Introduction
That since early last year, in fact exactly a year now, a special taskforce set up to clamp down on SIM Box fraud has made seven major arrests in Accra saving the country millions of dollars is commendable. The taskforce, made up of a team of Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and tech-savvy firm, Subah Infosolutions saved the state over US$50 million since 2014 when the operation started, is refreshing to know the police says. At a post arrest press briefing following the latest bust at Adjiringano in Accra mid last year – the immediate outgone Director General of the CID, COP Prosper Agblorh, revealed that about 30 people involved in the fraudulent activity were arrested.
What is Simbox Fraud?
Simbox or Interconnect Bypass Fraud is one most prevalent frauds today, costing the industry and countries some USD 3 billion plus experts say. Calls made via the Internet are sent to Simboxes (machines that house SIM Cards) which redirects this illegal VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) traffic onto mobile networks. Fraudsters effectively bypass the interconnect toll charging points to exploit the difference between the high interconnect rates and the retail price for on-network calls, thus avoiding payment of the official call termination fee/charges of an Operator or a mobile virtual network operators (MVNO).
SIMboxes are particularly prevalent in countries where high charges apply to terminating calls on networks, but where cheap on-net calls are offered instead. These creates the conditions for fraudsters to exploit the price differential using clandestine Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) equipment to bypass the traditional interconnect charging points.
Why is Simbox Fraud so hard to beat?
According to experts there are two unavoidable reasons for the surge and persistence of this type of fraud not only in Ghana but worldwide. The first is the use of pre-paid SIM cards. Most commonly used by fraudsters, their ownership and address are much harder to trace compared to the easily traceable post-paid SIMs. The problem is particularly serious in countries where the incoming international traffic rates are high as mentioned earlier and controls are lax in terms of availability of SIMs and law enforcement.
The second issue is the subscriber churn rate between Operators in the market. The telecommunications industry operates in a low customer loyalty environment. Fraudsters usually take advantage of cheap packages including bundled offers, which earn lower per-minute revenue to the operator than the interconnect rate they can earn from the international carriers. Due to this highly competitive market and the low customer loyalty phenomenon, the cost of all-inclusive bundles is driven down. And disposing of bundle offers and cheap packages is not an option. In recent times, the approach of using broadband links has become more and more popular as simboxes are widely available and sold at prices ranging from $500 to $10,000. Estimating the size of this grey market can be difficult as it depends on a number of elements and varies from country to country industry watchers say.
Fraudsters
Fraudsters are smart, technology savvy and know-how to outfox local operators. They are also experts at masking themselves, they host their equipment where their calls can reach multiple cell sites and get widely dispersed and they send out artificial SMS messages or accept a few incoming calls. They have even been known to use moving vehicles to mask their true intent. Simbox fraud is among the top 5 emerging threats to Operators and MVNOs (worldwide and cost the industry over USD 3 billion per year, according to the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA report 2013).
Why Does Fraud Happen?
Interviews with persons who committed fraud have shown that most people do not originally set out to commit fraud. Often they simply took advantage of an opportunity; many times the first fraudulent act was an accident – perhaps they mistakenly processed the same invoice twice. But when they realized that it wasn’t noticed, the fraudulent acts became deliberate and more frequent. Fraud investigators talk about the 10 – 80 – 10 law which states that 10% of people will never commit fraud; 80% of people will commit fraud under the right circumstances; and 10% actively seek out opportunities for fraud. So we need to be vigilant for the 10% who are out to get us and we should try to protect the 80% from making a mistake that could ruin their lives. Generally, fraud occurs because of a combination of opportunity, pressure and rationalization. An opportunity arises, the person feels that the act is not entirely wrong, and has pressure pushing them to commit the fraud.
Simbox Fraud Damage Consumers
The extent of revenue loss to interconnect bypass or simbox activity is still largely unknown to many Operators and a mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). Not only does it have a direct impact on the Operators’ or MVNOs’ bottom line, but is also responsible for traffic disruption on networks, causing indirect financial damage. Simboxes do not allow the delivery of the Calling Line Identity (CLI) service. Therefore, legitimate customers, being called via Simboxes, may complain about the unavailability of services they would otherwise expect to be able to use. The quality of service also suffers due to network congestion on the call, the bad quality due to traffic and the excessive number of dropped calls. Finally, inbound roamers may experience problems in receiving calls if fraudsters try to bypass calls to routing numbers (MSRN) used to
Solution
Indeed, it is refreshing to know that some Telecoms Operators recently deployed SIM Box M Detectors equipment and solutions to monitor and prevent interconnect bypass traffic, SIM Gateways, or SIM boxing from causing potentially heavy financial losses to their network. SIM Box Detector processes 100% of roaming – both national and international – and domestic event detail records (xDRs) to analyze the traffic generated by each active SIM card on the network. Detecting the presence of SIM boxes is carried about by clever proprietary analytics and the real-time use of over 20 configurable correlations and profiling techniques and decision models that minimize the number of false positive alerts.
As much as 80% of the alerts generated by SIM Box detector were shown to be genuine bypass cases, as opposed to the typical high incidences of “false positives” known to be associated with this type of detection technique. The results are displayed visually on a colorful and interactive user-friendly GUI. The presence of the MSISDN in the alerts generated on SIM Box Detector greatly simplifies the life of the analyst, as he/she can easily deactivate SIMs at the click of a button. SIM Box detector is stand-alone software solution that can be installed on-site on your network within just days.
Credit http://www.xintec.com/
