🇺🇸United States

False answer and call quality scams generating refunds and SLA penalties

2 verified sources

Definition

In false‑answer traffic pumping schemes, wholesale carriers or their partners send a fake answer signal and charge for calls that never truly connect, causing end‑users to experience dead air or early‑cut calls while still being billed. Retail operators then face complaints, credits, and SLA penalties for poor call quality and fraudulent charges to premium destinations.

Key Findings

  • Financial Impact: In affected routes, a material share of minutes (TransNexus cites high answer seizure ratios with very short calls as key indicators) can be falsely billed, forcing operators to credit customers or absorb losses on disputed wholesale invoices; for major carriers, this can scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars per route per year.
  • Frequency: Weekly
  • Root Cause: Traffic pumping intermediaries manipulate signaling to show calls as answered, combined with least‑cost routing that prioritizes price over quality; lack of granular real‑time QoS and answer‑pattern analytics lets these problems persist until customer complaints or audits reveal patterns.

Why This Matters

This pain point represents a significant opportunity for B2B solutions targeting Telecommunications Carriers.

Affected Stakeholders

Customer care and billing dispute teams, Wholesale route managers, Quality of service / network performance teams, Enterprise account managers, Regulatory and compliance teams (for billing accuracy rules)

Deep Analysis (Premium)

Financial Impact

$100,000+ per route per year • $100,000+ per route per year from SLA penalties • $100k+ per route per year

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Current Workarounds

Ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for fraud alerts and Excel for invoice disputes • Custom Excel dashboards and email chains for port-fraud tracking • Excel analytics on CDRs for leakage detection

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Methodology & Sources

Data collected via OSINT from regulatory filings, industry audits, and verified case studies.

Evidence Sources:

Related Business Risks

Artificial traffic pumping and IRSF driving uncollectible wholesale and retail charges

Global telecom fraud losses (dominated by IRSF, Wangiri and related artificial traffic schemes) are consistently estimated around $28–40 billion per year, with IRSF alone historically accounting for several billion annually; individual operators report single incidents in the $100,000–$1,000,000+ range when traffic pumping runs unchecked for a weekend.

Escalating fraud management and dispute handling costs from inefficient detection

Industry research and vendors note that manual fraud operations and reactive investigations can consume several percent of a carrier’s fraud‑related OPEX, with large operators running 24/7 fraud teams and paying six‑ to seven‑figure annual fees for outsourced monitoring and tools; these costs scale with fraud attempts even when no revenue is recovered.

Delayed fraud recognition leading to late billing disputes and slow recoveries

While exact figures vary, industry reports highlight that delayed fraud detection in roaming and international traffic can add weeks to collections cycles for large disputed invoices, commonly in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single event, effectively extending time‑to‑cash for a portion of high‑margin traffic.

Network and trunk capacity consumed by artificial pumped traffic

Vendors report that fraud systems must monitor five‑minute samples for suspicious spikes because pumped traffic can rapidly consume available capacity; for operators with constrained international gateways, lost legitimate traffic during attacks represents foregone revenue that can easily exceed tens of thousands of dollars per major incident.

Regulatory exposure from inadequate fraud controls and inaccurate billing

Regulators in many jurisdictions have forced operators to reimburse customers for fraudulent or artificially inflated charges and in some cases levied fines for mis‑billing and failure to protect consumers; depending on the market, these can range from hundreds of thousands to multi‑million‑dollar exposures over repeated incidents.

Systemic telecom fraud (IRSF, Wangiri, SIM box) exploiting slow or weak detection

Industry bodies and vendors consistently cite global telecom fraud losses in the tens of billions of dollars annually, with IRSF, Wangiri, PBX hacking, and related artificial traffic representing a substantial share; single carriers can lose hundreds of thousands to millions per year if controls are weak, even after partial recoveries.

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