Honestly, fraudsters world wide are becoming more and more resourceful. From SIP based port knocking, automatic bot nets and targeted VoIP attacks – we are now starting to see a new type of fraud – this time, not by fraudsters, but by legitimate termination providers.

In order to understand where the fraud here is located, we must first understand what a termination provider is and how it makes money. Normally, a termination provider will be an entity providing VoIP call termination (break-out) services, to either a cherry picked list of destinations or what’s referred to as an A-Z termination (the entire world).

Normally, termination providers utilize one of the following method of charging their customers:

• 1/1 – Calls are billed according to a per-second calculation
• 30/6 – Calls are billed according to closest 6 second (rounded up) interval, with a minimum of 30 seconds
• 60/6 – Calls are billed according to closest 6 second (rounded up) interval, with a minimum of 60 seconds
• 60/60 – Calls are billed according to closest minute (rounded up) interval, with a minimum of 60 seconds

Now, having said that, we now need to define two additional terms: ASR and ACD.

ASR stands for Average Success Ratio, which is a ratio between the number of successful calls (answered calls) and the number of failed calls. On some routes, ASR may include BUSY calls and NO-ANSWER calls as part of the successful ASR, but that is debatable.

ACD stands for Average Call Duration, which in turn means – the average call duration for a successful call. High quality routes will normally have an ASR higher than 80% and an ACD higher than 4 minutes – depending on the route type and the destination blend.

So, up till now, everything sounds like legitimate business – right? Two days ago, I’ve received the following mail from a termination company – you can contact us for complete information about this company.

“Missed call routes”? What the hell are “missed call routes”. So, I decided to investigate the issue.

A “missed call route” is basically a route that always leads to a voicemail system, that would normally answer the call and playback a message to the caller, as if a voicemail system answered the call. Now, that means the customer will actually pay for the call, as the call actually connected and minutes had been passed via the route. The pricing indicated above is set as $0.007, which is sub-cent pricing.

Now, let’s define the scenario for fraud. Let’s say I’m a tier 3 VoIP termination business and I have a large call center using my services. They terminate mostly to, let’s say, the UK. Here is a premium quality rate deck for the UK:

Now, let’s say I would activate the “missed call route” on all UK mobile locations. So, if the message on the voicemail would 30 seconds, I would charge my customer for 30 seconds worth of UK termination, while paying the “missed call route” provider a fee of $0.007 flat. So, I would make anything between $0.0015 up to $0.13 for each of those missed calls. Now, if I’m a call center and I generate let’s say, 1,000,000 every month (a medium sized call center), and my provider’s routing is 75% ASR, that means that 250,000 calls will get routed over to the “missed call route”. That means, that our “termination provider” will cash in a total of anything between $1750 up to a whopping $32,500 – every month!

Can you distinguish a “missed call route” from a real route – the general answer would be no – from your perspective it looks exactly the same. Can you detect this via analytics: yes. An analytics system will be able to alert upon a large number of short duration calls, let’s say, multiple calls that are under 30 seconds or exactly 30 seconds. Another option is: don’t use just some termination provider, don’t use some stupid little outfit, make sure you are buying from legit termination providers. Companies like Level3, TSGGlobal, 012Smile, iBasis, British Telecom, TATA and so on.

A comment from a friend indicated the a “missed call route” is actually a route that will enable you to generate a call, without really creating a full blown media call. The purpose of such route is to call users, show up on their phone as a “missed call” and then, they will return a call to the calling number. This was a common fraudulent call pattern around 2004-5, where premium rate fraudsters would generate these kind of calls, with a premium number to return to and you would spend 15 minutes on a premium line, with some bogus contest – was very common in the UK around 2005.

If you are de-frauded with “missed call routing” – you have only yourself to blame!