Neural Technologies Minotaur™ fraud management solution has been assisting Telkom SA to manage fraud since mid 2000. Now it is not only helping Telkom to reduce its fraud losses, but it is also greatly assisting the company to improve its image amongst its 7 million customer base.
The following is an article taken from This Day newspaper
This Day - Johannesburg, March 2004
Christian Figenschou
We have all heard the story: criminals tap into a private telephone line and run up huge bills on international calls. The subscriber gets a massively inflated bill and Telkom will not discuss the matter until it has been paid.
No more. Before my phone bill arrived last month I got a call from Telkom`s fraud department informing me that technicians had noted unusual activity on my line and had flagged those calls for investigation. They found that on one day several hundred rands worth of calls had been made to Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkey, but said that my account had already been credited with the cost of the unauthorised calls.
Most of the fraudsters who illegally tap into lines and sell phone calls at reduced rates work from roadside phone booths. Telkom says it lost R167 million in stolen call time in the 2002-03 financial year. That is a lot of money, but the parastatal says it is well below the international norm, thanks to its efforts to crack down on fraud.
The company is hard at work securing switchboxes and other infrastructure to make it more difficult for criminals to tap into lines. But the real advance is the cutting edge neural network technology that Telkom has installed to track unusual activity on its lines.
"We have introduced a network fraud-management system that allows us to track fraudulent use of lines in real time,` said Andrew Weldrick, Telkom`s spokesperson. "The software builds a profile of each subscriber`s usage patterns. Any sudden change in a subscriber`s call pattern is flagged by the software", says Weldrick. As an account is flagged, teams of investigators around the country leap into action.
The system operates in real time, so investigators are often alerted while the fraudulent calls are taking place. That allows them immediately to send a team to the switchbox or other distribution point and arrest the perpetrators. Suspicious subscribers can contact Telkom`s account enquiries on 10210.
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