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About Fraud Management in Siebel Communications

Fraud occurs when someone uses a service to defraud a consumer, business, or service provider by obtaining free services or services that the individual concerned is not entitled to. Some of the more common methods and indicators of fraud follow:

• Cloning of wireless handsets
• Stolen handsets
• Unauthorized third-party charging of calls
• Stolen or fraudulently obtained calling cards and PINs
• Bills returned in the mail with a claim that the customer is not at that address.

Fraud can be identified in various ways. For example, a consumer might identify fraud on a bill, noting charges for services that were not requested or used. Alternatively, a service provider might identify irregular calling patterns that can indicate fraud.

Traditionally, companies have used legacy fraud management applications to identify and manage fraud. The fraud management process involves fraud alerts, warnings that a fraud might have been committed, which are generated by the fraud management application from an analysis of calling details. For example, an alert may be generated if the system detects calls originating from two different cities within a short time period. A common way to commit such a fraud is by cloning, illegally modifying a handset chip to send an identification signal for another, legal phone. This allows the owner of the illegal handset to make phone calls on the legal phone owner's account.

A fraud alert can also be generated by a breach of a fraud threshold. A fraud threshold is a value which, when exceeded, produces a fraud alert. For example, a customer may have a threshold limit of $250.00 per day for domestic calls.

The back-office application issues a fraud alert by placing the customer on a fraud list, a list of customer accounts that are suspected of or confirmed for fraud. The back-office application might generate multiple lists, classified by categories in descending order of the likelihood of fraud.

A back-office fraud management application usually has a front-office component, which is used to manage customer interactions related to fraud. Siebel Communications functions as the front-office application for managing fraud. Your company's back-office fraud management applications send fraud lists to Siebel Communications for follow-up. Customer service representatives (CSRs) go through the lists and contact the customers to check if they made the calls that are the cause of the fraud alerts.

Fraud alerts indicate the type of fraud that might have occurred. For example, Exceeds Threshold is a fraud alert type that indicates that a predefined limit has been exceeded. Another fraud alert type, Stolen Handset, indicates that a customer's wireless handset has been stolen.

To help you resolve cases of suspected or obvious fraud, Siebel Communications allows you to view fraud lists, fraud alerts, fraud-related background information about accounts, and the history of fraud-related activities for an account.