Eighty percent of major U.S. cellular carriers employ Systems/Link Corp.’s RoamEx product to fight cellular fraud, but until now the decade-old Jackson, N.J., company has kept its nose to the grindstone and quietly gone about its business.
Diane Sammer, president of Systems/Link said the company has been too busy to seek press before now. In retrospect, that’s been a good strategy, she said. “We emerged fully grown before our competitors saw us coming.”
The company’s three products and services for fighting fraud are RoamEx, FraudTec and FraudNet. “We wrote the software, manage the network and provide operational support,” Sammer said.
The company’s lead product, RoamEx, is an intercarrier network used to exchange caller profile information between carriers in real-time. RoamEx works in conjunction with FraudTec and other profiling systems employed by carriers that use artificial intelligence to monitor and interpret calling patterns. RoamEx provides access to the FraudNet database, allowing carriers to exchange customer and criminal information and send alerts in real-time.
Sammer founded the company in 1985 with Bob Bruneau, chief engineer, and Dubi Silverstein, vice president of marketing and product development. The trio, which came from Computer Sciences Corp., started designing custom software engineering services. A few years later, Systems/Link designed an order activation system for Nynex Mobile, which brought the company into the cellular arena, said Sammer. In 1992, Bell Atlantic Mobile sought fraud protection for the MetroMobile properties it was about to acquire.
Systems/Link’s abilities to access data from a switch, update a switch and alarm the carrier were structured with an added layer of fraud detection technology for BAM. FraudTec is a descendant of this first-generation fraud prevention product.
After Cellular One in New York became a Systems/Link client, the company created a point-to-point call detail system between Cellular One and certain BAM markets for exchanging roamer information. The effort grew incrementally adding more carriers and markets. Sammer said eventually “the proliferation of circuits put a burden on carriers to manage.” That’s when Systems/Link developed RoamEx.
A few weeks ago Systems/Link introduced Home & Roam, a prepaid cellular service. This type of service is growing in popularity among customers with poor credit and businesses seeking to limit employees’ mobile calling. Home & Roam customers dial a toll-free number that prompts them for their phone’s mobile identification number, their credit card number and the amount of time they want prepaid. Systems/Link notifies the carrier electronically in real-time and the customer is cleared for service. Sammer pointed out many other secured credit cellular services don’t allow customers to roam because usage cannot be monitored outside home markets. Home & Roam’s system software is used with the RoamEx network for monitoring customer use.
Horizon Cellular is the first Home & Roam client.
