Cut Costs and Combat Fraud: Top Methods for Maximizing Efficiency from AB Handshake and Orca Wave

Fraud, of course, is the other side of the revenue assurance coin. Even after shoring up routing and billing, operators face losses in the millions due to inadequate fraud detection. Additionally, threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, making them difficult to detect and prevent. According to the CFCA’s Global Fraud Loss Survey 2023, global telecom revenue loss to fraud reached $38.95 billion in 2023. Apart from financial losses, voice and SMS fraud also inflict long-term damage on the reputation of service providers. 

Overall, the telecom industry is navigating a complex environment marked by financial pressures, technological challenges, and evolving consumer expectations. Addressing these issues requires strategic planning, investment in technology, and robust security measures.

A Comprehensive Solution

While operators strive for operational efficiency, they must also navigate the intricate challenges of fraud prevention. This is where the combined strength of AB Handshake and Orca Wave comes into play. Orca Wave ensures that telecom expense management is streamlined by preventing revenue losses from technical routing and billing errors, while AB Handshake protects against losses from interconnect fraud, such as IRSF, and enhances cost efficiency by replacing ineffective, disparate manual anti-fraud solutions with comprehensive automated systems.

A unified approach to revenue assurance not only optimizes costs and operations but also fortifies networks against fraud, ensuring that every dollar saved is protected by the highest standards of security.

Orca Wave provides revenue assurance solutions, such as Cost Autoloading, Least-Cost Routing, Telecom Expense Management, and many others, helping operators safeguard revenue by addressing technical errors like routing inefficiencies and billing discrepancies. Their services optimize telecom traffic, ensure accurate billing and cost efficiency, and provide detailed analytics to support informed decision-making.

Telecom Expense Management (TEM)

A key component of these services is the automated processing of call detail records (CDRs), SMS delivery reports (DLRs), and carrier costs from both Orca Wave customers and carriers. This TEM process offers a consolidated view of costs and usage from each carrier, identifies billing discrepancies, conducts cost comparisons across carriers, and recommends the most efficient call routing paths. Identifying incorrect ratings at the CDR level results in significant and immediate cost savings.

Orca Wave’s security integrates with each supplier for automated CDR delivery, including backdated CDRs and costs to build an audit trail. The implementation process involves detailed project management for setting up each carrier supplier’s CDR. Orca Wave handles the onboarding of supplier rates and CDR integration, ensuring a secure delivery process into their automated TEM platform.

The Orca Wave TEM service adds 100% automation to an essential accounts payable process. Here are some actual monthly invoiced findings:

• Carrier A: 38% overbilling ($84,000) due to misassigned rates.
• Carrier B: 18% overbilling ($39,000) due to incorrect billing durations.
• Carrier C: 9% overbilling ($8,700) due to invoice not applying a new customer rate decrease.

AB Handshake 

Many solutions rely on databases and historical attacks and lack real-time detection and blocking of new threats as they constantly evolve. On the other hand, volumetric filters and other heavy-handed approaches block significant amounts of legitimate inbound and outbound traffic, causing unnecessary revenue losses.

AB Handshake solutions combat all major forms of voice and SMS fraud, such as CLI spoofing, SIM box fraud, OTT and A2P bypass, brand impersonation, IRSF, Wangiri, and a host of other fraudulent activities. The system offers real-time fraud detection and blocking, targeting only fraudulent traffic rather than entire number ranges, minimizing disruptions and protecting revenue. When it comes to operational costs, automation significantly reduces the resources needed to stay ahead of increasingly complex attacks.

AI Shield

Our AI-powered anti-fraud tool provides 99.995% accuracy in real-time fraud detection and prevention thanks to ML algorithms and Big Data analysis, which means that legitimate traffic is not blocked. AI Shield uses multi-layered protection, including blocklists and custom rules that interact in real time, allowing you to customize alerting, blocking, and reporting policies.

AI Shield ensures the lowest false discovery rate (FDR) of less than 3% and a false positive rate (FPR) of below 0.001%.

End-to-End Validation

AB Handshake’s Call Validation solution prevents fraud by performing out-of-band, end-to-end validation of calls in real time, functioning like an instant virtual handshake between the originating and terminating operator. This process allows operators to validate the origin of every call before it reaches subscribers and to validate the termination of calls from their network. The interface provides an in-depth view of fraud patterns with custom reports, complete fraud log files, and customizable blocking and alerting actions based on destination, next-hop carrier, and fraud type.

With over 1 billion fraud attempts prevented annually, AB Handshake’s technology saves over $72 million in revenue each year for more than 160 operators worldwide.

By combining Orca Wave’s advanced cost optimization tools with AB Handshake’s comprehensive and automated fraud prevention capabilities, operators protect their bottom line and enhance operational efficiency.

Want to know if your network might be a victim of these fraudulent activities? Consult our Fraud Checklist to see if some of the challenges you face may actually be a result of fraud.

Fraud Checklist

Fraudulent activity in voice, SMS, billing, and routing often shares similar warning signs and can lead to severe financial losses if left unchecked. By addressing these indicators early you can better protect your revenue streams. 

Customer Complaints

Fraudulent activity can cause service disruptions and fraudulent charges to customers. These abnormalities often generate complaints to customer service, but subscribers may be unaware that their complaints are actually due to fraud.

• Disputed invoices or charges
• Reports of decrease in service quality (missed calls, etc.)
• Abnormal experiences (pre-recorded audio in live calls, other anomalies)

Abnormal Traffic Patterns

Unusual spikes, dips, and other behavior can indicate fraud if not easily explained by external factors and events or internal testing and maintenance. 

• Sudden increase or decrease of overall traffic volumes 
• Spikes in traffic to specific destinations 
• Considerable changes in customer calling profiles 
• Sequential calling (calls to all numbers in a number range in order) 
• Multiple calls to the same destination or other distinctive pattern

Mismatch Between Data Sources Within the Network

Discrepancies between signaling data at different network nodes can expose tampering both for billing fraud as well as on the signaling layer. 

• Multiple network nodes show different numbers of events or total charges
• Call details present in low-level nodes, but not at traffic aggregation points (firewall, network monitoring solutions, etc.)
• Discrepancies between real-time and post-event billing

Significant Revenue Forecast Discrepancies

Notable differences between expected and actual revenue can point to fraudulent patterns of activity with massive financial impacts. 

• Gaps between projected and actual voice/SMS revenues and invoices
• Redistribution of revenues and payments per destination
• Large amounts of zero-charged events

Negative Trends in Call and Messaging Quality KPIs

Significant decreases in quality of service, deliverability, and efficiency of network resources may be symptomatic of fraud rather than operational deficiencies. 

• Notable fluctuations in key network KPIs such as ACD and ASR
• Significant volumes of undelivered calls or messages
• Increased signaling load without increase in traffic volumes

If your network is exhibiting any of the symptoms listed in this checklist, it could be vulnerable to significant revenue leakage.