The Greatest Telecommunication Frauds
One of the most profitable spheres of human activity like telecommunications hide as many greatest frauds and money making schemes as any other big business ever done. Well, it often happens that big business is no saint. So, is Telecom.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, fraud in telecom was estimated for 20% of the whole fraud complaints only in 2010 and up from 34% in 2012. Don’t need to see to know what’s up now, eh! How do they manage? Let’s have some insight.
Telecom Fraud Call Scenarios
The above mentioned numbers keep growing simply due to the fact that new technology is leading to an onslaught of new fraudulent telecom tactics. The latest moneymaking schemes are being made difficult to track and especially investigate due to their ultimate frequency, as well as anonymity layers and their global nature afterwards.
There are several major fraud scheme categories that are divided according to the fraud targets:
- Phone schemes
These schemes incorporate all types of general fraud that may be realized over the telephone, or anything related to the “Phone Fraud,” category.
- Defraud of Service Providers
This is the most sophisticated fraud scheme. It’s complicated, often using regulatory loopholes, IP trunking, and even more.
- Traffic Pumping
This scheme incorporates using “access stimulation” technique in order to boost traffic leading it to a high cost destination. The revenue is shared between the fraudsters. The huge portion of such call situations are made with the use of the so called premium rate numbers only because they are more likely to be connected with high cost goals. Simply, the proprietor of the pool of premium numbers will offer to share the income produced from them with any individual who sends the traffic. This implies a fraudster who sends bogus or stimulated traffic on purpose to get a kickback for earning income.
Traffic Pumping
This is actually the largest group of fraud that is related to any artificial stimulation of traffic and manipulations with access. The weakest place — lax security support practices, are often exposed while making up these revenue share schemes.
The truth is that customers whose networks have been compromised are more likely to refuse paying large fraud charges, leaving a chance to cover the bill to the service provider, which’s logical enough.
Mind that the attacks more often happen at the weekends or at holidays, which’s also logical enough — the networks are less monitored under the scrutiny then.
1. The Call Forwarding Hack
Indeed, this is a common form of VoIP telecom fraud widely applied by fraudsters. During call forwarding hack, an entrance to the IVR of a voice message framework or a venture PBX are obtained. They can easily make sending calls to the costly long separation goal in order to benefit from arrangement of an income sharing.
2. Multiple Transfer
This hack incorporates sending call fakes, already described, yet rather an upgraded adaptation of it. This hack situation presupposes that the clients call is exchanged from the source the minute the destination replies. After the call is exchanged, the hack call is still in advance with the 2 higher cost goals and the source hangs up.
The following fraud is known to be extremely harmful due to several reasons:
- Each fraud call ends in 2 call legs with higher cost destination.
- It is more hard to distinguish the source of the fraudsters on the grounds that the call source is no longer in.
- The process can be repeated fast, at a time thousands of fraud calls can be set up currently via the soft switch of the service provider.
3. Fraud called «Wangiri»
That means that there’s one ring and then a cut off phone call follows. In Japanese, Wangiri means «one & cut.» This phone call scam depends on a single ring methodology for making money fast.
Its more likely that a fraudster will set up a computer in order to dial many phone numbers simultaneously at random. Each of them however, will ring only once. This leaves the calls as missed on the users devices. Of course, they think legitimate calls were cut off and dial them without a hidden agenda or simply dial it out of curiosity which is a huge mistake.is widely applied in order to generate the calls to off shore zones like Caribbean countries, for example, that may have a similar dial design as the USA telephone numbers. Such numbers may end up being the so called premium rate numbers: promotions, free costs, sex talks, whatever.
Schemes to Defraud
In reality telecom service specialists are the most defenseless against fraudsters and tricks. No wonder, skillful fraudsters are capable of manipulating regulatory systems and turn it to their own advantage and to harm the service providers. They do it in the ways that are quite difficult to detect, trace and especially prosecute in the case of a successful catch.
1. Wholesale SIP Trunking
This is yet a rare phenomenon, but gaining popularity fast, and extremely hard to detect. In this sophisticated phenomenon, by means of using the stolen credentials or the call termination, the fraudsters are making money by means of selling wholesale trunking services.
Apparently high number of random calls is the key significance of this scam, however, the goals are not particularly high, neither are they modest, as well. Here the most valued Asian states like Vietnam, Laos, etc. And other middle-priced nations frequently show up. The traffic is targeted at residential numbers mostly.
It’s been accounted for that the dominant part of false traffic was originating from the prepaid calling card organizations that work VoIP platforms that are generally situated on seaward zones. Prepaid calling administrations are especially reasonable for this scam because in reality there are no calling telephone numbers connected to the clients. The fraudsters IP is the best way to follow them.
Unluckily, it’s impossible to identify the fraudster by geolocation. The point is that these services can only be offered through the Internet tunnels where the true IP address of the fraudster is hidden.
The fact is that the public IP address of the deceitful calling platform utilized by the programmers can without much of a stretch be ended being the VPN (Virtual Private Network) IP address of a facilitated service, though the genuine prepaid calling platform might be located in a distant corner of the globe.
2. Tool Free Scam
Naturally, toll free fraud affects any company that has anything to do with the toll free services. Multiple calls can be done simultaneously and left out for hours, and dealt automatically, of course.
Different calling numbers are used for each call in business hours mostly, which makes it a sophisticated hack scenario. The fraudsters explore the IVR framework, keeping up calls for long time and fluctuate them so they seem to be a real traffic activity.
In the case the big business is targeted, for example, a large financial organization, often no one even notices the huge charges that are racked by the fraudsters of free toll, even at expensive long term phone calls.
3. False Answer Supervision
A man that calls will hear a short recording telling that the dialed telephone number is not accessible if it’s truly so. Between the caller and the administration there is no answer supervision meanwhile. Since the caller is never connected, it’s not a finished call and it can’t be charged.
Meanwhile, the scammers tend to use false answer supervision during these calls in order to make such calls seem to be completed and, thus, billed, which is a fraud success. Probably, the hackers would publish the rates for the call termination without any intention of completing the actual calls. Next, the service providers will definitely route the calls via the hacker, who instead of its termination will play a not in service message and then the service provider will be charged for exceeding a 10-second calling because of that.
The following fraud is extremely harmful for the original service provider because it affects both its budget and the reputation which is even worse.
4. Location Routing Number Hack
LRN which is also called a location routing number scam is mostly based on a particular service provider desire to skip the extra fees from dips in LRN. The majority of providers run LRN dip in order to define the right LRN for the number dialed. If the LRN is already in a SIP message, service providers do not make a dip. And that’s where the fraudsters make the maximum use of it by means of inserting the LRN to the cheaper terminating destination in their own SIP INVITES, whereas the call is actually going for example, to a high cost countryside destination.
Along these lines, the specialist organization will beyond any doubt route and then bill the fraudster by methods for LRN which is incorporated into their SIP INVITE. The system, giving the PTSN end, routes and charges the calls to the high cost destinations, with the use of the right LRN.
After that, the provider of the services under-bills their customers for the calls and pays expensive countryside calls up. There are cases of a 5 times higher bill charges to the fraudster.
Phone schemes
1. Phishing
Voice fishing (Vishing) and Phishing (phone fishing) are another category of fraud widely applied in telecommunications, and perhaps the most popular ones. This is perhaps the easiest way to cheat on the users through the communication channels like phone or voice over IP.
This is the fraud form which disposes the phony addresses for sending the messages via email, pop ups or website windows in order to gather the personal or secret data of the users. This data then can easily be used to initiate a scam, but also to identify a theft, as well.
Thus, phishing over the telephone using voice is called Vishing and is actually its new form. The scammers use phone numbers instead of emails and pose as legitimate companies to gather the same private information to harm the users of certain companies and thus these companies’ reputations, etc.
2. Account Takeover
By means of the following fraud, financial institutions are more often attacked. Hackers call the financial establishments and impersonate other customers maliciously in order to steal the data of their original accounts.
It is estimated that a financial organization like a large bank. For example, that accepts about 50 thousand business calls per day will sure to lose over ten million dollars annually at phone scam losses.
- Detection Solutions
A lot of companies try to develop as many prevention and fraud detection technologies as possible, and eliminate such problems as traffic pumping, sharing revenues, PBX hacks, VoIP call forwarding or the blind transfers, etc.
The most widely applied smart anti fraud solutions undertaken by the leading telecommunication companies incorporate smart monitoring that can guarantee the financial monitoring and security, and measure it real time according to the following parameters:
- Calling Number
- Customer ID
- Source IP
- Detailed Dial Codes (country, state, mobile).
Many companies do their best to develop an effective software to send alerts and block calls when they consider the financial risks to exceed the historically acceptable measures. The other fraud prevention and detection measures include call blocking, call diversion and fraud blacklisting. With the development of new technologies, newer defraud means appear with the largest telecommunication companies to minimize the VoIP hacks and other lucrative harmful enterprises. BSG is one of such law-abiding services that offers the top quality telecommunications solutions on legal terms only and take care of the customers security, which is already proven with long and successful years of functioning on the market worldwide.
