Toll Fraud is the illegal/fraudulent use of a telephone system, and will cost organizations globally in excess of $70 billion over the next 12 months.  The average attack in the enterprise sector is $40K.

The fraudsters are often employees/ex-employees or organized criminals.  For organized criminals, who are seen as the bigger and more costly threat, the illegal activity often involves hacking in to the phone system out-of-hours and utilizing all of the telephone lines.  A typical scenario consists of them flooding the market with “cheap” calling cards, which the innocent public buy so they can make lower-rate calls to various destinations around the world.  Unbeknownst to them, the code they are given on the back of the card is actually enabling them to hack into a phone system to get dial-tone.  They then proceed to make their call, all the while at the expense of the poor organization that has to foot the bill.  And the reality is that legally, the organization is liable to pay it because they own the phone system.

Like most type of insurances, companies don’t put something in place against toll fraud until they are stung for the first time.  Most of the time they haven’t even thought about it before.  But it makes sense.  Most businesses have firewalls, anti-virus software, spam filters, but what is protecting their phone system?

There are a few things that can be implemented:

You can ask your carrier to advise you of any unusual toll fraud activity e.g. calls being made at strange hours of the day, unusually high call traffic, but this doesn’t always work.  It is usually too late as well, as it may be a couple of months before they pick something up, by which time it is too late.

You could implement an on-site solution that monitors your call traffic, looking out for logarithmic changes over time identifying toll fraud.  However, this is often too expensive for the average buyer, and it too can take a while to detect any fraudulent behavior.

Or you could, wait for it, invest in Report, OSI’s Call accounting software (or the equivalent).  Report has customizable alarms that can be configured by the user, which when triggered, will notify the relevant person straight away via email or SMS.  For example, if the company’s opening hours are from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday, and a single call is made out of these hours, an alarm will be raised.  The administrator can then investigate there and then and take the appropriate action, rather than waiting for the bill at the end of the quarter.

And the alarm system doesn’t stop there.  It can also notify supervisors of calls made to premium rate numbers (or any numbers for that reason), calls that go over a certain price-threshold, calls that last over a specific duration and many other scenarios.  So you’re not only looking at saving costs, but you can also view the productivity of your staff.

The ROI story is a great one.  If you have any more about our call accounting solutions, please contact us at sales@oaksi.com or check out our call accounting page call accounting

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 2:10 am by OSI and is filed under Call Accounting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.