Fraud


they can spread quickly by riding an avalanche of ‘Likes’. On top of this, phishing techniques are enjoying a real renaissance in the mobile era as open exchange has made it easier to carry out targeted attacks with the aim of seeking out potential victims.”


Faster speeds = bigger frauds And, to compound things even further, we now also have the world of LTE to contend with as well, a technology set specifically designed to sup- port much higher transaction value services than plain old circuit switched networks could ever do, exposing mobile service providers to new and po- tentially more costly risks. For Joseph George, director of product man-


agement for fraud and revenue assurance at glo- bal interconnect leader Syniverse (www.syniverse. com), LTE is presenting its own sets of new chal- lenges to the sector – as well as new opportunities for fraudsters. “Te arrival of LTE services has meant that traditional fraud tactics like calls to premium rate numbers, subscription fraud and roaming fraud will continue,” he says. “But, in the more complex LTE environment, data-ori- ented frauds like VoIP fraud, content reselling, malware and phishing attacks are on the rise. LTE connects the service providers to the Inter- net world and this increases the complexity and risk in a mobile operator’s back-office IT systems and fraudsters have been quick off the mark, tak- ing advantage of loopholes the technology has bought with it with its exposure to the IP world. While multiple bearer layers are a requirement for control systems to provision and manage services in an LTE environment, as customers use differ- ent bearers across Wi-Fi, GSM and wireline serv- ices, so the risk of fraud increases.” He adds: “Effective fraud detection requires


seamless connectivity, access to data in real time, proficient systems, expert staff, global intelli- gence and efficient processes, 365 days a year. Fraudsters don’t work set hours; they’ll target operators at any time and real-time detection of potential frauds goes a long way to saving costs. As such, operators have to turn to fraud management solutions with large data-handling capabilities relative to increased LTE data vol- umes, and the architecture for immediate analy- sis. Tis moves fraud detection into the realm of


Companies have to look out for frauds being carried out internally by corrupted staff


‘Big Data’ analysis and beyond the capability of existing relational database structures.” Tis broad picture strategy is echoed by Carlos


Marques, product marketing manager at revenue assurance specialists WeDo Technologies (www. wedotechnologies.com) , “Just as there’s been in- creasing cooperation between fraud and revenue management teams in recent years, so too are we also seeing growing synergies between fraud man- agement and security departments as fraud man- agers are starting to have to learn about malware and hacking. Fortunately new systems and tools are coming onto the market that complement these new organisational approaches. As well as the challenges of the IP world, OTT services, or the increasing number of shared data plans that cover the multiple devices a user might have, we’ve also got the current explosion in M2M traf- fic to contend with as well.” Tis need to use as many perspectives on


fraud as possible is also illustrated by the grow- ing involvement of non-telco companies in this field, able to offer service providers access to complementary services, databases and expertise to identify and attack fraud as creatively as the criminals are doing themselves. For Nick Moth-


‘In social networks, users tend to be much more open when dealing with contact requests. If the message containing hidden malicious code seemingly comes from a friend, users are more likely to activate it’


16


ershaw, director of fraud and identity solutions at Experian (www.experian.com), the ability to identify anomalies early in the subscription cycle can block fraud even before it takes place: “Tere are a number of different techniques that can be used to check, validate or block fraudulent ap- plications for accounts by cross-referencing the information that the customer provides. While that’s relatively straightforward for countries with reliable ways of tracking citizens such as electoral rolls or where almost everyone has a bank account or credit history, this becomes much more prob- lematic in developing countries where much of the mobile growth into higher value services has yet to take place. To address this, we’ve recently partnered with device recognition specialist Iova- tion (www.iovation.com), allowing operators to actually track and identify devices through their unique footprints and spot, say, people trying to buy multiple services and accounts through the same device.” Just as in mainstream IT, while technology will


always create problems that can then be solved by more technology, it is also important not to forget the exposure to risk caused by human frailties and greed. Revector’s Andy Gent remembers: “We were checking out one service provider client and discovered a couple of anonymous looking boxes connected to the network – these turned out to be a PBX installed and owned by an employee who was happily bypassing the billing system and working as an independent operator him- self. Another service provider claimed to have no arbitrage fraud – on closer examination it turned out that a corrupt billing team had actually been deleting records. We estimated that that particu- lar operator had been losing around $500,000 every month….”


LAND mobile August 2013


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