WASPA Takes Aim at Mobile Fraudsters With Global Heavy Hitter

The Wireless Application Service Providers’ Association of South Africa (WASPA) has called in the big guns to help the local mobile industry win its battle against fraudsters.

Fraudulent attacks on local mobile network operators and systems of mobile service providers in South Africa and worldwide has become a major concern, not only for WASPA members but for all stakeholders in the industry. This includes the all-important SA mobile user.

“Specialist tactics are required to combat fast-moving, guerrilla-style hacking attempts,” explains WASPA General Manager, Ilonka Badenhorst.

“It is for this reason that WASPA has enlisted the services of a global mobile security expert. This followed the completion of a tender process that saw six firms submitting proposals to review WASPA’s mobile security best practice guidelines,” she says.

With a mission to ‘make mobile safe again’, France-headquartered Evina has a passion to help mobile content and application providers, mobile carriers, mobile advertisers, app developers and others recover the approximately USD 3 billion lost annually to fraud.

“Our experts have a long history of on-the-ground experience in beating mobile fraudsters. From fraudulent app installs to click cons, our Artificial Intelligence-based protection kit blocks fraudulent mobile transactions while continuously adding to our corporate anti-fraud IP (Intellectual Property),” says Evina Co-Founder and CEO, David Lotfi.

This real-world anti-fraud experience makes Evina the ideal partner to assist WASPA in ensuring that its best practice requirements remain current and applicable within the dynamic and ever-changing mobile landscape. The Evina review is in line with WASPA’s commitment to continuously fine-tune and tighten the Code according to the latest industry developments.

“WASPA’s world-leading Code of Conduct sets the standard for responsible self-regulation and this latest initiative with Evina takes our commitment to the SA mobile consumer to a whole new level,” concludes Ms Badenhorst.

WASPA was formed in 2004 as a self-regulatory body with a mandate to represent and regulate its voluntary members, which provide mobile-based Value Added Services (VAS), otherwise known as WASPs. As of end 2018, it had over 400 members. Please see https:// waspa.org.za/ and https://www.evina.fr/ for further information.