Telecommunications – Radiotelephone system – Security or fraud prevention
Patent
1997-03-13
1999-10-12
Bost, Dwayne D.
Telecommunications
Radiotelephone system
Security or fraud prevention
706 12, H04M 166, H04M 168, H04M 316
Patent
active
059666501
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention relates to an apparatus and method for the detection of fraudulent use of mobile telephones.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Mobile telephone fraud is the unauthorised use of a telecommunications network accomplished by deception via the wireless medium. This deception may take a number of forms which are generally classified under the broad headings of subscription fraud, theft and cloning.
Subscription fraud arises from the use of a false name and address when purchasing a mobile telephone and results in a direct loss to the service provider when a bill for usage of the telephone is unpaid.
Theft of a mobile telephone can lead to antenna misuse in the period between loss of the telephone and the reporting of that loss to the service provider. In some circumstances a mobile telephone may simply be borrowed by a fraudster who then steals air time. This particular type of theft may remain undetected for some time as it will become apparent only when the customer subsequently receives a bill.
The most serious fraud in a mobile system is that of mobile telephone cloning where the fraudster gains access to the network by emulating or copying the identification code of a genuine mobile telephone. This results in multiple occurrence of the telephone unit. The users of these clones may or may not be aware of this misuse. This fraud generally remains undetected until a customer becomes aware of unexpected items on a bill, by which time the total financial loss can be substantial.
Approaches to the problem of detecting mobile telephone fraud are described in specification No WO-A1-95/01707 and in specification No WO-A1-94/11959 both of which refer to techniques for building up an historical profile of subscriber activity so as to detect changes in that activity which may be indicative of fraudulent use.
Once illegal access has been gained to the mobile network, calls can be made at no cost to a fraudster, as either a genuine account holder is billed or the network provider is forced to write off the cost. It will be appreciated that once an identification code has been broken and a telephone has been cloned, this information can be disseminated to other fraudsters resulting in a high potential financial loss. The relatively slow response of conventional fraud detection procedures has become insufficient to address the rapid incidence of abuse of the system. It will also be appreciated that new forms of fraud are constantly coming to light and that these may not be immediately detectable by conventional techniques.
An object of the invention is to minimise or to overcome this disadvantage.
It is a further object of the invention to provide an improved apparatus and method for the detection of fraudulent use of a mobile telephone system.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to one aspect of the invention there is provided an apparatus for the detection of fraudulent use of a telephone subscriber's instrument in a mobile telephone system, the apparatus including means for determining a long term calling profile for a said subscriber, means for determining a short term calling profile for the subscriber, means for determining the difference between the long term and short term profiles, said difference comprising a subscriber profile pattern, and a trained neural net arrangement for determining from the subscriber profile pattern a probability value for the existence of fraud in that pattern, wherein the neural net arrangement comprises a self organising map adapted to effect pattern recognition of said subscriber profile patterns, and a multilayer perceptron adapted to determine said probability value for each recognised pattern.
According to another aspect of the invention there is provided apparatus for the detection of fraudulent use of a telephone subscriber's instrument in a mobile telephone system, the apparatus including an input preprocessor, a neural network engine coupled to the preprocessor, and an output postprocessor coupled to the neural network engine, wherein the preprocessor is adapted
REFERENCES:
patent: 5819226 (1998-10-01), Gopinathan et al.
Barson Paul Colin
Hobson Phillip William
McAskie Gill
Bost Dwayne D.
Northern Telecom Limited
Persino Raymond B.
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