Trend: Revenue leakage from data now major concern

Just when operators thought they had nipped fraud in the bud, a new report says that applications and content services are increasingly bringing new forms of revenue leakage to operators--as much as $5.6 billion in 2005. Juniper research says revenue assurance programs are inadequate to deal with newer forms of revenue leakage such as those coming from data services, third-party services, IP and premium-rate services. One of the sources of revenue leakage is sophisticated fraud methods associated with new services such as premium-rate SMS.

First we saw a rampant case of fraud associated with analog roaming in the '90s. With the advent of digital services and more players in the market, subscription fraud ran rampant. Now operators have the new headache of dealing with new premium-rate content and other third-party services, which seems to be a very complicated situation in light of the vast number of players involved.

For more about this kind of revenue leakage:
- see this press release from Juniper