The handful of Pacific islands countries that are frequent victims of a type of communications fraud loosely known as ‘telephone number hijacking’ are breathing a sigh of relief.
In the October meeting of the World Standardisation Assembly (WSTA) 2008, held in South Africa, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) adopted and approved measures designed to help them deal with this problem.
“This is the first time Pacific islands countries have taken a proposal and presented it to the ITU and received adoption and approval,” said Fred Christopher, manager at the Suva-based Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association (PITA).
PITA’s Pacific telecom members are usually the first point of disruption when ‘number hijacking’ happens, although as the fraud aggravates, a country’s economy is known to suffer when its international communication is affected.
“In attendance at the WTSA was Joseph Kim, of Papua New Guinea Telecommunications regulatory Authorty, who presented the proposal on behalf of the Pacific islands countries,” said Christopher.
“The proposal received its first reading and introduction at working group one for the plenary session after which it was referred to an ad hoc group for further deliberation.
“It received support from many countries, but as the original title of the proposal was ‘number hijacking on international telecommunication networks’, it faced difficulties when translated to French and Arabic.
“It was also noted that the word ‘hijacking’ was too emotional.
“Therefore, as a trade-off for their support, the title was amended to ‘misuse of numbering resources on international telecommunication networks.”
In the final plenary session, the new proposal was further debated following which the assembly adopted and approved it,” Christopher said.
He explained that telecommunication fraud is commonly called number hijacking in this region, where calls to the Pacific islands are diverted without the knowledge of the calling party, the called party or the domestic telecom operator.
“Number hijacking is fraudulent in nature,” Christopher added.
“Not only does it give the Pacific islands a bad reputation, it forces many international operators to stop calls going out to these Pacific islands countries.”
The process in which this fraud occurs is very technical in nature.
“What happens, explained Christopher, is when a telephone number is ‘hijacked’, calls will not terminate in the Pacific islands because someone at the exchange, for fraudulent reasons, has filtered the calls away from the routing to the intended country. Instead, these calls are typically routed to porn sites.
“As late as the first week of October, a colleague in India tried unsuccessfully to make calls to the Solomon Islands, as the Solomon Islands’ country code was blocked by the operator to avoid getting caught by the fraud,” said Christopher.
“The blocking of country codes by international operators as a prevention control is an aggressive method which is contrary to the existing ITU recommendation (E.156) on blocking of country codes.
“It stops all traffic to the affected country causing other problems. This method fails to address the cause of this globally organised criminal activity and the perpetrators walk away undetected.
“Efforts to identify fraudulent operators have been futile due to commercial confidentialities within the international carriages.”
Christopher said the new ITU resolution will be an important regulatory tool in that it resolves to provide a mechanism to allow national regulators to request carriers to release routing information in cases of fraud.
As well, they will be obligated to collaborate and share information on fraudulent activities related to misuse of international numbering resources and to consider sharing information about these activities.
A number of countries in the Pacific have been grappling with number hijacking for a while now, which led to an initial move by the Cook Islands to take its grievance to the ITU.
Stuart Davies, former CEO for Telecom Cook Islands, had told ISLANDS BUSINESS in an earlier article that number hijacking was predominantly committed out of Europe and the United States.
In recent times, Pacific countries have also become victims of a new kind of fraud called GSM fraud, where a GSM SIM card and international roaming services are used to the advantage of fraudsters.
“The methodology is that a SIM card is taken to a foreign company and a huge number of calls is generated.
“The GSM roaming system will trigger an alert, usually after about 24 hours, but by then, the fraudster has gone,” said Davies.
“The telephone company (issuer of SIM card) never gets paid the collection rate. Some companies in the Pacific have lost thousands of dollars and over US$100,000 in four hours in one reported case.”
Through PITA, telecom operators in the region can now engage the services of a company called Syniverse Technologies Inc. to be their Near Real Time Data Exchange (NRTDE) service provider.
As such, Syniverse helps with the early detection of fraudulent activities done using the Pacific operators’ roaming services.