Telecom Wholesale Fraud | Products

Search Blog About us
  • Products
  • Solutions
  • Services
  • Events
  • Knowledge

Roaming and Core Network

Risk Management

Network Security

Testing and Monitoring

Engagement & Experience

5G

Internet of Things (IoT)

VoLTE

MVNO

Cable MSO

Service & Network Assurance

Check our Services

Meet our team in the next event

Check out our exclusive insightful content

What are you looking for?

Telecom Wholesale Fraud

Stopping fraudulent traffic at the international wholesale carrier level

Telecom Wholesale’s prevalent fraud scenario encompasses different types of Fraud

According to some industry reports, fraudulent traffic is projected to cost the international wholesale carrier industry $17 billion annually. The ever-changing techniques deployed are making it more difficult to catch fraudulent partner carriers. While most carriers can identify at most times fraudulent patterns on their networks, contractual service agreements and fear of incorrectly blocking legitimate traffic can make the elimination of fraudulent traffic complex. The Mobileum wholesale fraud module allows carriers to gain comprehensive visibility of their network traffic, allowing them to identify fraudulent attacks and address them quickly with the highest level of accuracy in the market.

Advanced Protection against False Answer Supervision (FAS)

False Answer Supervision (FAS) most times occurs when there is a lack of synchronization between a VoIP leg and PSTN leg of the call on a VoIP-to-PSTN gateway. When the call reaches the gateway from the VoIP network the gateway tries to establish a connection with the called number but, most likely due to an incorrect configuration, it cannot detect the states of the call, which are returned by the PSTN network. These states are: "called party ringing", "called party connected". Therefore, the gateway forces the answer state which normally occurs immediately after the arrival of the call from the VoIP network or after a few seconds. The problem is that the gateway answers the call (which starts the billing) according to its own settings, but not according to the actual state of the call.
Learn more
Advanced Protection against False Answer Supervision

See how Mobileum can help protect & grow your business

Over 750 Telecom companies, in more than 150 countries, are scaling their business with Mobileum solutions.
Request a demo Request a meeting

Proactive protection against Call Stretching with Test Call Generator

Call Stretching is an inter-carrier fraud type that occurs on international voice services, where a fraudulent carrier or transit provider plays a recording with a fragment of a conversation during the time of the call. After a few minutes, the call is terminated on the B-side but kept on hold on the A-side with the recorded audio being played back repeatedly. As a result, the billed time of the call is longer than the time for which the called party was on the line. With Mobileum Test Call Generator and advanced Fraud Management System, CSPs can test these scenarios. Mobileum smart detection performs an automated comparison of the B channel voice to text conversation against the original recording to more quickly detect cases of fraud and stop being charged for illegal calls.
Learn more
Proactive protection against Call Stretching

Traffic Pumping and the settlement of “ghost” caller

Traffic pumping, also known as access stimulation, is a dubious practice by which some local exchange telephone carriers in rural areas of the United States inflate the volume of incoming calls to their networks to profit from the greatly increased inter-carrier compensation fees. In order to spur competition for Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs), the FCC allows rural Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) and Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs) to charge high terminating access charges for completing calls they accept from Inter-Exchange Carriers (IXCs). RAID wholesale fraud detection includes specific validations and controls that detect traffic pumping patterns in order to protect against revenue loss during inter-carrier settlement.

Mobileum Risk Management Software Portfolio

Discover why Mobileum is the most trusted software vendor by Telecom companies all over the globe to manage their Revenue Assurance activities.
Download Datasheet

RAID for Fraud Management is Powered by Mobileum's Active Intelligence Big Data Analytics Platform

Case Management
Drill down on data and alerts with ad hoc analysis to find the root cause of fraud and make better decisions faster.
Learn more
Fully configurable
Use easy-to-apply configurations, workflows, and dashboards to enable simple and transparent mirroring of your required business processes. Automations and migrations let you execute this in days instead of months
Learn more
Hybrid Solution
React to and stop known and unknown fraud patterns in a repeatable and auditable way by combining an extensive rule's library with machine learning.
Learn more
All-In-One Software
Manage the telecom fraud management lifecycle autonomously, from data loading to mitigation actions, with Active Intelligence’s complete suite of tools for fraud analysts.
Learn more
Link Analysis
Quickly uncover fraudulent activities by highlighting key individuals, connections and patterns in a uniquely visual way. Gain a deeper understanding of data within a different entity and relationship types, as well as attributes that can help uncover hidden fraud patterns.
Learn more
Big Data Analytics
Adopt stream data integration as part of your data management strategies for real-time integration and analytics. Address the problem of matching continuously income events to evolving fraud patterns with Active Intelligence’s complex event processing (CEP). Accelerate fraud detection and react faster to emerging threats with real-time data stream analysis.
Learn more

Wholesale SIP trunking, a scalable fraud door

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking is a way of providing telephone calls using data rather than fixed lines. SIP is the natural replacement for fixed lines and in addition, offers greater flexibility and resilience whilst being at a lower price point. Fraudulent wholesale SIP trunking is an emerging fraud type where fraudsters make money by selling wholesale trunking services or using stolen credentials to terminate the calls. A key pattern identified on this type of fraud is the huge number of apparently random calls to destinations such as Asian countries, that are not specifically high cost and are mostly dissimulated as residential numbers, can get below the radar creating a huge impact on the revenue.

Mobile Termination Rate (MTR) an emerging menace

Mobile network operators are now able to apply higher termination rates to non-EU incoming traffic. In these situations and when there is a considerable gap between the termination rates, the risk of exposure to Mobile Termination Rate (MTR) Arbitrage (also know as tromboning), is very high and can cause a significant impact to your network. In order to terminate the calls at lower costs, some carriers that are intended to pay a high MTR recreate the traffic in order to pay a lower MTR. RAID provides you with detailed information on how traffic originating from risky countries, suspicious ranges of numbers and unusually high or continuous low volumes in your network.

Top 6 threats of Wholesale Fraud

Degraded QoE
Wholesale carriers plan a major role in ensure seamless call connectivity through Inter-operator network connections. The rogue wholesale carriers significantly impact the call quality leading of huge number of call drops.
High Revenue Loss
False Answers, Call stretching, illegal call hijacking, short stopping of calls, SIP Trunking etc. are just few types of Wholesale fraud which not only impact the CSPs revenue but also leads to negative revenue for the wholesale carriers.
Low Brand Value
Operators expect their Wholesale partners to facilitate improved and more convenient communications. Nevertheless, when the service quality degrades, and customers don’t get services as expected, it impacts the CSP’s brand value.
Degraded Customer Experience
Wholesale fraud not only impacts CSPs’ bottom lines—it also impacts CSPs’ relationships with their customers. Degraded voice quality and latency issues caused by fraudulent carriers negatively impact the customer experience, which can eventually cause customers to lose faith in their CSP and even defect to another provider.
Increase cost of Fraud Prevention
The use of fraudulent traffic by organized crime to raise and distribute funds highlights how important it is that international carriers work to reduce fraud as the impact goes beyond the carriers’ profit and loss. They now invest heavily on dedicated fraud management full time employees (FTE) who are not linked to commercial performance but are critical to ensuring that they have clear incentives to reduce fraudulent traffic.
Settlement and Bill Disputes
Fraudulent carriers generate illegal traffic and in turn are able to generate high volume invoices which they charge to their CSP partners. Such massive bills leads interconnect partner disputes, eventually leading to delays in bill payments and settlements.

Increase your Fraud Management maturity with other products in our Portfolio.

CLI Spoofing and Robocalling Fraud
Fraudsters can generate false calling party information and pass it onto the PSTN via SS7 using IP technology. Mobileum Robocalling fraud solution, combined with a voice firewall, can sort good traffic from bad, block unwanted calls, and keep a voice network safe and secure from attack.
Know more
IRSF Fraud
International Revenue Sharing Fraud (IRSF) continues as the most persistent type of fraud within the telecom industry. Mobileum’s pre-packaged Revenue Share Fraud Management solution, combined with a real-time action system, can help operators mitigate losses occurring due to revenue share fraud.
Know more
Bypass Fraud
Fraudsters highjack voice international termination calls over an IP network and send them to a SIM box (a device that houses SIM cards), which redirects this illegal VoIP traffic onto mobile networks. Mobileum’s pre-packaged Bypass fraud management solution, combined with a real-time action system, can help operators mitigate losses occurring due to bypass fraud.
Know more

One platform that cuts the data silos between all telecom applications for limitless insights

Digital business depends on a flexible application portfolio that enables delightful digital experiences, that supports new ways of doing business, and that makes the most of new technologies.