘opened’ upstream. This frantic action is performed by dialer software to an extensively wide array of disparate destinations & numbers, in an intense manner. This is where knowing what to look for and speed of alerting is paramount.

“The Tata Communications Cloud Voice layer of GlobalRapide has an AI-driven, multi-layered fraud detection and prevention approach.”

Dialer Detector, our patent-pending solution, is focused solely on detecting and analysing machine or dialer generated traffic – also called robocalling. This is done even before minutes materialise and prior to initiating the invoicing process. It deploys layered algorithmic rules to trigger in real-time accurate detailed alerts for our customers, letting them know that fraudulent actions are in progress.

Dialer Detector, when used in conjunction with other fraud prevention techniques becomes Tata Communications customisable, multi-layered offering to predict, prevent and contain fraud. The entire process stems from having gained a deep understanding over many years about the operating processes followed by hackers. We block 6 million fraud call attempts a month and conduct more than 4 million tests a year for quality and fraud prevention. All of these efforts have resulted in preventing more than $800 million fraud for our customers in a 12-month period.

Visit our webpage to learn how your business can be protected against voice fraud.