One challenge of the move to digital calling is that there are more ways to hack it.
As the world moves from analogue calls to VoIP and WebRTC, it is going to become increasingly important to fend off digital thieves looking to exploit the new nature of calling.
One company trying to drive awareness of the threat is TransNexus.
“We are just trying to get the word out that telecom fraud is an issue,” Valerie Bradford, product marketing manager at TransNexus, told Webrtcworld during the recent WebRTC Atlanta conference. “The fraudsters have gotten really, really creative with their new schemes on how to take your money.”
She said that one misconception is that telecoms only need to protect their own network. They might be surprised that the buck stops with them, however, when cybercrime does its mischief.
“Service providers have to keep an eye on the customers and all of their customer’s devices, because if a fraudster hacks into one of your subscriber’s networks, you’re going to be stuck holding the bill,” she said. “Service providers are the ones who end up getting stuck paying for it, and they’re the ones that really need to be able to stop it.”
One way to prevent this situation is with SDReporter, the TransNexus reporting tool that now has telecom fraud baked in.
SDReporter looks at user history, enabling service providers to see if there is something suspicious going on based on past caller habits.
“What it really looks for is your financial risk,” she noted. “There are a lot of ways that you can look for telecom fraud, but we think most important is how much money might I lose.”
The solution eliminates the problems of traffic pumping fraud, PBX hacking, revenue sharing fraud, blind transfers and call forwarding fraud for VoIP providers, among other features.
“We rate the calls. We rate it based on how expensive it is going to be, and if something looks weird SD reporter is going to send you alerts,” she said. “It also can reroute your calls for black list calls that look like suspicious traffic. So you can stop that fraud event before it starts costing you a lot of money.”
Saving money is a good thing, and telecom fraud can effect affect every business that includes digital calling, whether WebRTC- or VoIP-related.
Edited by
Adam Brandt
