Roaming, “one of the great liberations of the mobile age”, is falling apart*
A new study from Juniper Research found losses from global roaming fraud are expected to exceed $8 billion by 2028. The acceleration is largely due to the increase in bilateral roaming agreements for data-intensive use cases over 5G networks.
The study also predicts that fraudulent data traffic will account for 80% of operators’ worldwide roaming-based losses by 2024.
As 2G and 3G networks are being phased out, operators are moving to 5G and VoLTE roaming services that leverage virtualisation to gain lower operational costs. However, the virtualised nature of 5G networks is creating more opportunities for fraudsters to attack 5G networks in new ways.
Bi-lateral forks
As bilateral 5G roaming agreements proliferate, Juniper expects operators to deploy more sophisticated fraud mitigation tools to detect fraudulent traffic from the far greater volumes of roaming connections as new 5G networks evolve.
One example is that fraudsters create new subscriptions using false information so that they do not pay for the roaming costs incurred, which continues the subscription is cancelled.
The author of the report, Rosie O’Connor stated, “Operators must implement 5G-specific signalling detection and firewalls that offer real-time monitoring and ID-registry analysis. Only then, can [they] more efficiently identify subscription fraud across 100 million 5G roaming connections predicted globally in 2024.”
Fraud mitigation services can alert operators to potentially fraudulent activity across 5G networks in real‑time so they can identify and block suspicious roaming subscribers.
* The quotation is taken from Dario Betti’s blog, published in Mobile Europe in December 2022. Betti is CEO of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum