I just finished reading an article on “VoIP Fraud: The Industry’s Best-Kept Secret, and while it was interesting, not one of the frauds detailed in the story was VOIP-specific. For example…

The biggest issue is fraud, perpetrated by scammers who take advantage of lax international communications standards and regulations, and make thousands of minutes of calls through carriers — many of them fly-by-night operators — in places such as Afghanistan and Lichtenstein, who charge exhorbitant rates for call termination, leaving the originating service provider with sky high bills and no one to charge for them.

Toll Fraud is nothing new. Credit card fraud is nothing new. Reverse Arbitrage is nothing new. Wire Fraud is nothing new. The only thing that’s new are the victims. While it’s unfortunate that VOIP carriers are getting abused by phone scammers, these are all well-known problems in the telecom industry. The large carriers mitigate some of the risk through their internal anti-fraud efforts and industry group sharing. The rest they’re generally large enough to absorb as a cost of doing business.

VoIP carriers don’t (yet) have these options. Many of them were caught off-guard by toll fraud and the ILEC sure isn’t going to do anything to help them survive. I wish them well. Hopefully they’ll be better-prepared when the scammers finally do something VoIP-specific.