Fraud in roaming/ISD SMS

Few days back, we discovered that large number of roaming SMS is being originating from some African country.

Though the originator number was not a valid customer number but still the SMSs which were destined again to Germany were being accepted by the SMSCs.

Hence the SCCP carrier was charging for every MSU it pass for each SMS. As a result month end bill for ISD SMS was quite high. After an analysis, it was discovered that huge number of SMS was originating from some African country having an originating MSISDN from the postpaid number series. As a result SMSC was accepting the SMSs as postpaid charges offline.

When the charging was carrying out as billing system, it was rejecting the A-Party (Originator) as it had the invalid number.

Latter on after configuring the correct postpaid series in SMSCs, such fraudulent cases stopped.