Answer: The Fraudulent Engineer

Firstly, thankyou to everyone who posted an answer this week. The purpose of this weeks question was to demonstrate that certain scenarios can be picked up by numerous Revenue Assurance controls, all very valid, but varying in degrees of complexity and expense.

The operator I found this revenue loss on was a good old fashioned operator, where CDR’s were created for every scenario – these are less and less common as IT managers attempt to reduce costs by insisting that only billable CDR’s are generated at the switch. 

Switch A was where the fraud was occurring and Switch B represented the other half of the country. I quite simply isolated all of the terminating CDR’s from switch B where the calls had originated from Switch A and reconciled them to originating CDR’s(billable) from Switch A. At first the query was performed at the volume level(a 5minute check) but due to the disproportionate volumes(in both directions) a detailed reconciliation was then performed. This flagged up some numbers on Switch A that didn’t seem to create CDR’s, so the customer accounts where then checked and found not to exist. From here a full investigation was then conducted and the route cause eventually found.

The above reconciliation was not the best way to find the problem(see Matt’s response to the question for the most complete solution), as it’s dependant on the individuals making calls. However all it needed to do, was find one problem and from there good route cause analysis should lead to the full picture.

Dave Stuart
Dave Stuart
David is an experienced manager, having worked for a variety of international telcos. He has hands-on knowledge of fraud management, revenue assurance, risk management and software development. David is currently the Group Director of Revenue Assurance & Fraud Management at Vimpelcom.

Related Articles

1 COMMENT

Comments are closed.

Get Our Weekly Newsletter by Email