Issue 23 • Oct 2011
Telemedia industry to launch body to tackle hijack fraud globally Leading members of the telemedia community have pledged to come together and form a body that will lobby the world’s major carried to stamp out what is now seen as an empidemic of hijack fraud that is draining as much as 50% of revenues away from the business – and has rendered it impossible to call some whole countries such as Somali and North Korea as pretty much 100% of all calls to these countries, even if it isn’t PRS, gets hijacked. Speaking candidly – and anonymously – in a closed workshop at World Telemedia Amsterdam earlier this month, some of the major European telemedia service providers and network operators pledged to form a co-operative action group, joinly funded by the industry members, to develop a proper strategy to take global network operators to task over traffic hijacking that has, as one telemedia exec put it at the meeting, “grown exponentially in the past three years to now be a major problem”. Hijack fraud is involves someone, somewhere in the supply chain of carriers, between caller and termination point, sucking away the traffic from the intended platform, with the fraudster delivering it to a, usually, poor quality IVR or recorder service attempts to fool the caller into staying on the line as long as possible. The fraudster collects the money from the delivering network and the caller, who has not received the service he paid for, will then often go to the carrier or content provider and demand his money back and making repeat business unlikely. This method of fraud is sometimes carried out in collusion with an accomplice at the origin carrier who turns a blind eye when a percentage of calls are rerouted down the line. Unscrupulous carriers have also been known to send traffic to the wrong termination point, collecting a kick-back from the fraudster. The aim of the industry task force is to employ representatives to travel the world speaking to carriers about the problem with the aim of getting them to look more seriously at where this is happening and to try and stamp it out. The group also plans to try and bring a hijacker to trial as an example to all – and operator help is needed in getting a full paper trail of the traffic that has been hijacked. Hijacking not only affects the victim of the fraud, but also can have a detrimental effect on the telemedia industry as a whole. This practice has ruined terminations that used to work from everywhere in the world, resulting in the international market becoming more fragmented and therefore less attractive. “Some carriers are really on top of it, others are not doing enough and then termination points are being hijacked and killed. Hijackers are like parasites, if they suck all the goodness out of a plant it will die,” says Stephane Allimant, Chief Executive of Atlas Telecom. “If it is hijacked so much on one termination point no one will use it anymore.” Chief Operating Officer for Kwak Telecom, Josef Bruckschloegl, sees the problem mainly aimed at the wholesale market. “They hijack the traffic and then offer wholesale below the interconnection market price, they have 100% mark up and don’t pay out,” he says. “They don’t pay for customer services etc. and never terminate the numbers where they should.” It is a problem which Bruckschloegl estimates is losing his company between 10 to 15 per cent of traffic a year, and he advises companies within the wholesale community to “make sure the carrier has official documentation for the number ranges, which need to be checked by the collecting party”.
THIS MONTH... News
The latest news from the industry, along with analysis of what that news means, including: • M-web use proving a boon to operator billing, says DIMOCO 3 • M-retailing explodes reveals IMRG Capgemini study 4 • M-payments set to be standard way to pay by 2015 5 • Mobile access to web now outstrips fixed line, finds MEF 6 • Tablet users click on more ads than anyone else 7 • Bet-to-view comes to UK Racing apps 8 • MobFox and MobPartner form m-ad partnership 8 • Bambuser video bloggers get ‘flattrd’ – and paid 9 • PPP registration scheme signs up more than 3000 companies 9 • Hallow’een text campaign raises funds for Alzheimers Charity 10 • X-Factor slots launched by Fremantle Media Enterprises 10
Analysis Editorial All Grown Up PPP registartion scheme and the fall out of World Telemedia Amsterdam show that the industry has matured 11 WORLD TELEMEDIA AMSTERDAM What a show! World Telemedia Amsterdam showed a marked return to form. Paul Skeldon outlines some of the best bits 13 WORLD TELEMEDIA AMSTERDAM From the show floor What was happening at World Telemedia Amsterdam on the show floor 15
Directory The leading industry directory of services 17
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