Eastwind's Solution Helps Beeline Tajikistan Filter SMS Traffic
4 july 2017

SMS broadcasts are dangerous not only because of their intrusiveness: they are capable of causing more serious damage. Subscribers often risk losing their money when answering suspicious messages. And what if that is not a one-time occurrence? Customers may grow disappointed and change operators. Thus, if you fail to deal with spammers you might quickly lose the loyalty of your subscriber base, which could entail actual financial losses for your business. Operators have to be doubly vigilant since unscrupulous messaging can be used by companies as well as individual subscribers.
Beeline Tajikistan has noticed that a large part of messaging traffic to its subscribers comes via transaction or info notifications generated by external services (A2P). Such broadcasts usually cost much cheaper than the traditional SMS ads, and some companies try to save money by resorting to the substitution trick. The operator loses revenues, while the subscribers receive torrents of 'gray' offers.
Beeline Tajikistan development department defined the task: to organize control of all the A2P traffic, with the ability to block it if need be. We already had a similar solution included in our complex product Eastwind SMS Firewall, which allowed us to implement the project in short time and allowed the operator to get access to the extended functionality.
The full version of the platform includes:
- SMS Antispam to analyze the senders of broadcasts and texts and allow blocking of suspicious messages. This means monitoring of A2P services, detection of fraudulent messages by key phrases and words. E.g., a broadcast with the text ‘Mom, I just had an accident! Put some money on…’ can be automatically blocked by the operator.
- SMS Antifraud to analyze and detect SMS traffic fraud. For example, frauds may imitate HLR numbers to send expensive roaming messages. In this case your customers would receive bills for services they had not used. And the operator would not know whom to actually bill – even after the complaint from the customer.
- SS7 Filter to detect and block illegal internal requests for subscriber data – e.g., information about financial transactions or geolocation of users.
The three modules against the three types of threats ensure comprehensive protection of the operator and its subscribers by taking total care of the internal and external SMS traffic. Conveniently, the functionality can be extended gradually, starting with the most urgent tasks and then taking on additional ones. Given the customer’s basic objective, we have implemented the Antispam and Antifraud services in the Beeline Tajikistan’s network.
After the system was introduced in the operator's network, the Tajik subscribers of Beeline started to receive only the trusted broadcasts, and the amount of spam and fraud has been dramatically reduced.
“The product has lived up to our expectations: we now can control all the А2Р traffic and block the gray traffic that tries to circumvent us. In this way we don’t lose the revenues,” says Valijon Mavlanov, product development manager from Beeline Tajikistan. “We will be ready to discuss the product roadmap after we have used the 100 percent of the current functionality. We are only studying the system’s capabilities now. The product training that Eastwind conducted for us will be remembered: It was minus 35 in Ekaterinburg, and that was a great challenge – our bodies were not designed to endure such freezing cold.”
More News
Beeline Tajikistan has noticed that a large part of messaging traffic to its subscribers comes via transaction or info notifications generated by external services (A2P). Such broadcasts usually cost much cheaper than the traditional SMS ads, and some companies try to save money by resorting to the substitution trick. The operator loses revenues, while the subscribers receive torrents of 'gray' offers.
Beeline Tajikistan development department defined the task: to organize control of all the A2P traffic, with the ability to block it if need be. We already had a similar solution included in our complex product Eastwind SMS Firewall, which allowed us to implement the project in short time and allowed the operator to get access to the extended functionality.
The full version of the platform includes:
- SMS Antispam to analyze the senders of broadcasts and texts and allow blocking of suspicious messages. This means monitoring of A2P services, detection of fraudulent messages by key phrases and words. E.g., a broadcast with the text ‘Mom, I just had an accident! Put some money on…’ can be automatically blocked by the operator.
- SMS Antifraud to analyze and detect SMS traffic fraud. For example, frauds may imitate HLR numbers to send expensive roaming messages. In this case your customers would receive bills for services they had not used. And the operator would not know whom to actually bill – even after the complaint from the customer.
- SS7 Filter to detect and block illegal internal requests for subscriber data – e.g., information about financial transactions or geolocation of users.
The three modules against the three types of threats ensure comprehensive protection of the operator and its subscribers by taking total care of the internal and external SMS traffic. Conveniently, the functionality can be extended gradually, starting with the most urgent tasks and then taking on additional ones. Given the customer’s basic objective, we have implemented the Antispam and Antifraud services in the Beeline Tajikistan’s network.
After the system was introduced in the operator's network, the Tajik subscribers of Beeline started to receive only the trusted broadcasts, and the amount of spam and fraud has been dramatically reduced.
“The product has lived up to our expectations: we now can control all the А2Р traffic and block the gray traffic that tries to circumvent us. In this way we don’t lose the revenues,” says Valijon Mavlanov, product development manager from Beeline Tajikistan. “We will be ready to discuss the product roadmap after we have used the 100 percent of the current functionality. We are only studying the system’s capabilities now. The product training that Eastwind conducted for us will be remembered: It was minus 35 in Ekaterinburg, and that was a great challenge – our bodies were not designed to endure such freezing cold.”