Fraud Prevention in the Contact Center

Fraudsters with their eyes on the prize of customers’ bank, credit card and other financial or monetary accounts are increasingly taking advantage of poor or inconsistent protection in contact center systems because it’s easier than penetrating tight security on networks, apps and mobile devices. By using the interactive voice response (IVR) system for data gathering, or by sweet-talking an agent into a lapse, the criminal may snag details needed to access and drain the account. That’s why contact centers need a holistic, multi-layered approach for authentication, fraud prevention, detection and remediation. Benjamin Franklin would agree – here's why...

We hear about fraud occurring in government programs all the time, right? So why was this month’s SNAP (food stamp) bust in Florida – aptly named Operation Stampede/Cash Hungry – so noteworthy?

With SNAP we generally see trafficking as the major fraud channel, where beneficiaries sell their own benefits to small-time crooked retailers and buyers for about 50 cents on the dollar. Generally, this is so they can support their families in other ways with the money, but sometimes it’s for nefarious reasons. Even so, SNAP fraud is touted at about 1.3% of all SNAP costs (there's some debate on that number), which is very minor when you consider the billions $ going into the program. Commercial enterprises face the same or more.

Fraud occurs every day and impacts the enterprise and the consumer. In fact, it’s so prevalent I can’t remember a time – certainly not in this decade – when fraud wasn’t a top-of-mind issue in our lives. But what happens when fraud impacts business on your watch, and you were certain you took every conceivable precaution to ensure it wouldn’t and couldn’t happen? There’s a missing link in fraud prevention, and it just may surprise you.

Since its inception in the 1950s, the contact center has been the cornerstone of company-customer relationships. It’s the keeper of personal customer information, the ambassador of the sales organization and a source of knowledge for marketing efforts. While many customers have a love-hate relationship with contact centers, it’s still the place they turn to when they have a problem. How the contact center responds will dictate whether that customer sticks around or becomes an ex-customer. Essentially, the customer's relationship with the contact center strongly influences the trust in the customer relationship.

"Someone is using my name and Social Security number to open credit card accounts. All the accounts are in collections. I had no idea this was happening until I applied for a mortgage. Because these 'bad' accounts showed up on my credit report, I didn't get the mortgage."

Fraud presents a major threat to both the consumer and your business. Some tips to keep in mind:

1. Fraud is more dangerous than ever before. There is at least one mega-breach per quarter, with greater than 10 million customer records compromised, and the FBI estimates that more than 1000 retailers are currently under assault with the same malware used in the Target breach.

Fraudsters often try to connect with contact centers, like reaching out to a company’s IVR system to see if they can gain additional information about an account such as a PIN that can be used to complete an account takeover or to steal larger sums.

Our Adaptive Fraud Prevention Solution is able to use 60 different variables to identify the early signs of fraud behavior before fraud actually happens including call velocity and duration, interaction and exit point data, caller history, and acceleration of activity from a single phone over a short period of time. 

‘Tis the season for fraud, which means that criminals are increasing their efforts to take advantage of cardholders, retailers, and consumers through scams such as account take-overs, probing activity, and phone spoofing. Retailers are one and a half times more vulnerable to consumer chargeback between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Chargebacks act as a form of consumer protection to offer remedy to individuals who have experienced identity theft, merchant errors or unethical business practices. Retailers can minimize the risk of chargebacks by implementing the correct fraud prevention methods before chargebacks hit.