Telephonic communications – With usage measurement – Call charge metering or monitoring
Reexamination Certificate
1998-07-31
2001-09-25
Tsang, Fan (Department: 2645)
Telephonic communications
With usage measurement
Call charge metering or monitoring
C379S088160, C379S088230, C379S091020
Reexamination Certificate
active
06295344
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates, generally, to a telephone system that helps users of travel cards control their costs and limit their losses. More particularly, it relates to a system whereby the travel card customer can control use of the travel cards without relying upon the issuer of the cards.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A real time telephone system having utility in reducing losses due to travel card fraud was first introduced in 1990 by the present inventor; that system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,068,891.
The essence of that breakthrough invention was its capture of data at a point between the DCO switching equipment of the telephone system and the internal buffer that temporarily stores data downloaded from said DCO switching equipment. However, in that earlier system, the data is downloaded and captured at the conclusion of a call.
Thus, the patented system interfaced with the DCO switch, but could not interact with it during a call. Thus, if a travel card user expended all of his or her travel card credit during a call, no means was provided where the call could be terminated while it was still in progress. An overseas call of several hours duration, for example, could result in losses to the card issuer or the customer of the issuer (depending upon which part absorbed the loss).
The earlier patent was a pioneering patent because it disclosed the first real time means for limiting travel card fraud by enabling the card customer to deactivate a PIN associated with any travel card anytime during the month when the credit balance on that card was exhausted. Before the disclosure of the patent, travel card customers were required to wait until the end of a monthly billing cycle before abuses could be detected; thus, an entire month of abuses could occur before such abuses were detected and stopped.
It should be understood, then, that the patented system was a system that interfaced with the DCO switch of an existing phone system, thereby eliminating the need to wait for the end of a billing cycle, but it was not a system that interacted with the DCO switch during a call.
What is needed, then, is an interactive system so that calls may be terminated, if desired, at the front end of or during progress of the call. A system accessible by those who use cellular telephones is also needed. Moreover, there is a need for a system equipped with a voice response means to increase the versatility of the system. A need also exists for creative techniques for checking the validity of PINs.
However, the prior art, when considered as a whole at the time the present invention was made, neither taught nor suggest that these features would be desirable nor points the way to a system capable of providing them.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention enables the customers of the issuers of travel cards to gain interactive access to the issuer's DCO switching equipment.
It therefore provides card validation and account status checking prior to the termination of a call.
It further provides means for determining whether or not an apparently valid PIN really is valid.
Additional features of the present invention include a voice response means and means for accessing the system through cellular telephones.
More particularly, personal computers (PCs) under the control of the card issuer and in communication with PCs of the customers of the issuer are an integral part of the DCO switching equipment so that the DCO switching equipment may be “programmed”by the customers to perform a variety of functions having utility to the customers of the travel card issuer.
Accordingly, a customer desiring to deactivate one or all of its PINs may deactivate them from its home office by simple communication with the DCO switching equipment through the issuer's PC. For example, most travel card customers will want to deactivate the PIN of an employee who is leaving the company for any reason, as mentioned earlier. If the customer wants to reroute the calls of certain sales people in the field, that also can be accomplished easily, and so on.
As a further example, if a home office wanted to leave a message with a salesperson in the field, the home office could instruct the issuer's PC of the DCO switching equipment and program it to activate an electronic voice response device that would provide the message to the salesperson when the salesperson made a call to any number with the travel card. Alternatively, the customer could program the issuer's PC of the switching equipment to re-route the salesperson's next call to the home office so that regardless of the number called by the person in the field, that call would be directed to the home office and the desired message could be delivered.
Moreover, the home office, i.e., the customer of the travel card issuer, could program the issuer's PC of the switching equipment to monitor any number of parameters and to validate or invalidate attempted calls as desired. For example, a company having no salespersons with authority to travel into certain territories could program the issuer's PC of the switching equipment to invalidate any call originating from a state or other geographical region within which the presence of no salesperson was authorized. This important feature would prevent the use of purloined travel card and PINs in those states that were screened out by the issuer's PC of the DCO switching equipment. Similarly, a west coast company could program the issuer's PC of the DCO switching equipment to reject all calls attempted before 8:00 A.M., PST and an east coast firm could cause all calls made after 5:00 P.M. EST to be rejected. This would curtail the use of purloined accounts by east coast and west coast thieves, respectively, before and after the respective times, and would provide the Company with information concerning the capture of its confidential numbers by hackers. Numerous other techniques could be employed to both foil and catch telephone thieves.
To provide these and other features, a communications port in the form of a digital communications path is added to DCO switching equipment under the control of the travel card issuer, and that port is connected to a personal computer and a backup, redundant personal computer owned by the issuer, as in the earlier patented system. Through the use of its own PC and standard programming techniques, each customer of the travel card user can program the issuer's PC to cause the DCO switching equipment to activate voice response messages, re-route calls, change the parameters for validating attempted calls, and the like.
As mentioned earlier, the novel system includes a voice response device that is connected to a personal computer controlled by the issuer and to the DCO switching equipment as well. If a home office of a travel card user decides that certain salespersons, for example, are not authorized to leave voice response messages, the personal computer in the home office is used to program the issuer's PC to instruct the DCO switching equipment to refuse access to the voice response device if the call thereto originates from an unauthorized travel card holder. In practice, the DCO switching equipment notifies the issuer's computer that a caller is attempting to activate the voice response device. In response to this notification, the issuer's personal computer searches its memory to determine whether or not the particular caller holds an authorization to activate said voice response device. The issuer's personal computer then sends a signal to the DCO switching equipment to either validate or invalidate the call so that the voice response device may or may not be activated, respectively; importantly, the issuer's computer merely follows instructions as programmed into it by the customer's computer.
The DCC switching equipment notifies the issuer's personal computer of each and every incoming call. That PC checks its memory to validate the account number an
Foster Roland G.
Lorusso & Loud
Tsang Fan
LandOfFree
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