Cutting Down on Roaming Fraud
The clearing and settlement firm, MACH has developed an early warning system that can detect roaming fraud and help operators reduce revenue leakage.
As roaming fraud becomes more prevalent Near Real Time Roaming Data Exchange (NRTRDE) systems are set to become a GSMA requirement to minimise roaming fraud loss.
Operators are particularly vulnerable to fraud attacks during peak times such as weekends or holidays when the fraudsters are extremely active. To combat this problem MACH Data Express has been configured to be on patrol 24 hours day, 365 days a year.
Anette Svensen, Product Manager at MACH commented: "Compared to the existing High Usage Reports (HURs), home operators are faced with a new task once they start receiving NRTRDE ? these files report all roaming usage but without any preliminary identification of fraudulent data. Operators should carefully evaluate the effect NRTRDE will have on their current fraud detection procedures and initiate an action to redesign their current procedure, if needed".
Annual telecoms fraud is on the increase
Typically 80% of international roaming fraud directly impacts on the P&L statement of the 'home operator'; this is underlined by the fact that the external cost is due to the liability of the 'visited network operator'.
As a result of this, 'home networks' are becoming a lot more careful when selecting a roaming partner, preferring to choose operators that can offer protection from roaming fraud through Near Real Time visibility of roaming subscribers.
Home and visited networks will soon be able to offer each other the same levels of protection from fraud losses. With NRTRDE being broadly deployed across the GSM community as a stipulation of the GSMA, the time limit on transfer of liability from visited network to home network will be reduced drastically to 4 hours maximum.
"The whole purpose of NRTRDE is to provide early visibility of a roaming subscriber's usage and thus be able to detect possible fraud much faster and limit the fraud loss. The operators' fraud detection procedure should be optimized to utilize this improvement ? they need to plan ahead to ensure that processes and potential complications, such as adequate planning of trained resources to manage the increased frequency of reports and data, are in place.", Anette Svendson continued.
In order to prepare for the new GSMA regulations mobile operators should evaluate the effect NRTRDE will have on their current fraud detection procedures and initiate an action to redesign their current procedure.
Implementing MACH Data Express will ensure that data processing and reporting streams will not be affected when the new directive is introduced on October 8th 2008."
Posted to the site on 3rd April 2007