Domestic Toll Fraud/Traffic Pumping

Delivering phone calls to all areas of North America doesn’t cost the same for each area. Marketplace dynamics dictate that supporting remote or lightly populated markets is generally more expensive than more densely populated cities.

The intercarrier compensation regime that applies to connected carriers that exchange traffic in the higher-cost areas allows for the billing of access charges for calls to and from these more rural destinations. Thus, it’s much more expensive to deliver calls to areas like rural Iowa, as opposed to Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, IA. Bad actors know this and will frequently turn-up automated phone-answering systems to generate traffic in these expensive areas. Then, they advertise through social media, websites, texts, and emails to generate calls into these automated phone-answering systems.

The fraud schemes that arise in such scenarios are a function of intermediate service providers being billed higher call handling (access) charges, which subsequently contribute to the fraudulent payments to bad actors. Traffic pumping of this sort is typically robotically dialed, lasts over 15-30 minutes, and is connected into automated systems that provide little or no value to the caller. Many of these calls complete into systems that return dead-air, barking dogs, ‘press 1 to continue’ loops, chat lines, recorded messages that never end, and in many cases, loud screeching tones.

The most common ways for bad actors to exploit high-cost traffic pumping is to acquire phone numbers from the local exchange phone company, stand-up fraudulent systems in an unknowing service provider’s colocation or cloud data centers, and then launch campaigns on social media to entice people to dial these recently acquired local numbers by the hundreds and asking them to leave the calls up, once connected. A nefarious service provider in the money chain will overcharge reputable carriers exaggerated access charges and give a portion of these charges to bad actors.

Here are the best practices that customers can follow to prevent the flow of Domestic Toll Fraud/Traffic Pumping from their network towards ours:

• Set up detection alarms on yours and your customer’s traffic to alert you on numerous, robotically dialed calls made to known high-cost areas of North America. These areas include but aren’t limited to rural Iowa, rural South Dakota, and rural Massachusetts. Look at the NPAs, compare the rates within your typical rate decks, and either convince your customers to stop sending this kind of traffic to you, or block this kind of traffic from terversing your network. We may also be monitoring for this type of traffic and typically alerts its customers upon detection.
• Educate your customers on this type of fraud and encourage them to prevent, detect, and mitigate such fraudulent Domestic Toll Fraud traffic before it reaches your network.