Toll fraud spikes during holiday periods and is costly, fast-growing menace to telco providers
TollShield, the real time toll fraud blocking innovator, today called on the international telecommunications industry to take action on toll fraud following another series of attacks over the 2016 Easter long weekend.
Over the Easter period TollShield™ generated toll fraud warnings across nine countries and stopped two major confirmed fraud incidents on the Symbio Network leading to the blocking of 10,655 attempted fraud calls. During the Easter period last year, toll fraud attacks spanned fifteen destination countries, with three major confirmed incidents.
Rene Sugo, CEO of TollShield developer Symbio Networks said “Toll fraud is a growing risk forun-prepared telecommunications providers. This is why real-time and automatic toll fraud detection and blocking is crucial, especially during holidays.”
“Most importantly, toll fraud is carried out so swiftly that most telcos don’t realise they’ve been robbed - until it’s too late. To date, efforts to combat toll fraud have largely been reactive – parsing call records ‘after the fact’ to identify toll fraud, or even being alerted to it by customer disputes over bills,” added Sugo.
Fraud is more severe during holiday periods to take advantage of skeleton staff on duty at most service providers. Fewer staff are available to monitor and respond to toll fraud incidents, heightening the chance of incidents going undetected. For example, data collected by TollShield™ shows from 21st-25th December 2015 on the Symbio Network four confirmed major fraud attacks were detected and stopped by the TollShield platform. This totaled 5,125 blocked call attempts, including one major prevented incident on Christmas Eve where 4,474 calls where attempted to 186 countries.
A typical toll fraud attack tends to target one to two countries at a time, attacking a phone network in order to route traffic to international destinations for their own profit, and leave the phone provider with a very large unexpected bill. Fraud types encompass a spectrum of ever-evolving methods: subscription fraud, PBX hacking, identity theft and more.
TollShield™, developed by Symbio Networks, is the first-to-market prevention tool that marks a new era in fraud mitigation. The solution addresses the fast-growing fraud problem, which amounted to $US46.3 billion in global losses due to fraud, according to The Communications Fraud Control Association’s 2013 report.
TollShield has also added a new partner, SmartIPX, which manages critical communications traffic across Telco, Private and Public Interconnects for Digital Service Providers, MVNO and SaaS organisations. The TollShield solution expected to be fully integrated to existing SmartIPX customer accounts by Q2 2016 to provide a new level of fraud protection. Paul Tindley, SmartIPX CEO says that Tollshield™’s real-time fraud protection is a major advance as VoIP fraud is a lose-lose scenario, that costs margin and damages customer relationships.
Mr Tindley explains “Wholesale transit is always about enabling routing rather than stopping people making calls. Fraud Management is about enabling central network teams to confidently rely upon their partners to exercise controls that their enterprise, corporate and SMB customers can rely upon.”
About TollShield™
Purpose built to be a carrier-grade technology, the Symbio TollShield™ platform is uniquely designed to enable toll fraud monitoring, detection and blocking in real time: a first for any carrier-grade fraud mitigation software.
TollShield™ is available through Symbio Networks in Australia and New Zealand, and through TNZI globally.
About Symbio Networks™
Symbio Networks™ is Australia's largest IP Voice carrier, operating a smart, new-generation network focused on empowering emerging and OTT providers to deliver their innovating service and overcome limitations of traditional PSTN and ISDN networks. Symbio continuously invests in R&D to create world-class IP Voice solutions that facilitate global voice carriage.
Symbio is part of the ASX-listed MNF Group, an integrated telecommunications software and network provider, specialising in IP voice communications. MNF Group was founded in 2004 and listed on the ASX in 2006. It has a reputation for quality, value and innovation, having won numerous awards including the Forbes Asia’s 200 Best Under a Billion (2014, 2015), Deloitte Technology Fast 50 (2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015), PC User Product of the Year (2005), Money Magazine Product of the Year (2007) and many others.
MyNetFone was founded in 2004 and listed on the ASX in mid 2006. It has a reputation for quality, value and innovation, having won numerous awards including the Forbes Asia’s 200 Best Under a Billion (2014, 2015), Deloitte Technology Fast 50 (2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015), PC User Product of the Year (2005), Money Magazine Product of the Year (2007) and many others.