Insights

Event Highlights from the Toll-Free Traffic Pumping Workshop

Jul 01, 2016

Toll-Free traffic pumping, artificial traffic that fraudulently generates revenue, is an issue that all telecom players know needs to be solved quickly for the health of the industry. On May 18, 2016, Somos gathered and facilitated a workshop with stakeholders to talk about potential solutions for Toll-Free traffic pumping. Representatives from the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and potential technology solution providers spoke to approximately 100 attendees.

Gary Beaulieu from AT&T, representing the CFCA, explained how traffic pumping occurs. Toll-Free traffic pumping is artificially generated traffic to Toll-Free Numbers in order to collect revenue from bypassing the SMS/800 platform and/or per minute originating access fees. Calls are generated with spoofed caller ID information (also called Automatic Number Identification, or ANI). Spoofing the ANI makes it much harder to trace a call back to its origins. Through revenue sharing agreements, those originating these calls can get paid by some carriers, who then bill other carriers or the Toll-Free subscriber.

One of the biggest issues in tracking down the fraudsters is that there may be several steps between the originating caller and the Toll-Free subscriber. A fraudulent call will go through several different hops, including traditional carriers, competitive carriers, resellers, and VoIP providers. Kristi Thompson from the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau explained how they work cooperatively with the victims of traffic pumping to help trace back the calls to help the FCC and law enforcement prosecute this type of fraud. For the Enforcement Bureau, the sooner information is brought to their attention, the faster they can trace it back to its origins. The FCC can use its subpoena power to get access to the necessary records, but time is always of the essence. Ms. Thompson encouraged Resp Orgs to reach out to her as soon as they see traffic pumping patterns. Emails should be directed to kristi.thompson@fcc.gov.

Antonio Sweet from the FCC spoke about efforts to eliminate ANI spoofing. Without spoofing, tracing calls back to their original source becomes much easier. The telecommunications industry is working on a solution that would authenticate the ANI using a two-key encryption model. This solution depends on the call being all IP, rather than analog. Even if industry does roll out a technical solution in the timeframe Mr. Sweet suggested (by late 2017), it will be several years before all calls can be authenticated this way.

The idea behind the entrepreneurs’ panel is to get some smart people in the room who have developed products and services that could possibly be adapted to help stop or slow Toll-Free traffic pumping. Aaron Foss, the inventor of Nomorobo and winner of the Federal Trade Commission’s contest for stopping robocalls, showed how he uses the simultaneous ring function to divert robocalls away from consumers. Nomorobo uses honeypots, crowd sourcing, and available black lists to determine in real time which calls are robocalls and intercept those calls, so the call only rings once and goes away. Andrew Mangold, a serial entrepreneur and owner of the System Control Point Tel-Lingua, posited that data shared amongst SCP Owner/Operators could be the key to finding and shutting down traffic pumpers in short order. Invoca’s Colin Kelley showed how they use advanced analytics to detect and shut off traffic pumping.

While there is no silver bullet to stop Toll-Free traffic pumping at the moment, the presenters demonstrated that there are smart and engaged people helping to prosecute those who engage in this nefarious activity and thinking of ways to use technology to ameliorate the problem. While Somos can’t solve the problem, our company will continue to be the conduit for these ideas.

For more background on Toll-Free Traffic Pumping, please visit our Blog “Bad Traffic.”