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FALSE ANSWER SUPERVISION

False answers occur when a carrier deliberately charges a connection period while in reality the call was not connected to the destination. The false connection period may last for a few seconds at call setup time or call teardown time, or the connection time may be faked completely by using a false answer message or false ring tone.

Telecom operators not only suffer from a loss of Quality of Service. As they are in general not aware that this fraud is occurring, they pass the additional charges from the carriers on to their customers, exposing themselves to refund claims. Meucci Solutions’ False Answer Supervision detects this type of fraud in an efficient way. Our active end-to-end monitoring service is the only accurate and bullet-proof system on the market.

False Answer/False Ring

A carrier does not pass the call to the destination network but short-stops the call by providing an answer or connection signalling message and fakes a network announcement, e.g. “The person you are calling has not responded, please try later” (false answer) or introduces a false ringing tone (false ring). In both cases, the customer is charged by the carrier for the period of false connection to the false answer or ringing tone. Another classic are messages like “Hello? Hello? I cannot hear you.. Hold on…”

 

Early Answer

A carrier provides an answer or connection signalling message and passes a ring tone back to the originating network before it establishes a connection with the terminating network. The calling customer is charged for a few extra seconds while the call is still being setup. If the call does not get successfully set up through to the destination, the carrier may continue the false ringing tone, so the scenario becomes the False Ring scenario as described above.

 

 

Late disconnect

If the call is terminated by the called party, the disconnect message is not passed by the transit carrier back to the originating network for a few seconds, allowing the transit carrier to charge for a few extra seconds.

 

Meucci Solutions’ False Answer Supervision


The use of reputable carriers does not guarantee that this fraud type will not occur. Carriers transit the calls to other carriers that transit to other carriers, etc. Most have no active end-to-end monitoring in place and end-to-end SLA’s are virtually non-existent. In general false answer fraud is performed on a small percentage of the calls (e.g. 2%), to remain undetected. Impact on ASR and ALOC will be invisible in the natural fluctuations of the KPI. On top, false answers are not always an indication of intentional malicious behaviour. Sometimes there might be other explanations: badly configured equipment, under-dimensioned SIM Boxes,... Fraudulent carriers take advantage of these genuine issues by “blending” in.

 

Meucci’s fully time-synchronized platform is able to set-up call between more than 350 mobile, fixed and VoIP operators. All types of False Answer fraud explained above will be detected by accurately measuring the dial/ringing/connect/disconnect timestamps of calls performed. Meucci is able to monitor this interconnect fraud in both directions: on calls from you towards other operators and vice versa. Thanks to the information generated by our platform, telecom operators can easily detect the affected routes in their traffic and take the necessary steps to solve the problem. This will result in an increased quality of service, customer satisfaction and revenue assurance.

 

Meucci False Answer Supervision is available as a stand-alone solution, or as an add-on to SIM Box Detection, CLI Monitoring and Interconnect QoS Monitoring.