Think your organization is exempt from in-house network abuse? Think again. A CFCA Global Fraud Survey of communication service providers found that dealer fraud was one of the top five methods of fraud, costing $US 3.35 billion annually.

In this scenario, customer service representatives (CSRs) or administrators with access to account information may upgrade friends or family to a premium service package or even provide free access to services.

Major Fraud Types*

*Source: 2013 CFCA Global Fraud Survey

IT Systems Misalignment

Of course, not all in-house revenue losses are a result of intentional fraud. Manual errors or data misalignment between multiple systems can affect revenue when discrepancies affect billing or service delivery. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear whether these errors are intentional or the result of an honest mistake. This requires further investigation—but many service providers aren’t even aware that these data errors occur, which means revenue can slip through the cracks undetected.

Detecting and Preventing Internal Fraud and Errors

Combat internal fraud, errors, and data discrepancies—whether intentional or not—with the following safeguards:

• Make sense of Big Data to track revenue leaks back to human errors
• View per-subscriber bandwidth usage to identify gaps between usage and revenue, or speed and purchased package, to target potential CSR fraud and leakage areas
• Detect and investigate fraudulent devices to stop potential external threats
• Automate and streamline internal workflows to reduce the chance of errors
• Access controls to secure subscriber data
• Simplify the management of complex service bundles, even for large enterprise customers
• Track consistency of promotions and customer plan upgrades across CRM, billing, and provisioning systems, as well as configuration files and IT middleware