The capability of Tollring’s fraud and credit management solution enables BT to take a proactive stance and deliver a whole new level of real-time intelligent fraud detection and protection as soon as it enters the network. Within hours of going live, Tollring’s solution proved itself to be highly effective at identifying and preventing fraud. For BT Group, Tollring is monitoring 20,000 peak concurrent calls and over 250,000 monitored endpoints on its BroadSoft UC and NOAS SIP Trunking platforms.Tollring’s overall average findings of 95% of fraud incidents across platforms in the past year captured by intelligent analytics suggests that relying on credit capping is vastly insufficient in the fight against fraud. If such a high percentage of fraud attacks continue to be captured by intelligent analytics, we believe this will cause a huge shift in the channel’s approach to fraud in the industry.
FOREWORD BY DOMINIC MARTINISENIOR MANAGER, HOSTED BROADSOFT VOICE AND UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS (UC), BT
Telecoms fraud is still one of the biggest challenges in our marketplace.
Fraudsters are becoming increasingly astute, using different methods to achieve their goals such as creating smaller and more frequent ‘pick-pocket’ style system hacks that can go unnoticed by traditional fraud management systems. A simple spend capping mechanism is often the method widely used by carriers to combat fraud. This type of fraud renders the ‘capping’ of a customer’sspend ineffective. More importantly capping doesn’t tackle the real issue of telecoms fraud. If, and when, the hack is discovered and validated, the hacker is likely to have racked up many thousands of pounds of income from calling high cost destinations and premium rate numbers and moved on to his next victim.
The BT solution with Tollring goes far beyond capping – it’s about “actual” fraud prevention based on real-time data analytics of call destinations, variations in call patterns, machine learning and complete prevention of high cost calls. It’s also about protecting our network, our reseller partners and their customers from fraud, in real-time, automatically, any time of day or night.
The capability of Tollring’s fraud and credit management solution enables BT to take a proactive stance and deliver a whole new level of real-time intelligent fraud detection and protection as soon as it enters the network. In their search for a comprehensive fraud management system, BT had three main pre-requisites:
1. The solution could integrate with BT’s existing platforms and processes.
2.Could scale with their Cloud Voice and SIP Trunking business.
3. Could be accessed securely in real-time by their reseller community.
BT wanted a new way to address the ongoing and growing increasing challenge of telecoms fraud.
“Spend caps have been the industry’s traditional approach but these were recognised as blunt and outdated tools when trying to tackle fraud. We needed a system that protected us and our reseller partners from the cost and damage caused by fraud.”
Dominic Martini, Senior Manager, Hosted BroadSoft Voice and UC at BT.
For resellers, the spend caps ensure that there is never a big bill to be paid. But for end customers, it means they might come into their office on a Monday morning with no phones working. There is then a great deal of activity required on everyone’s part to get everything running again which is disruptive to business.
“Fraud puts a considerable strain on relationships throughout the supply chain from the customer, the reseller and the service provider to the end country that handles the destination traffic. It’s a very painful and emotive subject for everyone. We wanted credit and spend caps to feature only as the final gatekeeper.”
The big challenge is that fraud is dynamic and ever-moving where routes, destinations and numbers change. BT Wholesale went in search of an intelligent analytics solution that would stop fraud, protect its platform and, in the process, differentiate its UC services.
“We were looking for a provider that offered comprehensive and proven analytic tools that were extremely easy to navigate so as to encourage more partners to use them.
Our aim was to give our reseller partners open access and visibility to the fraud management system, so they could see and understand what was happening and be part of and involved with the fight against fraud”.
As BT was already engaged with Tollring, following a successful deployment of iCall Suite, Tollring’s cloud native, call analytics and reporting solution, BT chose to embed iCS Protect, Tollring’s fraud and credit management system, across BT’s Cloud Voice and SIPTrunking platform.
To meet their aggressive growth targets and help protect them from fraud, BT realised they needed new and more comprehensive solution for their new hosted voice and SIP trunking service that would not just stop fraud but differentiate their offering and appeal to the UK’s biggest telecoms resellers.
BT’s existing fraud management processes were highly manual, too slow and thus ineffective. BT realised they needed to move to a more automated, self-learning and scalable solution that could integrate with existing services via APIs. Tollring’s unique approach of integratingtheir solution into not just BT’s incumbentnetwork and systems, but also their VoIP and SIP Trunking platforms and automate the learning of new customers via API access to their customer management portal was a major factor in their decision to partner with Tollring.
Tollring’s solution provides real-time fraud detection and protection of the BT Wholesale Hosted Centrex (WHC) platform and SIP Trunking products that deliver voice services across BT’s entire portfolio (BT Wholesale, BT Business and BT Global Services):
• By embedding Tollring’s data analytics tools deep into the BT network, the solution can automatically learn new customers, new users and new end points with a full understanding of associated resellers.
• It then applies an appropriate set of rules, spend limits and thresholds which can be amended to meet specific customer needs. For example, the customer may be a travel agent and as part of everyday business is required to call high risk, high impact destinations often targeted and used by fraudsters.
• The system then monitors each call setup and attempts to establish call destination, call type and call cost and maps this data to a substantial reference database of destinations and call typesbefore applying a risk score
Tollring monitors and learns call patterns and trends for each and every end customer, implements 100s of rules and triggers different level alerts to notify resellers and their customers of potentially fraudulent activity or when a spend threshold has been breached. The solution performs rigorous checks against a risk register of International Revenue Share numbers, fraud rules, trends, blacklisted destinations and credit limits - on every call made - in real-time.
If, after all these checks and validation the activity is continuing, the solution will automatically kill a live call and block further calls to their number:
• The system notifies the reseller that a number has been blocked.
• If a credit limit has been set and breached the whole customer site is blocked from making outbound calls until the issue has been resolved.
Using AI the system self-learns from all events, alerts and blocks and automatically creates new rules and thresholds at core system levels to ensure all other customers are protected from similar activity.
“In our search for a comprehensive call analytics product, it became clear that the solution could both meet our needs and those of our reseller community.
Visually it looks good, technically it delivers so much in such a rich format, and it moulds into our ethos to provide real-time order automation, made possible through Tolling’s API.”
Daisy Group is a provider of hosted voice services and a BT reseller for the fraud management solution.
“Our Hosted Voice Services portfolio has been strengthened since introducing BT’s fraud solution with Tollring’s analytics in summer 2017. We can detect fraud and misuse early and further reduce commercial exposure."
“Often fraudsters use automated systems to generate calls when businesses are closed and can stop the calls at set times in an attempt to remain undetected for as long as possible. Receiving call and dialling activity data as quickly as possible is therefore key to successfully detecting fraud and misuse"
“We can assign over 100 rule thresholds against a customer site, in addition to adding simple credit locking values. Email alerts are sent when threshold levels are breached then usage can be restricted. Alerts based on unusual calling patterns allow early analysis to identify fraud and misuse. The system can also automatically restrict services if thresholds are breached, providing considerable peace of mind.”
Alex Mawson, Product Director Voice Services, at Daisy Group
“Using automated and self-learning technology is the way forward. It empowers everyone in the food chain.”
Dominic Martini, Senior Manager, Hosted BroadSoft Voice and UC at BT.
The product not only checks against a global database of fraudulent destinations but also profiles on a customer-by-customer basis, identifying the typical calling behaviour and looking for unusual patterns. This protects thepartner community in a very tailored way.
• The solution is dynamic and auto-learnsto adapt to new challenges.
• The system is fluid, working it out and understanding behaviours.
• If volumes are beyond normal calling patterns, resellers can give the customer the option to cut the traffic.
• Resellers can work with customers to set spend limits at site level relevant to the customer’s needs, to ‘white-list’ customers to avoid auto-barring, and to change thresholds of fraud rules.
• Incident notifications triggered on breach mitigate risk immediately. • Monitoring alerts and notifications directly enable resellers to react quickly in the event of fraud and be proactive in communicating with customers.
• When live calls are terminated, selective auto-barring enables businesses to quickly recover business-as-usual and site-level dial plans are updated to avoid recurrence.
• Credit management becomes the final gatekeeper in the process, constraining spend to manage exposure, and full audit reporting provides peace-of-mind.
Reseller control over tools to protect customers helps strengthen relationships and encouragescustomer confidence and loyalty. Involving end customers in individual thresholds/limits boosts collaboration is good for the supply-chain and a positive step forwards for the telecoms industry as a whole.
“With greater intelligence and analytics, we can bring our resellers and their customers into the conversation much earlier on. Everyone can be made aware of threshold alerts, they can react much faster and be proactive. By widening access to Tollring’s intelligence and analytics tools across our whole portfolio, our resellers now have the opportunity to take control and differentiate their offering.
The ability to collaborate with customers on fraud and credit management is a big differentiator and a great confidence boost for the end customer.”
Dominic Martini, Senior Manager, Hosted BroadSoft Voice and UC at BT.
Within hours of going live, Tollring’s solution proved itself to be highly effective at identifying and preventing fraud. For BT Group, Tollring is monitoring 20,000 peak concurrent calls and over 250,000 monitored endpoints on its BroadSoft UC and NOAS SIP Trunking platforms.
Spend capping was the common reactive approach to tackling fraud but concedes fraud will occur and simply minimises exposure. Immediately following launch, BT encountered intelligent fraud attacks that would remain undiscovered using such methods, such as regular smaller ‘activity (pick-pocketing).
Tollring’s overall average findings of 95% of fraud incidents across platforms in the past year captured by intelligent analytics suggests that relying on credit capping is vastly insufficient in the fight against fraud. If such a high percentage of fraud attacks continue to be captured by intelligent analytics, we believe this will cause a huge shift in the channel’s approach to fraud in the industry.
BT works closely with Tollring to continuously evolve and enhance the solution.
It is likely that areas of focus will include addressing the ongoing challenge of blocking a call; ongoing enhancements of audit trail capability become essential in delivering proof of any action that might take place on their network. BT Wholesale are also likely to focus on empowering the channel with evermore self service functionality to attain self-sufficiency in protecting their customers from telecoms fraud.
