Fraud Assurance Methods
Revenue Assurance methods for fraud include:
- Detection and prevention of the theft of services – concentrating
on prevention of intercarrier and roaming charges. Most Telcos
require large prepayment deposits by prepaid customers wanting
to roam.
- The prevention of long distance services theft is managed by
fraud detection systems that access real time feeds of switch
CDRs; using data mining and other predictive and modelling techniques
to identify typical fraud usage patterns. These trigger alarms
that notify and in many cases perform automatic remedial action.
Fraud Management Process
The high-level fraud management includes:
- A real time / near real time feed of call detail records and/or
other traffic information is fed into the fraud management system.
- The traffic activity is scanned to identify patterns of activity
that historically have indicated a high probability of fraudulent
activity.
- When such a pattern is detected, an alarm is generated [ email
to fraud management team]
- The team analyses the flagged pattern using analytics tools
that integrate the customers usage history, the companies policies
and other relevant traffic attributes.
- If the probability of fraud is confirmed appropriate action
is taken – typically cancelling the customer account until
the unusual behaviour can be explained.
Credit Exposure Minimization
Some telcos modified fraud management systems to provide credit
risk exposure prevention as well as formal fraud detection methods.
The fraud management system uses customer information to build a
customer profile (based upon their credit history, payment history
and credit risk). The system then monitors the customers call usage
to help detect when the customer has gone often a predefined number
of minutes of service.
The system will activate alarms when the customers credit limit
is surpassed, and the customer will either be called, or the account
suspended until partial payment is made.
Customer Identity Verification
Indentify verfication is generally quite tight in Telcos. This
ensures that any subscriber has met a predefined level of identify
verification prior to the account being activated. This ensures
the subscriber has a valid name, address and credit history.
Integrity Audits
Integrity audits assure that all parts of the call revenue management
chain are operating correctly, and that CDR's and logs generated
are also correct. This includes:
- Network equipment
- Network revenue information collections mechanisms
- Mediation
- Billing
- Collections
- Debt Recovery
- Sales and Activations
- Call Center and Service Order Processing
- Account adjustment process
There are two parts to integrity checks - firstly to ensure that
the operations are correct, and secondly, to assure that any non-typical
data is a true indication of fraud, rather than a systems error.
NEXT: Collections
and Debt Recovery
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Revenue Assurance | Telco
Model | Telco Operations
| Billing | Leakage
| Types of RA | RA
Capability | RA Operations
| Network | Mediation
| Postpaid Billing | Prepaid
Billing | Collections & Debt Recovery
| Interconnect
|
