Call for candidates for the projects regarding an antifraud platform for fraudulent telephone calls on fixed and mobile networks and voice signalling on mobile networks in the context of the National recovery and resilience plan - Axis 2 Digital transformation

As all countries, Belgium is increasingly faced with fraud and abuse through telecommunications networks.

Fraudsters for instance purposefully use the end-users’ inherent trust in the caller ID (CLI) (e.g. by spoofing valid numbers as CLI) to commit fraud during telephone calls (e.g. to extract banking data, credit card data or other similar personal information).

End-users as well are increasingly receiving nuisance calls such as robocalls, silent calls that are particularly annoying.

According to the 2021 “Fraud Loss Survey” report (https://cfca.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/CFCA-Fraud-Loss-Survey-2021-2.pdf) of the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA), International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF), a type of fraud existing in the artificial inflation of traffic terminating to certain parts of national numbering series in different countries, constitutes the number one form of telecom fraud worldwide.

Worldwide loss caused by IRSF in 2021 is estimated at 6.7 billion dollar.

A number of vulnerabilities have also been detected in the no 7/Diameter/5G signalling protocols: if insufficient protection measures are put in place, serious risks regarding a negative impact on privacy arise (such as location tracking of the end-user in the context of espionage).

At the request of the Minister of Telecommunications you can find here the specifications for the third and the fourth part of the project together with a call to interested operators to submit a file with a view to investing in an anti-fraud platform aiming to reduce these phenomena.

The deadline for submitting applications (see specifications) is 26 May 2023 at the latest.