Strengthening the Industry’s Defences Against IRSF: Enhancing Visibility, Validation and Detection with Numbering Data

For more than a decade, international revenue share fraud (IRSF) has resulted in the loss of millions of dollars for enterprises and CPaaS providers. It is a costly challenge that continues to plague the telecoms industry each year.

IRSF takes place when attackers artificially inflate traffic to premium rate numbers, profiting from revenue-sharing arrangements. This type of fraud stands as a significant threat to the telecoms industry, with companies losing a massive $38.95 billion to instances like IRSF in 2023, according to the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA).

What makes IRSF especially hard to detect is that it can be mixed with legitimate international calls. It is a challenge that not only has an immediate impact on organisations’ revenue streams but is also damaging overall trust in the voice carrier ecosystem.

Rebuilding Trust Across the Voice Ecosystem

Traditional communications channels are becoming closely associated with fraud, resulting in an uncertain future for voice and SMS and damaging consumer trust. With thousands of IRSF instances occurring every day, both carriers and their customers are experiencing substantial financial losses, leading to them exploring alternative communications channels.

Addressing the trust in communications challenge is an industry-wide responsibility. It requires industry bodies and players to come together to deploy collaborative solutions and initiatives. Collaboration will be vital in rebuilding consumer trust and enabling new revenue streams that come from trusted voice.

As a neutral provider of trusted information services, XConnect’s goal is to support this by working with leading industry bodies to provide new services for authentication and validation. With this in mind, we’ve introduced our IRSFCheck™ solution, in collaboration with the GSMA.

The solution is part of our RiskALERT™ product suite and leverages the GSMA’s IRSF Prevention data to stop individual fraudsters before an attack takes place. We see this as a vital next step in the expansion of our fraud services backed by industry-recognised datasets.

Fighting Fraud with IRSFCheck

IRSFCheck provides a dedicated solution, underpinned by our award-winning Global Number Range (GNR) data, in combination with the GSMA’s IRSF Prevention data. It protects mobile network operators, CPaaS providers and enterprises from high-risk fraud destinations in real-time.

With 19+ million unique at high-risk IRSF numbers in our global threat feed and 239 countries and territories covered, organisations that deploy IRSFCheck benefit from:

· Rapid Validation – Our GNR data checks validity, allocation and immediately flags high-cost ranges. Prior to routing, it identifies high risk B-numbers that may be associated with IRSF to help deliver fraud management for voice routing.

· Real-Time Visibility – GSMA IRSF Prevention adds to our GNR data by immediately flagging reported revenue share fraud numbers and International Premium Rate numbers (IPRNs). The database is updated regularly using a unique scanning system and monitors all traffic.

· Comprehensive Threat Detection – IRSFCheck delivers an over 90% detection rate on confirmed fraud cases. With real-time flagging of reported revenue share fraud numbers and IPRNs, IRSFCheck helps organisations gain evidence of call hijacking and access to IPRN numbers.

· Revenue Protection – The database is updated over 250 times every single day - because a couple of hours can represent up to $50k of losses. IRSFCheck protects MNOs and enterprises against any IRSF method, including Wangiri and roaming fraud.

Overcoming High-Risk Threats

Collaborative engagement with the industry and regulators at a global level is at the heart and DNA of what we are.

Together with the GMSA, we’re providing the industry with a comprehensive and collaborative solution to tackle IRSF with the goal of restoring trust in telecoms. Our aim is to provide a quick and efficient way to easily identify high-risk numbers, improve margins and reduce damaging losses.

Learn more about how XConnect IRSFCheck is strengthening the telecom industry’s anti-fraud capabilities: https://www.xconnect.net/resources/news/introducing-irsfcheck-part-of-the-xconnect-riskalert-family