Fraud in Telecommunications Industry: Geographical Distribution

CFCA (Communications Fraud Control Association) has been one of the most respected anti-fraud organization in Telecom since 1985.

Every two years they survey telecom operators and carrier around the world to gain insight on the situation of fraud in different regions and publish results which have been widely accepted and well received by the whole industry.

Recently, CFCA published the results of their "Global Fraud Loss Survey" for the year 2013, which had the following high level results:

CFCA estimate annual fraud losses are $46.3 billion for 2013, up 15% from 2011
Fraud losses make upto 2.09% percent of global telecom revenues
The top five methods for committing fraud were identified as:

The top five types of fraud reported by operators were identified as:

The survey results made me a little curious in terms of visualizing how the numbers are distributed against every region. Hence, I did a small exercise of breaking up survey results to get a feel of fraud presence in each region. Findings of this exercise is what this post is based upon.

Few points to note before you start:

The major fraud risks I reported against each region is based upon my experience in the industry and not CFCA.
My apologies for any inconsistencies in the maps. They are not intentional. The maps were obtained through a regular Google image search.
I am not sure but there seems to be a little inconsistency related to fraud loss numbers posted by CFCA against the "South Pacific" & "Central & South America" as they look absolutely same. Anyways, I have used the statistics posted by CFCA.