It has been a fun start to 2019. It is fun because, as a team, we at LATRO have never had more clients, never had as large an annual sales forecast, and never turned down business in the first quarter before.
To our prospective clients who are processing their 2019 contracts and purchase orders with us … do not worry. We will not turn you down! Our team is scaled, our systems ready for provisioning, and our operations calendar open for business. It is not what you think. The reason we turned down business is due to a guy named Occam.
More than five years ago, we decided to invest in development of fraud detection technology involving Signaling Analytics. Protocol Signaling is the lifeblood that flows in today’s telecom networks and enables the features and functions of our favorite services like mobility, roaming, prepaid top up, and call forwarding. Without signaling, there is no mobile network and no services. But unless you’re a telecom techy like us, you probably have just a light understanding and familiarity with terms like SS7, STPs, and Diameter. No worries.
Signaling Analytics allows us to detect elusive SIM Servers and SIM Gateways no matter how advanced the anti-detection techniques employed by the fraudsters. Signaling Analytics is not dependent on conventional data fields like IMSI, IMEI, or Phone Number. In addition to being impervious to Human Behavior Simulation, IMEI Spoofing, and rapid IMSI rotation, Signaling Analytics is fast.
Beating the fraudster is pretty simple. You just have to be faster than them. If you do not detect fraud before the fraudster makes a profit, you are not beating the fraud. When you detect the fraud faster than the fraudster makes money, you take away his profitability and reason to commit fraud in the first place. I doubt there are any fraudsters paying out of pocket to operate SIM Boxes because they enjoy doing it.
You see, the reason we turned down business already in Q1 is because the prospective client insisted, they wanted us to charge for our services based on number of SIM Box detections. Unfortunately, the Test Call Generation industry has conditioned many Fraud Managers to focus their SIM Box Bypass control KPIs on detection counts. That is insane. Anyone that wants to beat fraud will not incentivize their team and vendors to produce a continuous trend of detections. If your SIM Box detection metrics are consistent or growing over time, that is an indication you are not beating fraud. It is an indication that your TCG and CDR Analysis controls are too slow. At LATRO, we want our clients to beat fraud, not just meet their monthly detection KPIs.
That is why I love the requests from our Analyst team to join project meetings because of customer complaints about low detections. I start those meetings with the statement … “Low detections? Perfect. We are doing our job!” Sure, I get it. Low detections can mean the FM vendor has a problem. We always take these concerns seriously. But after we walk our client through trend analysis on international voice traffic, integrity checks on test numbers, profile optimization verification, and system data integrity validation, we’re left with a simple answer. There is no fraud.
Sadly, the TCG industry has left FM professionals rightly pessimistic against “no fraud” statements. And everyone cringes at proving a negative. But after we’ve done the proper due diligence, we are left with the simple answer. We beat it. There is no SIM Box fraud.
And so, as our old friend Occam so wisely formulated in his razor over 700 years ago, the simple answer is likely to be more correct than a complicated answer. Therefore, expect our LATRO team to continue turning down business through the rest of the year when it comes to detection-based performance contracts. The answer is simple. We beat fraud.
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