Globe Teleservices announced on Monday it has entered into an exclusive strategic alliance with Tigo Tanzania to deploy its intelligent firewall solution for A2P SMS.
Tigo Tanzania will use Globe Teleservices’ firewall solutions to protect its international application-to-person (A2P) traffic delivery against revenue loss caused by SMS fraud scams.
Globe Teleservices said its firewall solution safeguards messaging traffic from grey routing and spam, ensuring secure and reliable communication. The company also said the A2P SMS firewall has also been customised to meet Tigo Tanzania’s specific business requirements.
As A2P SMS continues to grow in popularity among enterprises globally, so has activity by fraudsters to exploit it. Common fraud trends targeting A2P SMS include artificially inflated traffic (AIT), SMS phishing (a.k.a. smishing), SIM farming, grey routes that bypass telco charging systems to deliver messages to end users, and of course spam.
According to Juniper Research, one reason AIT is a growing threat is because the rising cost of A2P SMS makes it more lucrative. AIT fraud works by using bots to generate one-time PIN requests, which are sent by SMS. The fraudster (usually an MNO or aggregator) then prevents the message from being delivered, forcing the enterprise to pay twice for delivery of the same message.
Juniper predicts that while number of A2P SMS messages sent per annum globally will continue to grow, that growth will slow in part to larger enterprises abandoning A2P SMS because of rising costs due to AIT fraud.
On the other hand, Juniper expects A2P SMS to see stronger growth in markets in Africa and the Middle East where brands are at the early stages of digital transformation and haven’t yet adopted mobile messaging to communicate with their customers.
