GTE Telecommunications Services Inc. last week introduced FraudForce, a service aimed at blasting today’s most threatening cellular phone fraud, roaming fraud.
Initial deployment of FraudForce will include FraudInterceptor, a tool that recognizes customers who are roaming in a high-fraud market, and FraudChallenger, an interactive voice response platform that verifies roaming customers’ identities before they place calls, said Tony Zarrella, business development manager for GTE Telecommunications.
Roaming fraud occurs when a criminal clones a cellular phone’s unique electronic serial number/mobile identification number combination in one market for use in another market. While authentication technology may be the ultimate cloning fraud solution, time-to-market and cost restrictions have prompted companies to seek alternative more immediate solutions such as FraudForce.
A crucial factor incorporated in FraudForce’s design is flexibility, Zarrella said. The product was designed to be adaptable based on carriers’ differing needs. With FraudForce, GTE intends to accommodate varying levels of management and system control desired by carriers.
The first time a customer roams on a FraudForce equipped network, an operator comes online to collect and match caller information to stored account and billing data for the named customer.
Once verified, the roaming caller formulates a personal identification number. Thereafter, the caller’s identity is intermittently “challenged” when roaming. Verification can be handled by a carrier’s customer service center or GTE’s National Fraud Protection Center in Tampa, acting on behalf of carriers.
GTE’s FraudManager system, which communicates on a common version of Interim Standard-41 equipment, notifies carriers when callers are roaming, making it possible for carriers to interpret roaming activity and initiate challenges with FraudForce. FraudForce directs or “hotlines” potentially fraudulent calls either to carriers or to GTE’s centralized processor, where it can be analyzed..
FraudForce allows for minimal intrusiveness on customers, a concern expressed by some carriers, said Zarrella.
The time window for the frequency of roamer challenges may be once an hour, once a day or even once a week, and carriers can change that window marketwide or for individual customers, depending on perceived fraud risk. FraudForce also allows carriers to rapidly turn on a new market as high-fraud. These and other adjustments can be executed directly by carriers.
Zarrella said beta testing for FraudForce began last week at GTE Mobilnet’s Tampa facilities. The trial will be concluded later this month, said GTE Telecom spokesman Mike Flanagan. The FraudForce system will be tested in the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s technology trials scheduled to begin this spring. However, FraudForce is commercially available now and is being reviewed by a number of carriers, indicated Flanagan.
GTE soon plans to incorporate FraudForce with its current fraud fighting system, CloneDetector, which has an Automatic Actions feature that will be interfaced with FraudForce. CloneDetector looks at calling patterns, determines various severity levels of fraud occurring on a network and communicates to other systems to take certain actions. FraudForce will accept this information and act based on parameters set by each carrier.
On the horizon are two adjunct technologies to be incorporated with FraudForce-Commonly Dialed Digits and Suspicious Dialed Digits.
Commonly Dialed Digits recognizes phone numbers routinely dialed by a user. When a user is roaming and calls those numbers, the system will forego a request for PIN entry, said Zarrella. Suspicious Dialed Digits takes account of multiple fraud cases and keeps the numbers known or suspected to be called by other criminals. A customer dialing one of these numbers may be immediately challenged by the network.
GTE also is developing Flexible Service Blocking, which allows carriers to declare brown-outs, suspending all roaming in a home market, at selected time intervals. More criminal activity occurs at night, said Zarrella, so a carrier may want only to declare a brown-out from the evening to early morning hours.
