Better Phone Routing Information Sharing Needed to Fight Fraud
Early consensus on boosting information sharing among regulators in cases of fraudulent misuse of national telephone numbers has emerged at the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly. More fraudulent misuse of national telephone numbers has surfaced, the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity said in a proposal. A group of 14 Pacific island countries have had problems with the new tactics, said an APT official. Nations supporting the short-stopping proposal are Australia, Bangladesh, Fiji, South Korea, Malaysia, Micronesia, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga and Palau. U.S. and Canadian officials are consulting with the Asian group to work out differences, an official said.
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The APT proposal suggests administrations and operating agencies take “all reasonable measures … to enable National Regulators to ask for routing information and be given that information by carriers in cases of fraud.” They should “observe and apply” guidelines urged for regulators, operating agencies and administrations for addressing number hijacking, the APT said. To bring criminal cases, regulators in the call-originating country must cooperate with counterparts in nations along a call’s route and in the dialed country, the guidelines said. It’s up to individual nations to participate.
The ITU should report to member countries and national regulators on incidence of misuse of international numbering resources, the proposal said. It asks the ITU-T study group on service definition, numbering, routing and disaster telecom to “study … the hijacking of international country codes” with a view to amending procedures for determining ITU action on misuse of number resources. The proposed resolution also asks the ITU-T study group on tariff and accounting principles to study how call blocking affects developing countries.
Crooks hijack a country’s numbers “in many cases, the complete country code,” without administrations or carriers realizing it, the APT said. The practice, called “short stopping,” results in filtering out of legitimate calls to a phone number with the particular Pacific Islands country code, the proposal said. Calls are “sent to an audiotext provider, or Premium Rate Service Providers” with the aim of “making the holding time as long as possible,” it said. The carrier which filters the call collects the termination rate for that Pacific Islands country. Short stopping gives rise to other types of fraud including “International Revenue Share Fraud” on both mobile and PSTN lines, the proposal said.
Some IRSF countermeasures already appear in an ITU-T recommendation. Countermeasures in place for mobile services include making staff aware, creating controls to counter Subscriber Identity Fraud and installing “Near Real Time Roaming Data Exchange,” the proposal said. The measures are complex, costly and rely heavily on “the human factor,” it said.
PSTN fraud is elusive because carriers don’t know it’s occurring and because legitimate numbers are used, said the proposal. “Friendly” carriers make routine test calls to probe for problems, the proposal said. Catching scammers also is tough, it said. “Carriers quote confidentiality agreements and will not release the information of how they are routing the traffic” often on improbable routes, the proposal said. Regulators often don’t know how the fraud works, it said. Law enforcement has jurisdictional problems and no expertise, the proposal said: “Steps need to be taken to prosecute the perpetrators.”
“The carrier quoting confidentiality and not giving routing information is the main stumbling block,” said the APT proposal. “We need to give the Regulators stronger powers to force carriers to give them the routing information where causes of fraud have been established.”
Some administrations and operators are blocking all calls to affected areas because of the problems. The Pacific Island administrations want the blocking ended because it also stops legitimate calls and because the blameless nations “are totally reliant on telecommunications for trade,” the proposal said.