Starhome Mach, a supplier of mobile inter-carrier network and clearing house services, has announced that a European Tier 1 operator has significantly reduced its roaming fraud expenses by about 600%, saving an average of more than $7 million per year.
Roaming fraud is an enormous problem within the GSM world due to the standard 4-hour delay in receiving Near Real Time Roaming Data Exchange (NRTRDE) records from visited networks and the response time of the home network’s Fraud Management Systems (FMS).
According to a 2013 survey by the Communications Fraud Control Association, revenue loss from roaming fraud costs operators $6.1 billion per year and is rising.
Mobile network operators can easily track suspicious calls made by home-country subscribers. Once subscribers travel abroad, the home operator does not have sufficient, timely visibility of the calling activities of its outbound roamers. As fraud complexity increases, operators need a real-time roaming fraud prevention solution to eliminate roaming fraud threats and their related expenses.
Operators have several levels of fraud protection when using Starhome Mach’s Roaming Anti-Fraud solution. First, extensive barring capabilities and segmentation provide the flexibility to detect fraud and block calls of individual subscribers according to profiles, origination or destination country, and current location.
When combined with the Starhome Mach call correction capability, Roaming Anti-Fraud simplifies identification of problem numbers when dialled in various formats, such as local dialling or the use of different international access codes. Second, the operator’s FMS will now receive call progress information in real time from the Roaming Anti-Fraud system. Using its own logic, the FMS can then more quickly detect fraudulent activities. At the third level is a unique, global premium number database and monthly report fed into Roaming Anti-Fraud, providing faster detection and prevention of premium number fraud.
