The word ‘credit referrals’ or ‘you’ve been referred to a credit Analyst sir!’ does not go down well with potential customers, particularly when the customer is waiting to get his hands on the next iPhone. Almost all businesses, with a few exceptions, use a risk assessment scoring methodology to score an application prior to parting […]
Orpheus Subscription Fraud Management – FAQ
What is Orpheus? Orpheus is a Fraud Management System (FMS) commonly used for detecting Subscription Fraud. How does Orpheus differ from other FMS tools? Traditional fraud management systems adopt unusual usage to generate fraud alerts, for example high spending or usage outside of normal behaviour to indicate fraudulent activity. While this may provide immediate and […]
Anti-Fraud Program – Who owns it anyway?
If the chairman of the board asks, ‘can someone walk me through the anti-fraud and compliance program of our company’, it is not rare for the board to ponder who exactly owns the anti-fraud program in their organisation – legal, compliance, HR, IT? In the article ‘Who owns fraud?’ by Dan Torpey and Mike Sherrod […]
Telecoms Fraud – Changing face of Telecom crime.
It was once the domain of the petty thieves working alone, and often targeting one organisation. The organisations too did not feel the pang and often wrote the losses off as bad debts. On a bad day for the thieves, a few days of community service and a slap on the wrist was all it […]
Orpheus Cloud – A few steps to get started.
Following on from our earlier blog, here’s a bit more about how we used the Amazon cloud server to host our fraud management system in the cloud. We did try a year ago to host our application on a different hosted virtual machine, however, apart from costing more for a low spec machine, we encountered […]
Orpheus Cloud – Our fraud management tool in the cloud.
It’s been two weeks since we hosted our fraud management solution in the cloud. It is purely for demo purposes, and the feedback so far has been positive. I thought I should share with you some of the thought processes that went into hosting the solution in the first place. We announced a free trial […]
PBX Fraud – Fast catching up as the mother of all frauds.
According to the 2011 Global Fraud Loss Survey conducted by Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA), the top two fraud types in the Telecommunication industry are Subscription Fraud and Compromised PBX System Fraud (circa $10 billion in combined dollar loss). While PBX fraud has been around for many years it has only taken centre stage as […]
Big Data – Is this the end of the road for traditional Data warehouse?
Data Warehousing is close to my heart as I’ve spent a significant part of my career building, modelling or architecting large and complex data warehouses and analytics systems. If I am not building one, I am certainly using one. Finding the data sources, cleaning and loading them into structured star schemas and deriving intelligence has […]
Expenses Fraud – Train your eyes to spot the red flags.
Expenses Fraud may not be as big as other forms of occupational fraud but nonetheless it’s a soft target and considerable damage could be done, at short periods, if not nipped in the bud. According to a report by ACFE, a typical organisation loses about 5% of its revenues to occupational fraud and 15% of […]
Statistical models – Should we trust them for detecting fraud?
Statistical models are ubiquitous, from predicting the next wind direction in the Atlantic to whether you are about to buy a Beatles tune from Amazon. Statistical models have also been used widely to predict fraud among mobile subscribers. The object is to eliminate fraud as soon as it occurs. However, more often than not, legitimate […]
