Once upon a time there was the GPO, who were required by law to run all the Nation's communications - be they written, telegraph or voice. Fraud was easy to perpetrate in those days because of the somewhat crude methods used to control the switched network. Nowadays BT, who inherited the role the GPO held as the provider of Universal Service for telephony and telex, are but one of over 200 licensed network operators: and all of these are to some extent at risk of becoming victims of fraud.
But have skills in fraud detection now been spread so thinly that they are no longer effective? This seminar will look at some recently perpetrated frauds, and the obstacles that both liberalisation and developments in technology create for the `traditional' approach to fraud detection and subsequent prosecution.
Competitive pressures are driving new players to adopt practices that open huge loopholes for misuse: but is this always fraud? A fresh banana-skin will be used to show that in some cases it may not be ... and that Network Operators may have only themselves to blame for a significant part of the fraud currently on the telephone networks!