Mobile dealer management fraud is on the rise

But are operators doing enough to address it?

by Susana Schwartz,  connected planet

“About 15% of a typical mobile operator’s total cost goes to managing dealers and sales channels,” according to Orna Sadan, product manager of cVidya’s dealer fraud solutions business.

Because so many carriers rely on homegrown systems rather than commercial and common-use tools to enable them to manage what are becoming extremely complicated commission schemes, they have little recourse for the number of loopholes that are emerging, and sophisticated tactics used by dealers and sales channels to increase their commissions.

According to Sadan, there are approximately six key ways in which dealer fraud metes itself out: ……

The Solution: Awareness is the first step toward a solution, after which, operators should be looking at a blend of rules, scalable event processing and sophisticated processes to identify and address abuse.

“First you decide for just how long you want to monitor different dealers and commissions—four months from activation? Six months from activation? Then you identify all the data sources that are relevant, such as point-of sale, activation points, CRM, billing, dealer commission management systems, etc. You need this to be very ‘configurable’ so you can be very specific about the transactions and time frames and other variables you need to assess,” said Sadan.

She explains that the sheer volume of events necessitates a very robust engine for event processing (cVidya calls their solution CEP) to accurately define the most complex scenarios around dealer fraud. “You want to seek scalability and ease of use in terms of defining abuse patterns,” she added.

In addition to processing millions of transactions, solutions should be able to organize data into chronological and contextual scenarios that are highly configurable in terms of the fields and measures, such as “dealer,” “handset,” “location,” “time frame,” and other variables that help define “key risk indicators” for each channel and dealer. ………  Report