Telecommunication fraud – known to most people as "spam calls" – has become a huge problem for everyone. Private consumers are bombarded with numerous unwanted calls; brands face a growing degradation in reliability from their customers; and telco operators have to deal with situations where their network is being bypassed by an unauthorized third party.
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Monnan Miah[/caption]
"While spam calls may be a way of generating traffic, this phenomenon is slowly destructing the value of traditional telecommunications in the eyes of the public, which in turn affects how it is perceived by organizations," explains Monnan Miah, Head of Global Services at Toku. In fact, the phone number is the most widely used identification method in the world today, connecting it directly to a brand's reputation. "As soon as people lose trust in the authenticity of that ID, many companies will start moving to other communication channels that might be perceived as more secure, but actually have other disadvantages, like the fact that they are unregulated and less ubiquitous," Miah notes. While some areas already have active fraud-prevention frameworks, APAC does not. Realizing that fighting fraud is a mutual effort, Toku decided to take the regional lead and join the AB Handshake community: a cross-industry solution allowing operators to validate the authenticity of every single call as they occur in real-time.
A Mutual Problem – A Collaborative Solution
If both network operators and consumers worldwide suffer from telco fraud, the most natural thing would be fighting it together. So, what's stopping them? "When it comes to telecommunications, each country uses a different type of technology or interprets the technology in a different way. This makes it impossible to have a consistent, cross-border way of handling fraud," Miah shares. "Different countries have tackled the problem from different angles, but none of them has actually used technology-first focused approach to do it," he explains. "That's where newfound operators like Toku can help. In partnering with AB Handshake, we're helping both our own community and other communities worldwide. It's a mutual effort."
