Bulgarian Operator Orders Anti-Fraud Platform

Published on: 11th August 2008

Neural Technologies has announced that Bulgaria's BTC Mobile has deployed its Minotaur solution to enable it to tackle fraud on its network. A fraud review carried out by the operator in 2006 highlighted several areas of concern, the most pressing of which was bypass fraud.

Bypass fraud is the illegal routing of calls in order to avoid paying interconnection fees. Legitimate operators negotiate interconnection agreements between each other that define the routes and the cost to terminate calls on their network; routing calls in a manner that avoids these agreed interconnection points is bypass fraud. The advent of Voice over IP (VoIP) has made bypass easier and more common and large telcos are losing significant revenues to VoIP routing.

"We selected Minotaur based upon its proven track record and its flexibility in accommodating new fraud trends and service offerings. We have not been disappointed; to date we are identifying in excess of 80% of bypass fraud on our network and expect to see this figure rise in the near future", stated Mihail Radulov, the operator's Fraud & Revenue Assurance Manager.

Luke Taylor, Commercial Director of Neural Technologies (Nt), said, "We are delighted to be working with the fraud management team at BTC Mobile. Their proactive and professional approach to combating network fraud, coupled with the capability of Minotaur and Nt's dedicated support, is already delivering outstanding results and is set to provide them with an early return on investment".

Figures from the Mobile World database estimate that BTC Mobile ended Q1 '08 with just under 1.1 million subscribers, of which some 53,000 are using the new 3G network. At the beginning of 2005 BTC was granted a licence to become Bulgaria's third GSM operator, and in November 2005 the company launched its mobile services under the Vivatel brand.

 

Tags: [voip]  [revenue assurance ]  [btc]  [vivatel]  [fraud]  [interconnection]  [Bulgaria]