Solutions / Route Integrity & Fraud

Mobile Money Monitoring

Revenue assurance and fraud detection for mobile money services. Transaction integrity, agent fraud, settlement reconciliation across M-Pesa, Orange Money, MTN MoMo, Airtel Money and the long tail.

The market

Mobile money is now a trillion-dollar channel.

GSMA tracks mobile money transactions in the trillions of dollars annually, concentrated in MEA, LATAM and South Asia. The economics work because the unbanked need financial services. The fraud works because the same unbanked are vulnerable to agent fraud, account takeover and KYC bypass.

Transaction integrity

Transaction integrity

Per-transaction verification. Amount, balance, fee calculation, settlement leg. Discrepancies flagged within the transaction window.

Agent fraud

Agent fraud

Collusion patterns, fictitious deposits, float manipulation, KYC bypass at onboarding. The biggest single fraud category in mobile money.

Settlement reconciliation

Settlement reconciliation

Per-agent, per-transaction reconciliation against the ledger. Disputes resolved on data, not on the agent’s word.

Fraud patterns

The schemes that actually cost money.

Mobile money fraud is not a single threat. It is a family of schemes, each with its own signature. We monitor for the family.

01

Agent fraud

Fictitious cash-in (agent credits a customer without taking cash), underreported cash-out (agent hands over cash but does not record the transaction), float manipulation between e-money and physical cash.

02

Account takeover

SIM swap to defeat SMS OTP. Stolen KYC documents to open accounts in someone else’s name. Account-to-account transfers that drain the victim’s balance.

03

Money laundering placement

Mobile money is attractive for placement because transactions are small, frequent and routed through many agents. Patterning catches the layering.

04

Settlement leakage

Per-transaction settlement gaps. Aggregate to material over a month. Reconciliation against ledger closes the gap.

Why AZN

Because mobile money runs over the same signalling we already operate.

Mobile money transactions ride SS7 and SMS, the same signalling stack we monitor for voice and SMS fraud. The detection layer is shared. The cost of monitoring mobile money on top of what we already do is small; the cost of not monitoring it is large.

Field note

GSMA reports over a billion mobile money accounts globally and transaction values exceeding a trillion dollars annually. Where the money flows, the fraud follows. Mobile money fraud budgets are growing because the channel is growing.

We sit on the signalling that the transactions ride.

What we monitor end-to-end

  • Transaction integrity: amount, balance, fee, settlement leg
  • Agent behavioural baselines per corridor
  • SIM swap events before OTP authentication
  • Account-to-account transfer patterns
  • Ledger reconciliation per agent, per day
  • AML pattern flags for placement and layering
Next

Operating a mobile money service and need a fraud layer?

Tell us the platform, the markets and the agent count. We will scope the monitoring and the reconciliation model.