Artilium

Friday, August 10, 2007

The Battle Against Fraud

Where money leads, fraud follows.  Mobile communications is no exception and fraudsters are forever seeking new ways to exploit weaknesses in any telecom network.  For network operators, this is a huge concern as several millions of Euros are lost each year.

It’s possible to prevent technical fraud, such as SIM cloning and theft, with technical methods such as EMEI blocking.  Likewise, social fraud such as unpaid bills, is best countered with social means, such as better customer service and credit control from the MVNO’s side.  Thanks to new services and implementing extensible technologies, this kind of revenue leakage (unpaid bills and churn) is being stopped and has also prompted innovative B2C partnerships.  For example the recently introduced Apple iPhone is being sold in combination with dedicated rate plans from AT&T. Pre-paid subscriptions offer the most secure subscription model for the MVNO and combined with the right marketing – such as dedicated programmes for students (eg. get x-number of free SMS/free minutes for after-school hours) - this model can also reduce the churn-war going between various mobile operators. Real-time call monitoring on post-paid subscriptions, with limits per day, week or month, offers the customer the guarantee that he/she won’t be the victim on sky-high bills.

It can also act as a service to the customer in cases where a certain call behavior has been reached. The CustomerServiceCenter can then contact the customer in order to explain certain other subscription models, based on the customer’s call behavior.
A huge challenge lies in the fact that most systems run high usage algorithms the day after the usage has occurred.  However 24 hours after the fact, it is too late.  In the US, Amp’d Mobile ran into trouble with billing and collections, among other issues.  Advanced customer provisioning which provides security for unallowed access by controlling the service/traffic in real-time with customizable reporting can avoid this situation.