Some of us already have the experience of receiving fraud messages or phone calls, claiming that you win a prize or commit a crime. This is one type of communication fraud. Although most of them can be exposed easily, they still resulted in $18,4 billion lost in 2011.
Below are some examples of communication fraud:
– Compromised PBX and voicemail systems ($4.96 billion): crimes connect to a PBX and steal users’ passwords to make international calls.
– Subscription and identity theft ($4.32 billion): thieves steal users’ accounts and identities to use their communications services.
– International revenue share fraud ($3.84 billion): committed by exploiting high call termination rates into some nations, or manipulate data around certain phone numbers with high call termination rates.
– Credit card fraud ($2.40 billion): using communication network or the website, credit card’s information is illegally accessed.
Accessing channels
As explained by the above examples, this type of fraud is committed by accessing user’s personal information. Lawbreakers get access to user information through two common channels. The first one is the IP network. Internet protocol (IP) enable users to communicate with each other in a cheaper and more flexible way. Moreover, through virtual private networks (VPNs), users can connect to corporate applications and services. However, the safety of most of the IP based services is still questionable, which means that your information might be “open” to hackers when you are doing simple business activities, such as checking emails using a public WiFi network. Besides IP network, smartphone is another entry point for communication crimes. Around 96% of smartphones and tablets do not have antivirus apps installed.
Fighting against Communication Fraud using Big Data
Big Data might become practical when it comes to identify illegal acts in the telecommunication industry at early stage.
– Handset fraud prevention: using big data to determine if the applicant is an organized fraudster who attempts to acquire a subsidized high-end handset.
– Dealer fraud prevention: monitoring sales figures on communication services sold through third parties. This can ensure that thieves are not being paid commissions for artificially inflated handset sales and data plan offers.
– Identity fraud prevention: a secured order entry tool is used to catch any unlawful identity attempts by business and residential applicants.
– Customer identification verification: recognizing customers through various data inputs including name, address, and personal credit history details.
– Bad debt recognition: identifying clients with existing bad debt and making determinations. Based on this method and other financial factors, the communications service provider will then decide to welcome the customer or not.
– Multiple activations fraud prevention: recognizing individuals or companies that attempt to activate multiple services within a brief period.
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Dear Ge Jiang,
Thank you for the interesting piece you shared with us. I guess accessing to analyze this kind of data also required some disclosure of confidentiality which makes it a harder to take this data. Especially because normally when firms take data, it is anonymized to some degree. In the case of using it for communication fraud, I imagine that would require to know have a non-anonymized set of data, so the firm could reach to that specific client’s account and stop certain transactions. Thereby, I see this as a challenge when trying to retrieve data to fight against communication fraud. This is under the assumption that customers are sensitive about their information and are not comfortable disclosing it.
Some ways of preventing a type of communication fraud like identity theft might be very easy, however a little “time consuming” for customers. These prevention measurements include easy things like not using the same password twice or add an extra layer of security (mobile phone confirmation). As a result, I believe it is weighting costs. If I were to be a company I would implement the most cost-effective method.
Thanks again for your contribution!
https://www.google.com/safetycenter/everyone/cybercrime/identity-theft/