Agents at a travel agency specializing in trips to the Pacific islands were surprised one day to no longer be able to reach their on-island hotel, resort and tour operator contacts by phone – clearly a serious problem for their business. The travel agency concluded that they needed to make a change from the local carrier that provided their hosted PBX service.
What happened?
The local carrier suffered a series of fraud attacks involving hacked PBXs and high-volumes of calls to several Pacific Islands. After multiple confrontations with angry customers who had been billed for calls they never made, the carrier had taken the drastic, but logical decision to completely block all calls to these destinations, including legitimate calls like those made by the travel agents.
Long Tail Destinations
It is no secret that in order to avoid the expense of noncollectable invoices due to fraud, carriers are increasingly blocking outbound international calls to certain high-risk destinations. These destinations are often part of the “long-tail” of country destinations with low traffic volumes and higher termination rates.
These high-risk destinations are attractive to perpetrators of International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF) due to their high termination rates. But naturally, not all traffic to high-risk destinations is fraudulent. According to iBasis estimates, less than 10% of total call attempts to high-risk destinations are fraudulent. This means that carriers blocking an entire country destination are missing significant revenue and margin opportunities.
iBasis FraudAlert
With iBasis fraud management solution, called FraudAlert™, carriers of any size can capture and profitably monetize the legitimate traffic streams to higher-risk destinations. FraudAlert analyzes voice traffic sent through iBasis’ network 24×7, automatically blocking IRSF traffic. Further, FraudAlert can help carriers avoid aggravating legitimate business customers, thereby helping to minimize customer churn.
If you are interested in learning more about iBasis’ FraudAlert capabilities or would like to schedule a demo, please contact Product Manager Guillermo Hurtado (ghurtado@ibasis.net).