While fraud occurs in all industries, the fast paced environment of the telecommunications industry means companies must especially stay on their toes when it comes to protecting their companies, their personal information and each other.

When it comes to breaking down telecom expenses, it can be difficult to decipher whether all the right expenses are being charged accurately.

To ease this process, Spectrum offers TrueVue, the company’s award-winning Telecom Lifecycle Management application that provides one unified platform offering turnkey processing of paper and electronic invoices – helping to increase efficiency, lower expenses and, ultimately, eliminate the possibility of fraud.

Spectrum President, Trent McCracken, told TMC in an interview that fraud occurs daily in companies due to their lack of mobility policy, or, often times, the policy various companies have is not being enforced properly.

McCracken discussed two specific types of fraud affecting the telecom industry today: subscription and counterfeit.
With subscription fraud, an individual provides false information to a sales center, a service is then activated and the individual receives free service until the carrier disconnects the service in response to non-payment.

With counterfeit fraud, an individual is able to “clone” the ESN/MIN of a wireless device so all charges accrued by the fraudulent individual are billed to the original device owner.

With recent statistics estimating that wireless fraud costs the industry over $650 million a year, how can Spectrum’s TrueVue help lower this figure?

“The architecture of the TrueVue solution helps identify fraud proactively through many comprehensive methods,” said McCracken, “one such method is by storing all of the inventory information in one area and the invoice information in a separate area.”

With this method, each invoice is processed and compared within the two areas. “If the application cannot find an existing inventory item for the item on the invoice, the invoice process will automatically create an exception report,” said McCracken, which helps to eliminate discrepancies that would otherwise be potentially missed in house.

Spectrum’s TrueVue offers protection and privacy for its customers, in hopes of reducing those numbers. The company’s services protect its clients from excessive spending due to unmonitored activity within their telecom environment, while concurrently taking a proactive stance at preventing possible fraud occurrences.

“With TrueVue we can assist in detecting each occurrence of fraud through inventory management, assurance methods, and invoice audits,” said McCracken, “we also handle the invoice disputes with the carrier until they are resolved.”