A joint announcement from the anti-fraud teams of the International Telecoms Week (ITW) Global Leader’s Forum (GLF) and the i3Forum promises to reduce the incentives for international revenue share fraud (IRSF) by making it easier for carriers to avoid voice calls charged at premium rates. The two associations have a history of working closely on fraud reduction and the announcement is about an addition to their code of conduct for international voice carriers.
Principle 7: International Revenue Share Fraud
Carriers who directly breakout special number ranges for revenue share purposes, including “special services” and audiotext i.e typically higher rate destined for content related services, will clearly outline in their rate sheet that they contain such breakouts and offer customers the ability to “opt out” of such ranges prior to engaging in voice traffic. Intermediary operators will not be accountable if they are not aware of these breakouts.
26 major international wholesale carriers have already stated they will comply with the revised code of conduct. They include A1, BICS, iBasis, Tata Communications, BT, stc, Telstra and the carrier divisions of Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Telefónica. More carriers are expected to affirm their support soon.
The joint announcement highlights the severity of IRSF.
IRSF remains the biggest challenge in terms of volume and financial impact on both the carrier and the end-customer due to the sheer number and intensity of attacks, which anti-fraud systems struggle to block effectively.
It is good that these groups are addressing the problems caused by revenue share number ranges, which provide a mechanism for criminals to turn several kinds of fraudulently generated traffic into cash. However, this problem is far from new, begging a question about why the world’s biggest wholesale carriers did not take this step sooner. I have seen independent data which suggests only about one-quarter of IRSF traffic currently terminates on the premium rate ranges targeted by this new rule. Whilst revenue share ranges were an historically important means of monetizing fraud, present-day IRSF is typically short-stopped, meaning the call never reaches the destination associated with the dialed number. Short-stopped calls are terminated prematurely by a crooked intermediate carrier so they can collect all the fees associated with expensive national destinations without paying the slice that would have to be passed to downstream carriers.
There is also a general problem with the code of conduct, which some carriers may take seriously but which is not meaningfully enforced. This latest announcement reminds readers that there is an attestation process that requires carriers to ‘demonstrate’ their compliance with the code of conduct. I am skeptical about the rigor imposed by this process in real life, not least because there are no carriers who have been found non-compliant yet. The strength of a test is proven not by how many have passed it, but by the fact that some have failed it.
