Artificially Inflated Traffic
Spot artificial traffic surges early. Contain cost exposure fast. Protect A2P and termination revenues.
Move from post-settlement discovery to near real-time detection of inflated traffic. Subex combines behavioral baselining, ML-driven anomaly detection, and route-level risk analytics to catch artificial volumes before they hit settlement.
Overview
Artificially Inflated Traffic (AIT) is a telecom fraud scheme in which perpetrators deliberately generate unnecessary or artificial traffic to create chargeable traffic. This traffic is typically directed toward high-cost destinations or revenue-share partners, allowing fraudsters to profit from termination fees or revenue-sharing arrangements.
Subex addresses AIT through proactive, AI-powered fraud detection that monitors network traffic in near real time, identifies abnormal traffic patterns early, and enables rapid containment to minimize fraud runtime and financial exposure
The Challenge
Sudden, artificial spikes in A2P and voice traffic significantly increase termination and interconnect costs.
Automated bots, scripts, and click-farms systematically trigger chargeable events at scale.
Revenue-share agreements and high-cost destinations create incentives that fraudsters exploit.
Post-event reconciliation and billing reviews detect losses only after financial damage has occurred.
Genuine enterprise campaigns and seasonal promotions can obscure fraudulent traffic patterns.
Benefits
Identify traffic anomalies in near real time before artificial volumes escalate into significant termination losses.
Shorten detection-to-action cycles to limit the financial impact of high-cost traffic bursts.
Flag suspicious partner-linked traffic spikes and enforce policy controls to prevent revenue-share exploitation.
Differentiate between genuine marketing campaigns and fraud-driven traffic inflation to avoid unnecessary service disruption.
Provide clear audit trails, traffic intelligence, and evidence for finance, fraud, and wholesale teams.
Key capabilities
Continuously monitor A2P, voice, and signaling events across routes, destinations, partners, and enterprise sources.
Use behavioral baselining and ML model-driven pattern recognition to detect unusual traffic surges, velocity shifts, and destination clustering associated with AIT.
Correlate traffic spikes with high-cost routes, premium destinations, and revenue-share agreements to identify potential abuse patterns.
Identify traffic signatures linked to scripted or automated triggering of calls and messages.
Enable configurable thresholds, alerts, route blocks, partner restrictions, and workflow escalations to contain fraud quickly.
Provide real-time visibility into traffic trends, cost exposure, blocked volumes, and estimated loss prevention.
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Signaling Risk Intelligence
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AI Agents in Telecom Fraud Management
Resource Center
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- E-book
AI-First Defense Against Telecom Fraud
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about how our Artificially Inflated Traffic solutions work.
How is Artificially Inflated Traffic (AIT) different from International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF)?
AIT and IRSF are closely related fraud types. AIT focuses on the artificial generation of chargeable telecom events such as calls, SMS, or OTP requests, while IRSF specifically involves routing traffic to international premium-rate numbers where fraudsters receive a share of the termination revenue. In many cases, AIT techniques are used to generate the traffic that enables IRSF.
What data sources are required to detect AIT effectively?
Effective AIT detection requires correlating multiple telecom data sources, including:
- Voice Call Detail Records (CDRs)
- A2P SMS traffic records
- Signaling data (SS7 / Diameter)
- Enterprise messaging platform logs
- Interconnect and wholesale routing data
- Billing and revenue-share partner information
Combining these datasets enables accurate detection of abnormal traffic patterns.
What operational actions can be taken once AIT is detected?
Once suspicious traffic is detected, operators can implement several containment measures:
- Blocking or throttling suspicious routes
- Restricting traffic from specific partners or enterprise sources
- Applying rate limits on OTP or messaging requests
- Temporarily suspending high-risk destinations
- Escalating cases to fraud investigation teams
These actions help reduce fraud runtime and financial losses.
How can operators distinguish between legitimate traffic spikes and AIT attacks?
Legitimate traffic spikes often occur during events such as marketing campaigns, product launches, or seasonal promotions. Advanced fraud detection solutions analyze traffic origin, velocity patterns, destination clustering, and campaign metadata to differentiate genuine enterprise activity from artificially generated traffic.