In the world of international telephony, unallocated destinations should not be in use because they have not even been assigned by an operator.

Fraudsters love unallocated destinations. Some see them as their own ‘expensive to dial’ space within a National Numbering plan which they can take advantage and ownership of. Biaas has seen many preventable IRSF frauds over the years to unallocated destinations. Some of these destinations are very well established. Others are more recent and very sophisticated, using unallocated destinations within higher priced European Premium destinations. Even today, over 20% of IRSF Test numbers that we collect are to unallocated destinations.

Fraudsters can only continue to enjoy unallocated destinations because many carriers do not have the information available to effectively block and monitor them. In order to help operators, we also include unallocated destinations in our FNRM™ database.

Sensible internal controls that we have seen to prevent IRSF fraud include both blocking and monitoring events to unallocated international destinations – this is made easier and more effective with improved reference data. There should be no unallocated traffic. Upon implementation, monitoring controls will often highlight erroneous event records previously unseen, so operators may even achieve an immediate increase in revenue.