🇺🇸United States

Network and trunk capacity consumed by artificial pumped traffic

3 verified sources

Definition

Traffic pumping and IRSF campaigns generate huge spikes of short calls to specific high‑cost destinations, occupying trunks, SBCs, and interconnect capacity that could otherwise carry profitable customer traffic. During intense fraud bursts, this can degrade service or cause call setup failures for legitimate users.

Key Findings

  • Financial Impact: Vendors report that fraud systems must monitor five‑minute samples for suspicious spikes because pumped traffic can rapidly consume available capacity; for operators with constrained international gateways, lost legitimate traffic during attacks represents foregone revenue that can easily exceed tens of thousands of dollars per major incident.
  • Frequency: Weekly
  • Root Cause: Fraudsters exploit open capacity and low‑cost routes by generating automated call bursts, while carriers without real‑time anomaly controls continue to route these calls normally; capacity planning models often omit fraud‑driven load, causing unexpected congestion during attacks.

Why This Matters

This pain point represents a significant opportunity for B2B solutions targeting Telecommunications Carriers.

Affected Stakeholders

Network planning and engineering, Switching and routing operations, Wholesale capacity planners, Customer experience and service reliability teams

Deep Analysis (Premium)

Financial Impact

$10,000+ in foregone revenue per major incident from lost legitimate traffic • $15,000+ per burst in lost customer minutes • $20,000+ per incident from blocked profitable international traffic

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Current Workarounds

Excel-based dashboards for capacity monitoring and WhatsApp groups for urgent alerts • Manual CABS reconciliation in Excel during fraud spikes • Manual Excel logs of 5-min samples and shared drives for team alerts

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Methodology & Sources

Data collected via OSINT from regulatory filings, industry audits, and verified case studies.

Evidence Sources:

Related Business Risks

Artificial traffic pumping and IRSF driving uncollectible wholesale and retail charges

Global telecom fraud losses (dominated by IRSF, Wangiri and related artificial traffic schemes) are consistently estimated around $28–40 billion per year, with IRSF alone historically accounting for several billion annually; individual operators report single incidents in the $100,000–$1,000,000+ range when traffic pumping runs unchecked for a weekend.

Escalating fraud management and dispute handling costs from inefficient detection

Industry research and vendors note that manual fraud operations and reactive investigations can consume several percent of a carrier’s fraud‑related OPEX, with large operators running 24/7 fraud teams and paying six‑ to seven‑figure annual fees for outsourced monitoring and tools; these costs scale with fraud attempts even when no revenue is recovered.

False answer and call quality scams generating refunds and SLA penalties

In affected routes, a material share of minutes (TransNexus cites high answer seizure ratios with very short calls as key indicators) can be falsely billed, forcing operators to credit customers or absorb losses on disputed wholesale invoices; for major carriers, this can scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars per route per year.

Delayed fraud recognition leading to late billing disputes and slow recoveries

While exact figures vary, industry reports highlight that delayed fraud detection in roaming and international traffic can add weeks to collections cycles for large disputed invoices, commonly in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single event, effectively extending time‑to‑cash for a portion of high‑margin traffic.

Regulatory exposure from inadequate fraud controls and inaccurate billing

Regulators in many jurisdictions have forced operators to reimburse customers for fraudulent or artificially inflated charges and in some cases levied fines for mis‑billing and failure to protect consumers; depending on the market, these can range from hundreds of thousands to multi‑million‑dollar exposures over repeated incidents.

Systemic telecom fraud (IRSF, Wangiri, SIM box) exploiting slow or weak detection

Industry bodies and vendors consistently cite global telecom fraud losses in the tens of billions of dollars annually, with IRSF, Wangiri, PBX hacking, and related artificial traffic representing a substantial share; single carriers can lose hundreds of thousands to millions per year if controls are weak, even after partial recoveries.

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