February 2015

A Wholesaler’s Fraud Prevention Creed: If You Lose the Trust, You Lose the Traffic

interview with Robert Benlolo

I’ve just returned from an excellent conference in London — the Wholesale Fraud Forum 2015, put on by Capacity Magazine.

The conference shed some much needed light on the key role large wholesalers play in keeping a lid on international telecom fraud.

Through the big data study of suspicious traffic, the careful screening of suppliers, and the mentoring of its retail carrier customers, the wholesaler not only closes fraud leaks but makes the telecom market a more efficient and profitable place to do business.

One of the leading practitioners of wholesale anti-fraud operations is Tata Communications, the largest international transit carrier worldwide, carrying about 20% of the international wholesale voice traffic.

And the conference featured a great presentation by Tata Communications’ Robert Benlolo, Senior Product Manager Product and Business Strategy and head of overall fraud management. Robert joins us in the discussion below to explain Tata Communications’ highly organized and multi-threaded approach to wholesale fraud prevention. Lots of useful tips for both retailers and wholesalers are here. Enjoy.

	Dan Baker: Robert, the title of your talk at Wholesale Fraud Forum 2015 was on the “Arsenal of Tools” Tata Communications has built up to combat fraud. What anti-fraud tools have you acquired and what motivated you to make that investment?

Robert Benlolo: Actually, Dan, for 10 years we have been investing heavily in fraud management tools, people and processes. And one of the key reasons we did that is to support our growing managed termination and outsourcing business.

For customers who get managed services from us, we take on their entire transit and international traffic. So when you have a great responsibility like that, you feel compelled to do more.

In our first managed termination deals, for instance, we didn’t have the elaborate fraud systems we have in place today. Customers at the time were happy with our price and voice quality, but they started asked questions about fraud issues that were recurring month over month.

So as a wholesaler we decided to take the problem head on. Our decision to invest was a very rationale one because if you lose the trust, you lose the traffic.

Now we have many solutions in our anti-fraud arsenal. For instance, there’s a Subex hosted solution that filters all the traffic: 100 million minutes a day go through that system to spot strange patterns and alert us.

We also have the IPSoft, the industry leader in False Answer Supervision (FAS) detection and removal. We tried to detect this problem ourselves, but it was impossible because suppliers who commit FAS use some sophisticated blending and commit FAS fraud randomly. So if you don’t have tools like this, then it’s impossible to detect. But when you do detect FAS, the suppliers are automatically removed and then we send them the CDRs to prove the FAS traffic.

On the testing side, we have CSG, the former Ascade, who does testing to make sure our suppliers are giving us the right quality.

Then we have our own internal secret sauce for routing and customized alerts. Every managed service customer has its own set of requirements and this we build in-house. This is the reason why Tata Communications recently came up with the Fraud Protection toolkit offering, a complete managed solution to protect service providers against several forms of potential fraud.

	What about your internal processes and people fighting fraud?

Of course, we have dedicated resources within Tata Communications trained to pursue fraud issues vigorously. If there’s a hacker convention somewhere trying to improve their hacking methods, we are probably aware of it: we go to great lengths to keep current.

Now we also widely sell our anti-fraud strategy within the Tata Communications organization. In the past we had groups within the company who tended to take on more risk. For instance, people in sales and marketing would sometimes sign up a new customers or supplier who was more risk-prone.

What we’ve done is make the organization more accountable. So whenever there is a fraud case with a supplier, for example, we engage everyone who was involved in signing them up as a supplier. And it’s their job to help us fix the issue.

So it’s a deterrent for them because it’s not a friendly process: lots of questions get asked internally about due diligence, etc.

	How exactly do you perform due diligence on suppliers?

Honestly, ten years ago it was fairly easy to make the cut and become an industry wholesale Tata supplier. Today it’s not so easy. For example at Tata Communications now, a supplier needs to answer a few long questionnaires because we emphasize “know your supplier”. We ask ourselves tough questions: why should they be in-route? What’s their competitive advantage? In short, we want to know the carrier’s strength before doing business with them.

For suppliers we have little historical information on, we require them to sign an active anti-fraud amendment that says if they commit fraud or FAS, we withhold payment. Then, when a supplier is caught engaging in FAS, they are automatically removed and not put back in-route until they sign an anti-fraud amendment.

We also have a team that focuses on pre-testing. For example, we go so far as to test unallocated numbers on a prospective supplier to see what kind of release code they send back to make sure they have the proper numbering plan. And once a supplier is in-route, we do random testing because a supplier can give you great service in the beginning, but some have a tendency to degrade their service over time.

	What are the telltale signs that a prospective supplier is a potential fraud risk?

Dan, a lot of this is common sense. And there’s plenty of fraud expertise and common sense within our company. The challenge is sharing this good information and intelligence with those who need to know.

But some potential suppliers wave a big red flag. For instance, if the supplier is incorporated in Gibraltar, uses equipment in Liechtenstein, banks in Australia, and offers low A-to-Z rates, they are not going to make the cut.

But our most potent weapon perhaps is the thorough analysis we do on a supplier’s rate sheets. We have a dedicated team who does exactly that.

For instance, looking at a rate sheet we recently receive from an operator, we noticed several discrepancies. Number one: they advertise a Premium route when we know from our long relationship with the carrier that a Premium route does not exist in that country.

Analyzing other codes in the rate sheet, we find those codes don’t exist or are unallocated code ranges. They even sell “Country X Mobile” at sub-market rates. All this evidence points to one thing: the supplier is out to make a fast buck. They would never pass through our rigorous filter.

	What measures do you take to protect your wholesale customers?

We have many programs, and the key to it all is good prevention.

When a new customer first comes onboard, they get a “Welcome to the Family” package that includes access to a private portal that allows them to check their traffic and discover variances.

Another part of that welcoming kit is our Customer Security Checklist — in two pages. The first page scares them a bit, explaining the telecom fraud cases and common problems. Then on the second page is a detailed list of configuration and IP configuration mistakes. So we sensitize them to fraud issues right from the start.

Another thing we do is have our salespeople engage with these new customers. One of our chief concerns is they may have hundreds of price breakouts they probably don‘t need. Paring down that list takes some time and effort, but it saves a lot of trouble later on. We approach them and say, “Let’s go over your past year’s (or past two-year’s) traffic to see what destinations you’ve never had traffic to.” And we urge them to block those destinations. Worse case, we’ll open the route for them later on. But by blocking at the outset, we save many headaches.

Now if a customer is reluctant to block destinations, we have a second option: limit their capacity to those risky regions. Why have your entire interconnect capability available for these routes on weekends, for example? So this is a very popular option with our customer base because it limits their exposure.

Working from the retail side, we also have subscriber traffic management and blocking — basically a monetary threshold for each A number (or subscriber). For example, our retail customer can say: “I don’t want my subscribers to make more than $250 a month on international calls.” So as soon as that limit is reached, we block the calls.

This is especially useful in preventing PBX hacking fraud where you see one A number doing $10,000 in fraud. It’s a blend of credit control and fraud prevention. And, of course, the customer can easily reset the monetary threshold any time.

	How do you manage and block number ranges that are a fraud risk?

Well, we firmly believe that a number plan strategy is critical. If you don’t have one, you’re going to become a victim. Luckily there are some fantastic vendors out there who have numbering plan tools.

Our team is tuned into industry resources such as the GSMA Fraud Forum and many internet sites. To date there are more than 22,000 ranges we block — and each range translates to many more actual numbers. We are adding code ranges every week and as soon as one of our customers has an issue with a number, we block the number for all.

Daily we block about 400,000 attempts on these fraud ranges. We also go to the high fraud destinations and focus on blocking the unallocated numbers within these ranges because there’s a whole sub-industry of resellers who specialize in distributing unallocated numbers.

	Thank you, Robert, for this illuminating look at how wholesale fraud works at Tata Communications. It’s impressive.

It’s my pleasure, Dan. Happy to get this information out into the marketplace. When you think about it, perhaps the biggest fraud threat is carrier complacency. The right attitude is be paranoid about the fraud threat.

And yet, lots of carriers out there don’t have robust fraud management systems. Plus there are lots of “easy carriers” who will connect with anybody, and they’ll make short-term gains. When we spot them and see the trend, we discretely remove them from the route because we know their strategy is to fleece the inexperienced operators out there.

Without some visibility, you are surely going to see mid- to long-term loss of traffic. I would urge both wholesale and retail carriers to keep their fraud program simple and make incremental improvements. There are a lot of industry groups you can join and they are very helpful. Finally I think you need to engage suppliers or customers when stuff happens because you need to put them on notice.

It comes back to Tata Communications’ anti-fraud motto: if you lose the trust, you lose the traffic.

Robert Benlolo

Robert Benlolo is Senior Product Manager, Product and Business Strategy at Tata Communications. He oversees the company’s full spectrum of sourcing activities and relationships with more than 200 VAS suppliers for Tata Communications International Toll-Free and Local Number Services. Robert is also the lead architect of the company’s anti-fraud strategy, where he maintains

constant focus on enhancing internal and external FMS systems as well as fine-tuning processes in an effort to protect customers’ voice traffic.

He holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing from McGill University.

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Enabling Telecoms & Utilities to Adapt to the Winds of Business Change — interview with Kirill Rechter — Billing is in the midst of momentous change. Its value is no longer just around delivering multi-play services or sophisticated rating. In this article you’ll learn how a billing/CRM supplier has adapted to the times by offering deeper value around the larger business issues of its telecom and utility clients.
Driving Customer Care Results & Cost Savings from Big Data Facts — interview with Brian Jurutka — Mobile broadband and today’s dizzying array of app and network technology present a big challenge to customer care. In fact, care agents have a hard time staying one step ahead of customers who call to report problems. But network analytics comes to the rescue with advanced mobile handset troubleshooting and an ability to put greater intelligence at the fingertips of highly trained reps.
Hadoop and M2M Meet Device and Network Management Systems — interview with Eric Wegner — Telecom big-data in networks is more than customer experience managment: it’s also about M2M plus network and element management systems. This interview discusses the explosion in machine-to-machine devices, the virtues and drawbacks of Hadoop, and the network impact of shrink-wrapped search.
The Data Center & Cloud Infrastructure Boom: Is Your Sales/Engineering Team Equipped to Win? — by Dan Baker — The build-out of enterprise clouds and data centers is a golden opportunity for systems integrators, carriers, and cloud providers. But the firms who win this business will have sales and engineering teams who can drive an effective and streamlined requirements-to-design-to-order process. This white paper points to a solution — a collaborative solution designs system — and explains 8 key capabilities of an ideal platform.
Big Data: Is it Ready for Prime Time in Customer Experience Management? — interview with Thomas Sutter — Customer experience management is one of the most challenging of OSS domains and some suppliers are touting “big data” solutions as the silver bullet for CEM upgrades and consolidation. This interview challenges the readiness of big data soluions to tackle OSS issues and deliver the cost savings. The article also provides advice on managing technology risks, software vendor partnering, and the strategies of different OSS suppliers.
Calculated Risk: The Race to Deliver the Next Generation of LTE Service Management — interview with Edoardo Rizzi — LTE and the emerging heterogeneous networks are likely to shake up the service management and customer experience management worlds. Learn about the many new network management challenges LTE presents, and how a small OSS software firm aims to beat the big established players to market with a bold new technology and strategy.
Decom Dilemma: Why Tearing Down Networks is Often Harder than Deploying Them — interview with Dan Hays — For every new 4G LTE and IP-based infrastructure deployed, there typically a legacy network that’s been rendered obsolete and needs to be decommissioned. This article takes you through the many complexities of network decom, such as facilities planning, site lease terminations, green-safe equipment disposal, and tax relief programs.
Migration Success or Migraine Headache: Why Upfront Planning is Key to Network Decom — interview with Ron Angner — Shutting down old networks and migrating customers to new ones is among the most challenging activities a network operators does today. This article provides advice on the many network issues surrounding migration and decommissioning. Topics discussed include inventory reconciliation, LEC/CLEC coordination, and protection of customers in the midst of projects that require great program management skills.
Navigating the Telecom Solutions Wilderness: Advice from Some Veteran Mountaineers — interview with Al Brisard — Telecom solutions vendors struggle mightily to position their solutions and figure out what to offer next in a market where there’s considerable product and service crossover. In this article, a veteran order management specialist firm lays out its strategy for mixing deep-bench functional expertise with process consulting, analytics, and custom API development.
Will Telecoms Sink Under the Weight of their Bloated and Out-of-Control Product Stacks? — interview with Simon Muderack — Telecoms pay daily for their lack of product integration as they constantly reinvent product wheels, lose customer intelligence, and waste time/money. This article makes the case of an enterprise product catalog. Drawing on central catalog cases at a few Tier 1 operators, the article explains the benefits: reducing billing and provisioning costs, promoting product reuse, and smoothing operations.
Virtual Operator Life: Enabling Multi-Level Resellers Through an Active Product Catalog — interview with Rob Hill — The value of product distribution via virtual operators is immense. They enable a carrier to sell to markets it cannot profitably serve directly. Yet the need for greater reseller flexibility in the bundling and pricing of increasingly complex IP and cloud services is now a major channel barrier. This article explains what’s behind an innovative product catalog solution that doubles as a service creation environment for resellers in multiple tiers.
Telecom Blocking & Tackling: Executing the Fundamentals of the Order-to-Bill Process — interview with Ron Angner — Just as football teams need to be good at the basics of blocking and tackling, telecoms need to excel at their own fundamental skillset: the order-to-cash process. In this article, a leading consulting firm explains its methodology for taking operators on the path towards order-to-cash excellence. Issues discussed include: provisioning intervals; standardization and simplicity; the transition from legacy to improved process; and the major role that industry metrics play.
Wireline Act IV, Scene II: Packaging Network & SaaS Services Together to Serve SMBs — by John Frame — As revenue from telephony services has steadily declined, fixed network operators have scrambled to support VoIP, enhanced IP services, and now cloud applications. This shift has also brought challenges to the provisioning software vendors who support the operators. In this interview, a leading supplier explains how it’s transforming from plain ol‘ OSS software provider to packager of on-net and SaaS solutions from an array of third party cloud providers.
Telecom Merger Juggling Act: How to Convert the Back Office and Keep Customers and Investors Happy at the Same Time — interview with Curtis Mills — Billing and OSS conversions as the result of a merger are a risky activity as evidenced by famous cases at Fairpoint and Hawaiian Telcom. This article offers advice on how to head off problems by monitoring key operations checkpoints, asking the right questions, and leading with a proven conversion methodology.
Is Order Management a Provisioning System or Your Best Salesperson? — by John Konczal — Order management as a differentiator is a very new concept to many CSP people, but it’s become a very real sales booster in many industries. Using electronics retailer BestBuy as an example, the article points to several innovations that can — and are — being applied by CSPs today. The article concludes with 8 key questions an operator should ask to measure advanced order management progress.
NEC Takes the Telecom Cloud from PowerPoint to Live Customers — interview with Shinya Kukita — In the cloud computing world, it’s a long road from technology success to telecom busness opportunity. But this story about how NEC and Telefonica are partnering to offer cloud services to small and medium enterprises shows the experience of early cloud adoption. Issues discussed in the article include: customer types, cloud application varieties, geographic region acceptance, and selling challenges.
Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model — interview with Scott Swartz — Facebook, cloud services, and Google Ads are examples of innovative business models that demand unique or non-standard billing techniques. The article shows how flexible, change-on-the-fly, and metadata-driven billing architectures are enabling CSPs to offer truly ground breaking services.
Real-Time Provisioning of SIM Cards: A Boon to GSM Operators — interview with Simo Isomaki — Software-controlled SIM card configuration is revolutionizing the activation of GSM phones. The article explains how dynamic SIM management decouples the selection of numbers/services and delivers new opportunities to market during the customer acquisition and intial provisoining phase.
A Cynic Converted: IN/Prepaid Platforms Are Now Pretty Cool — interview with Grant Lenahan — Service delivery platforms born in the IN era are often painted as inflexible and expensive to maintain. Learn how modern SDPs with protocol mediation, high availability, and flexible Service Creation Environments are delivering value for operators such as Brazil’s Oi.
Achieving Revenue Maximization in the Telecom Contact Center — interview with Robert Lamb — Optimizing the contact center offers one of the greatest returns on investment for a CSP. The director of AT&T’s contact center services business explains how telecoms can strike an “artful balance” between contact center investment and cost savings. The discussion draws from AT&T’s consulting with world class customers like Ford, Dell, Discover Financial, DISH Network, and General Motors.
Mobile Broadband: The Customer Service Assurance Challenge — interview with Michele Campriani — iPhone and Android traffic is surging but operators struggle with network congestion and dropping ARPUs. The answer? Direct resources and service quality measures to ensure VIPs are indeed getting the quality they expect. Using real-life examples that cut to the chase of technical complexities, this article explains the chief causes of service quality degradation and describes efficient ways to deal with the problem.
Telco-in-a-Box: Are Telecoms Back in the B/OSS Business? — interview with Jim Dunlap — Most telecoms have long since folded their merchant B/OSS software/services businesses. But now Cycle30, a subsidiary of Alaskan operator GCI, is offering a order-to-cash managed service for other operators and utilities. The article discusses the company’s unique business model and contrasts it with billing service bureau and licensed software approaches.
Bricks, Mortar & Well-Trained Reps Make a Comeback in Customer Management — interview with Scott Kohlman — Greater industry competition, service complexity, and employee turnover have raised the bar in the customer support. Indeed, complex services are putting an emphasis on quality care interactions in the store, on the web, and through the call center. In this article you’ll learn about innovations in CRM, multi-tabbed agent portals, call center agent training, customer treatment philosophies, and the impact of self-service.
21st Century Order Management: The Cross-Channel Sales Conversation — by John Konczal — Selling a mobile service is generally not a one-and-done transaction. It often involves several interactions — across the web, call center, store, and even kiosks. This article explains the power of a “cross-channel hub” which sits above all sales channels, interacts with them all, and allows a CSP to keep the sales conversation moving forward seamlessly.
Building a B/OSS Business Through Common Sense Customer Service — by David West — Delivering customer service excellence doesn‘t require mastering some secret technique. The premise of this article is that plain dealing with customers and employees is all that’s needed for a winning formula. The argument is spelling out in a simple 4 step methodology along with some practical examples.

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