Telecommunications (telecom) fraud involves the abuse of telecom services or products—primarily telephones and mobile phones—to illegally siphon money away from a telecom service provider or its customers. In part because it’s a low-risk alternative to traditional methods of financial crime, telecom fraud is a fast-growing field of criminal activity in which perpetrators attempt to gain access to SIM cards or other billing portals to infiltrate a customer or carrier account. Telecom companies often use fraud-analysis systems based on a rule-based engine that generates alerts about suspicious behaviors. Typically, these alerts use fixed thresholds that periodically require manual adjustments. However, telecom companies are turning to solutions that use machine learning to identify fraudulent patterns of behavior and flag them for investigation. These solutions remove the operational overhead of managing rule sets and reduce costs associated with combating fraud.
