Abstract

A system to prevent subscription fraud in fixed telecommunications with high impact on long-distance carriers is proposed. The system consists of a classification module and a prediction module. The classification module classifies subscribers according to their previous historical behavior into four different categories: subscription fraudulent, otherwise fraudulent, insolvent and normal. The prediction module allows us to identify potential fraudulent customers at the time of subscription. The classification module was implemented using fuzzy rules. It was applied to a database containing information of over 10,000 real subscribers of a major telecom company in Chile. In this database, a subscription fraud prevalence of 2.2% was found. The prediction module was implemented as a multilayer perceptron neural network. It was able to identify 56.2% of the true fraudsters, screening only 3.5% of all the subscribers in the test set. This study shows the feasibility of significantly preventing subscription fraud in telecommunications by analyzing the application information and the customer antecedents at the time of application. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.