In the case of telecommunications fraud, the scammers attack, take their profits and leave before they can be stopped. Many telecom operators know this story all too well.
These days, telecommunications fraud threatens operators with financial and reputational losses and with today's telecom fraud detection technology, they are discovering their losses when it's too late.
This has been the case for decades as telecommunications companies, including wholesalers, have joined the fight against fraud and developed telecom fraud detection services.
These telecom fraud prevention solutions have done a good job of blocking some attacks, but many telecom fraud schemes out there still succeed. And each year, the financial losses from these successful attacks amount to
billions of dollars.
What's more, in the age of COVID 19, as businesses are becoming more reliant on telecommunications services to operate remotely and allow their employees to work from home, fraudsters have
given an appropriate response.
Recently,
Global Leaders Forum (GLF), in cooperation with Delta Partners Group surveyed executives from leading carriers around the world about the effects of COVID 19 on their operations. They found the following:
The general consensus of those surveyed was that fraudsters' tactics have evolved over the years along with increases in telecommunications traffic, in general. Meanwhile, there have been noticeable increases in fraud attacks on specific traffic flows, such as international voice, that have seen increases in volume due to COVID-19.
The fraudsters and their schemes have adapted with them.
In other words:
the higher the traffic, the higher the fraud.
Telecom fraudsters have increased the frequency of their attacks, become harder for telecom fraud prevention solutions to detect and each year the amount they steal in a single attack grows:
- Back in 2019, one form of telecommunications fraud, called Interconnect Bypass, cost the global telecommunications industry a whopping $2.71 billion in lost revenue.
- In 2019, global revenue losses due to telecom fraud, as a whole, cost the telco industry $28.3 billion.
- In 2019, the total revenue lost to telecom fraud for all industries around the world was $32.7 billion.
The obvious question many operators have been asking is, 'how can we stay protected?'.
Let's look at this topic in detail, with a focus on telecom fraud mitigation strategies.