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Carrier Services
Faster Fraud Detection Promised
Vendor Adds Animation Tool to Help Manage Voice Services
by Jim Barthold
According to Coastal Technologies Group, a call detail
processing, accounting process and OSS support vendor for
the telecom industry, up to 90 days can lapse before a carrier
detects network fraud.
To speed things along – moving the fraud detection process
to hours rather than months – Coastal has added a Workflow
Pro business process automation tool to its existing Call
Management Platform (CMP) and OSS Connect product lines.
The CMP assigns a fraud score to each phone call and now,
when that score is exceeded, the information is passed to
Workflow Pro which sends an e-mail warning to the fraud
team.
“We’re getting the human factor involved within hours as
opposed to 180 days after the fact,” said Jay Bowker, vice
president of sales and marketing at Coastal Technologies
Group.
The system serves not only traditional telephone networks
but the expanding IP voice space where fraud, especially with
international calls, is growing since “a home user could set up
a VoIP termination at home and run a gateway bypassing
local carriers,” said Bowker.
This would normally be detected when the billing system
noticed an inordinate number of international terminations at
the home point without reciprocal outgoing termination.
“We would assign a very high fraud score to that particular 10-
digit number and hand that off to the carrier’s fraud team to
go and investigate the fraud,” said Bowker.
Without automating the process, he said, the billing system
would be primarily responsible for detection and “by the time
they get to it it’s 90 days down the road or more and there’s
likely still fraud going on associated with that particular
instance. We’ve shortened the cycle down to hours for the
fraud teams to identify if it is fraud or not. If it is, we have
another disconnect tool to the switch so you can disconnect
that customer.”
Besides improving the fraud detection capabilities, Workflow
Pro has more mundane responsibilities of automating any
business process within a telecom service provider’s
organization by providing a detailed view of the current
status of the network.
“Telco carriers have a slew of business processes that have to
be followed for an order to be taken and fulfilled,” said
Bowker. “Workflow Pro automates that process so that people
are proactively notified about what they need to do that day.”
The new component, he said, can be purchased as either a
standalone or integrated within Coastal’s other product suites.
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