Like any scam targeting innocent individuals, it usually comes at the cost of their wallets. For least cost routing operators, it’s no different.

As reported by one industry expert, fraudulent call termination, or when international calls are swindled so that the local telco doesn’t collect a termination fee, is costing European telcos a whopping $150 million per year, according to U.K.-based fraud management company Revector,  Even more, the consumers involved are usually unaware of this multifaceted phone con, which seems to be cropping up more and more overseas.

Over the past two years, Revector has been closely following this attack on telco operations in 50 countries. It’s worsened so much to the point that one European operator was losing more than $1 million per month.

This ongoing issue plaguing telcos isn’t limited to the traditional telephone company, however. As explained by Jim Dalton, CEO of least cost routing company TransNexus (News - Alert), fraud is now becoming rampant in VoIP services.

“Fraud has been an issue for traditional telephone companies for years. But it was never a factor for VoIP services until recently,” Dalton told TMCnet recently. “More and more, we hear about SIP phones and SIP PBXs that have been hacked and utilized to make unauthorized calls costing thousands of dollars.”

Luckily, companies like TransNexus offer solutions and applications that mediate in the case of a fraudulent dispute. TransNexus’ Nex0SS Mediation solution, a high-performance CDR mediation application with highly flexible rules for mediating, filtering and reformatting CDRs for billing, correlates source and destination call detail records for each call. By doing so, it immediately identifies any discrepancies that could point to fraud or a possible settlement clash.

To learn more, bookmark the Least Cost Routing channel, exclusively on TMCnet.

Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Juliana Kenny