Do you know that 2% of the global annual revenue of the Telecom industry is lost due to fraud? It accumulates to around USD 1.5 trillion lost every year. As digital transformation services and solutions are increasing, fraudsters are coming up with new ways. Telecom operators find it hard to deal with the increasing taxonomy of frauds. If a telecom operator cannot address fraud timely, its service reliability suffers a downfall. Many telecom operators in 2022 have started using AIOps digital transformation solutions for fighting fraud. Read on to know how AIOps helps fight fraud in the telecom industry.

Challenges in the telecom industry for fighting against fraud

Why do telecom operators need to leverage the power of AI for fighting fraud? What happened to the traditional methods of fighting fraud in the telecom industry? Well, the conventional methods of fighting fraud in the telecom industry could not withstand the modern-day challenges. As a result, telecom operators had to look for an alternative. AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT operations) has become a companion of telecom operators in fighting fraud. The modern-day challenges for telecom operators in fighting fraud are as follows:

• The frequency of frauds in the telecom industry has increased in the past few years. It is because the number of telecom consumers has also increased in the past few years. Every telecom operator must deal with many spams in a single day. When your employees try to find the source of the fraudulent activity, it may take hours or even days. The speed of action is slow and may hamper the service availability of the telecom operator. Also, traditional monitoring systems in the telecom industry are no longer effective in fighting frauds with such a high frequency.
• Since human-based teams may take hours/days to identify fraud, the fraudster will get ample time to make multiple calls and send messages. The manual approach to fighting fraud in the telecom industry is reactive. A telecom operator may identify fraud when the damage is done. There is a lack of a proactive approach to fighting fraud in the telecom industry. A proactive approach can help identify fraud before occurring and boost service reliability.
• Fraudsters have evolved to be more effective in 2022. As the methods of fraud are changing, telecom operators need to find a better solution. For example, pickpocketing is a fraudulent activity in the telecom sector where numerous small calls are made over time. Since pickpocketing involves small calls, it is hard to determine them as fraud. When there is a significant shift in the expected behaviour, one may find fraudulent activity. The real challenge is to detect fraud when there isn’t any substantial change in user behaviour. To ensure high service availability, telecom operators need to evolve in the same way as fraudsters.
• Telecom operators do not only serve individual consumers. Telecom operators have many organizations as their clients which need a network for their IT infrastructure. As a result, carriers have comprehensive product portfolios for different types of consumers. Maintaining service reliability irrespective of the telecom product is a challenge in 2022. A few decades back, there were not many products in the telecom industry. As the product portfolio is expanding, telecom operators must provide the same assurance to each end-user.
• There are no more lengthy contracts to lock in customers. At present, telecom customers can easily change their service provider within minutes. Relaxations in number porting have allowed customers to jump from one service provider to another. Since customer mobility is relatively easier, customer service gains importance. If you cannot offer high service availability, telecom consumers might ditch your services. The same happens for organizations that rely on telecom operators. If an organization isn’t satisfied with a service provider, it can quickly switch to cloud-based network infrastructure. Installing cloud-based network infrastructure is faster and easier than on-premise installation.
• Not all telecom operators have direct consumers. Some resellers provide network services with the help of partner channels. In such a case, a service provider may know nothing about the end-user. It makes fraud detection even more difficult as there isn’t any information on the end customer. There is a need for digital transformation services and solutions that can provide fraud-related insights to resellers and channel partners at the same time.

How AIOps help eradicate the telecom industry challenges?

As you can see, there are many challenges in 2022 for telecom operators. AIOps digital transformation solutions have the power to deal with these challenges. Let us see how AIOps prevent fraud in the telecom industry.

• An AIOps based analytics platform is an expert in detecting anomalous behaviour. Once AIOps recognizes the ideal behaviour, it generates reports every time the user behaviour is different. AIOps-based solutions have the power to recognize even the most minor changes in normal behaviour. Be it a nearby user or remote user, AIOps based analytics platforms always offer enhanced monitoring.
• The best AIOps products and tools monitor fraud patterns always. By doing so, they find the source of the fraud quickly. AI automated root cause analysis solution is much better than manually detecting the source of fraud. When you identify the source of frauds quickly, you can solve them in real-time to boost service availability.
• AIOps based analytics platform can generate tunable models for learning the patterns of past frauds. Once an AIOps-based fraud detection system is fully trained, it can identify threats before they occur. Telecom operators can avoid downtime and decline in service availability by knowing about the frauds in advance.
• AIOps-based solutions can help telecom operators with alert prioritization. A telecom operator with many consumers will receive many fraud alerts in a day. Some frauds are deadlier than others in the telecom industry. AIOps can help identify the fraud alerts that require immediate attention. You need to address those fraud alerts first, which could seriously hamper the service’s reliability.

Using AIOps will also help you slash costs in fighting fraud. With AIOps, you don’t need to hire many employees for fighting fraud. Adopt an AIOps strategy to fight fraud in 2022!