Cell firms, PTA mull ways to thwart fraud calls, SMSs

[LRE]

Cell firms, PTA mull ways to thwart fraud calls, SMSs

By Muhammad Yasir

KARACHI: Cellular phone operators, in collaboration with Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA), are mulling methods to curb fraudulent activities that incur financial loss to their customers through their networks.

It is a common practice that subscribers receive SMS messages containing information about lucky draw awards, and lose their balance if they unconsciously reply to them. Besides, some obnoxious calls from deceivers invite subscribers to come to particular location for award of prize money, resulting in loss of money to the subscribers.

Cellular phone operators have been receiving complaints on regular basis from their customers about fraud calls and SMSs that cause lose of balance on reply.

It is imperative to mention here that Mobilink had captured three big groups, which were involved in such activities. However, being an operator/service provider, Mobilink does not have the authority to punish such people. An operator can only cancel the culprit’s SIM for which there are no guidelines.

Ufone has said that it will deploy a spam filtering solution in the coming October that will reduce malicious activities. It will focus on those SMSs, which have a higher frequency of balance transaction.

It is learnt that PTA had hired M/S Tekelec (one of the solution providers) to come up with an effective strategy, but it is not convinced of the success of the spam filter for financial fraud with intelligently dispersed traffic.

PTA officials suggested to either block all balance transfer services or to put some identification code and amount of balance transfer limits to overcome the SMS fraud problem.

The balance transfer service is very helpful to those prepaid subscribers, who are on international roaming and want to recharge their balance. However, Mobilink is working seriously to control fraudulent activities and has deployed spam filters.

Representatives of Warid telecom suggested that by shutting down the balance transaction service, there would be a huge loss in their revenue. Representatives of SCO and CMPak said they have not faced such problems since they don’t offer services of balance transfer. However, in the future, they will try to improve their billing network to avoid any such issue in the future.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp...2008_pg5_2