Toll fraud becomes an issue when a hacker breaks into a company phone system and routes unauthorized calls to international (long-distance) numbers. This type of fraud cannot be stopped by merely compiling an IP blacklist and, when it occurs, it usually results in substantial losses for the company. That is why it is important that administrators take timely measures to prevent it.
PortaBilling offers a solution that promotes early stage toll fraud detection and sends alerts whenever any potential toll fraud activities take place.
An administrator defines the destinations that will be monitored for toll fraud (for example, Algeria and Ethiopia) by configuring a complete destination group set.
Then the administrator creates a Fraud traffic profile and selects the previously created complete destination group set for it. For each destination group in the set, the administrator configures a threshold that defines call durations during a span of time that are considered normal (for example, 50 minutes per day).
The administrator assigns the fraud traffic profile to a customer class or directly to a customer. If required, the administrator can override thresholds configured in the fraud traffic profile for an individual customer (for example, if sending larger/smaller volumes of traffic to monitored destinations is considered normal for this customer).
Whenever the duration of calls exceeds the set threshold, an alert is sent to the administrator. The administrator can review these automatically generated alerts on the Alert History page. To locate a specific alert, the administrator can filter the alerts by customer, customer class, destination group and time interval.
The same approach is used for early detection of unauthorized calls made to premium-rate numbers.
