Proactive Robocall Mitigation Helps BICS Improve Traffic Quality & Reduce Risks

Goal: BICS aimed to minimize the financial and security risks from fraudulent robocalls, optimize infrastructure costs by reducing the volume of malicious calls, and improve the overall quality of the company’s traffic profile.

Solution: Infopulse developed and applied a range of new robocall mitigation approaches and processes, as well as contributed its software engineering expertise to improve the efficiency of the client’s fraud management platform “FraudGuard” with custom traffic detection and barring tools.    

Benefits: The new robocall mitigation capabilities have helped BICS to significantly optimize infrastructure resources and costs, as well as ensure healthy and secure USA-based traffic, ultimately saving up to EUR 87 million in wholesale fraud exposure for its customers.    

Services delivered: Managed Services, Solution Engineering, Software Product Modernization.

Infopulse contributed its software engineering expertise to customizing a traffic-barring tool and established a set of robocall mitigation processes and conditions to amplify the FraudGuard platform used by BICS. Moreover, our team implemented traceback requests in collaboration with ITG, as well as assisted BICS’ partners with the detection and filtering of potentially malicious traffic.    

Armed with new proactive methods and efficient tools to combat robocalls, BICS received the following benefits:

• Full compliance with the new FCC and ITG regulations enabled BICS to continue delivering traffic to the USA, thus safeguarding its market presence
• Proactive robocall mitigation along with the isolation of suspicious calls has created a significantly healthier and risk-free traffic profile
• BICS improved its reputation as a reliable, compliant, and secure telecom provider, which minimized the risks of robocall attempts from fraudsters
• Optimized infrastructure costs and resources due to a substantially reduced volume of malicious call attempts
• Streamlined robocall mitigation with access to ITG’s DNO Registry database that contains 4+ million fraudulent numbers

The new proactive robocall mitigation approaches and capabilities helped BICS block 507 million robocalls in 2023 and save up to EUR 87 million in wholesale fraud exposure for its customers.

Infopulse’s contribution to the client’s fraud operations team helped BICS to win the Future Digital Award for the Best Robocall Mitigation Solution presented by Juniper Research – a leading market research and consulting company that specializes in the digital tech sector. 

Technical Details 

BICS operates a fraud detection platform known as FraudGuard and offers it as a solution toward its mobile network operator (MNO) partners. FraudGuard is a multifaceted solution that analyzes BICS’ global traffic and incorporates SMS, voice, and roaming fraud management features combined with a global threat intelligence database.

The key objective for BICS was to elevate the current anti-fraud capabilities with proactive measures: to rapidly identify, filter out, and block robocalls before they affect the partners and customers. 

After discussing the project and outlining the scope of the work, Infopulse began implementing a set of specific approaches, processes, and tools to help BICS successfully combat malicious robocalls: 

Suspicious Traffic Detection & Proactive Barring 

The first stage of the project involved the barring of traffic from unreliable wholesale carriers whose compliance with the new FCC regulations was uncertain.     Infopulse helped to fine-tune a custom barring tool to filter out and proactively block suspicious traffic from untrustworthy operators. Furthermore, to ensure an immaculate USA-based traffic profile for BICS, our team also thoroughly analyzed the trusted carriers by detecting Caller Line Identifications (CLIs), checking the origin and the destination of the calls, and monitoring their traffic patterns. 

Our team applied a range of custom conditions and parameters to precisely detect potentially malicious traffic. For example, if the A-number (the calling party) is trying to reach a multitude of B-numbers (the party being called) in sequence, meaning that only the last digit of the B-number is changed, this is instantly considered suspicious traffic. The same accounts for non-existent B-numbers as the call disconnect reason – calling non-existent numbers is considered abnormal behavior.    

All forms of suspicious traffic from unreliable carriers were blocked with a customized barring tool. If any deviations were detected within trusted operators, Infopulse assisted BICS with the investigation and filtering of presumptive robocall traffic.

Traceback Requests

Consequently, after BICS started collaborating with ITG, Infopulse helped to implement traceback requests for BICS. Traceback requests are initiated when a USA-based subscriber files a complaint about suspicious calls that impersonate legitimate entities, such as banks, governmental organizations, retailers, etc. The traceback process involved the following stages:

• The operator informs ITG about a complaint
• ITG sends an official traceback request to BICS
• BICS updates the traceback path with its part of available information
• The origin of the call is blocked
• BICS reaches out to the sending operator and informs them about the malicious nature of the call, asking them to investigate the call further.

To further improve robocall mitigation efficiency, Infopulse helped BICS to adopt a proactive approach, where BICS’ team reached out to the operators prior to receiving traceback requests if malicious traffic was spotted. When our experts detected a growing volume of alerts, they would contact the operators and ask them to assess and filter their traffic profile.    

DNO Barring 

Lastly, Infopulse suggested a new approach to combat robocalls – barring illegitimate calls based on the Do Not Originate (DNO) Registry created by ITG. The registry serves as a holistic centralized database of CLIs that are invalid, unallocated, or reported to be fraudulent. The DNO-based barring enabled BICS access to a database of 4+ million fraudulent phone numbers, which is continuously updated by ITG.