Fraud challenges in the messaging ecosystem

SMS firewalls are the industry standard for protecting mobile networks from spam, fraud, and phishing messages.

Coupled with expert monetization consultancy, which uses the system’s findings to reroute SMS traffic to properly charged routes. SMS firewalls are an essential tool in the mobile operators’ quest for new revenue streams, especially from existing services. 

Driven by machine learning and AI SMS firewalls have significantly improved their detection performance and reduced the percentage of false positives in detecting malicious or uncharged traffic.

This has also enabled SMS firewalls to identify new fraud scenarios, such as the Artificial Traffic Inflation Fraud recently detected by sGate with an operator partner. 

This fraud scenario was initially detected as an anomalous message content pattern that did not seem to fit either person-to-person messaging or simulated P2P messaging, which is often used by SIM farms – which were initially thought to be the source of the messages.

The content itself was not the only anomaly. The sending patterns were also not in line either with standard texting patterns or SIM farm traffic, which raised suspicions that this was a new fraud scenario at work.

After the detection, working with mobile operators, Infobip developed and implemented an update to the sGate SMS firewall designed to detect this particular fraud case specifically.

To find out more about the fraud case and the deployed solution, download the white paper.