AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic)

Also known as: Artificially Inflated Traffic, SMS AIT

AIT is traffic generated with the primary purpose of producing termination revenue rather than delivering a genuine communication. In A2P SMS it is often called SMS pumping: bots trigger OTP flows on public sign-up or password-reset forms to force the sender to pay for messages routed to high-cost ranges. AIT is closely related to IRSF on the voice side and is countered with rate limiting, destination hot-lists and CAPTCHA on trigger surfaces.

Categories: FraudOperations and BusinessInternet and Routing

AIT in context

Telecom fraud costs operators an estimated $40+ billion per year. Common vectors include International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF), Wangiri callback scams, SIM box bypass, PBX hacking, subscription fraud and A2P grey routing. Effective defense combines real-time signaling analytics with CDR-side machine learning.

OSS/BSS platforms (provisioning, charging, mediation, order management) hold the highest-value subscriber and revenue data on the operator side. They are heavily targeted for fraud and insider abuse and are increasingly in scope for regulatory obligations like NIS2 and the UK Telecoms Security Act.

To place AIT in the wider telecom-security picture, review OTT Bypass, Flash Call Fraud, SIM Box, Revenue Share Fraud, Traffic Pumping and Wangiri 2.0.

Related terms

Related topic hubs

  • SMS Firewall SMS spam, phishing, A2P bypass and MAP-layer SMS filtering.
  • Telecom Fraud IRSF, Wangiri, SIM box, PBX hacking and CLI spoofing.
  • SS7 Security SS7/MAP/CAP/SCCP attacks and defenses across 2G/3G interconnect.
  • Diameter Attacks S6a IDR/PUR/CLR abuse, subscriber tracking, LTE signaling attacks.

More from the TelcoSec Glossary

Browse the full TelcoSec Glossary, the Ultimate Guide to Mobile Network Security, or the P1 Arsenal of telecom-security tools.