By Simon Woodhead
We’ve made some changes to the way our fraud controls reject calls. But don’t worry, nothing changes unless you want it to!
I was looking to see when we introduced the majority of our fraud control features and the best answer I can give is “well over 10 years ago”. Yet, they still remain unrivalled which is incredible. Maybe customers being hacked is profitable for competitors? Maybe they couldn’t handle processing hundreds of thousands of events per second 10+ years ago (and still can’t today)? Maybe company Ferraris, or defending take-over bids from Germans are more important than infrastructure or customer welfare?! Alas, I digress.
We’ve always returned a SIP 603 code on any fraud limits being tripped. Those include: price limits, trunk channel limits, trunk rate limits, trunk rate limits on international calls, trunk rate limits on calls to hotspots, trunk channel limits on international calls, trunk channel limits on calls to hotspots, account channel limits, account rate limits, account rate limits on international calls, account rate limits on calls to hotspot, account channel limits on international calls, account channel limits on calls to hotspots and dynamic channel limits. There’s a few of them!
Also included are instances where we reject calls because a customer has tripped their limit for arbitrage traffic. We’ll always allow calls at a loss for most customers to ensure they connect, we just won’t allow an unlimited number of them for obvious reasons. For repeat offenders, we won’t allow any. Rejected calls similarly get a 603 and the background to this is that this control was quite tightly tied into fraud mitigation in that, more often than not, the circumstances requiring this went hand in hand with a customer having a fraud issue.
A 603 was picked as the appropriate code because it stood the best chance of your equipment not route-advancing. We don’t want to go to all the expense and trouble of protecting you, only for you to unintentionally failover and subsidise Ferraris.
However, fast forward to 2023, particularly with our unique stance on Origin Surcharges – if you’ve been in a cave we are the only carrier as far as we know that does not profiteer from these disgusting things – and, as a result, customers sending us traffic and tripping limits is far more common than it used to be. A 603 doesn’t seem appropriate so we’re changing it.
Existing accounts will remain unchanged, but going forward new accounts will return a 503 in the event of any limit we set (so the account level limits listed above, and the anti-arbitrage limits). This gives the maximum chance of calls advancing to another route who will accrue their sports cars, from origin surcharge profit, which we refuse to! We will continue to return 603 for anything you set, such as the trunk level limits.
Now, when I say “existing accounts will remain unchanged” that feels like the most appropriate thing to do but if you would like your account to be changed to return a 503 (or indeed another cause code) for rejections we make, just pop us a ticket in and we’ll get it done.
I hope this helps!
