Over-The-Top Bypass
Merve Şahin, Aurélien Francillon · 2016
In this paper, we study the Over-The-Top (OTT) bypass fraud, a recent form of interconnect telecom fraud. In OTT bypass, a normal phone call is diverted over IP to a voice chat application on a smartphone, instead of being terminated over the normal telecom infrastructure. This rerouting (or hijack) is performed by an international transit operator in coordination with the OTT service provider, but without explicit authorization from the caller, callee and their operators. By doing so, they collect a large share of the call charge and induce a significant loss of revenue to the bypassed operators. Moreover, this practice degrades the quality of service without providing any benefits for the users.