Three out of four consumers have changed their behavior due to the threat of cyber crime. Fraudsters will fear-monger by any means necessary: pop-up alerts, loud threats, and deceitful warnings. They will do anything to trick an alarmed user into falling for the con. Whether you are a business, government agency, enterprise, or financial service, you are all at risk.
While there are a lot of eyes and ears on cyber security, whose watching out for the contact centers? Recently, an owner of a local café in New London, Connecticut was a victim of phone fraud. The owner got a call from a man purportedly from his utility company threatening to shut off the restaurant's power if he didn't pay a past-due bill within 45 minutes.
Alarmed and panicked the owner fell for the scam costing him more than $1,800. This type of scheme is all too common and is the new landscape of Phone Fraud as a Service (PFaaS). Modern criminals are approaching phone fraud with a business framework, outsourcing technical work and reconnaissance, creating easy to manage tools and cloud services, and even creating fraudulent call centers for hire.
The key is stopping these fraudsters in the process of their malicious activity and before data is compromised, which can have irreversible consequences for consumers, businesses, governments and more. That’s the magic behind the Adaptive Fraud Prevention solution. Adaptive Fraud Prevention allows you to see when specific callers access multiple accounts, indicating potential fraud. Adaptive Fraud Prevention is the only multi-layered, automated tool on the market that offers the ability to track and stop fraudulent activity over time and across accounts. The Red Flag detection technology within Adaptive Fraud Prevention uses 60 variables to automatically detect suspicious caller behavior in your IVR, and put the spotlight on at-risk accounts.
Through a proprietary analysis of millions of interactive voice response (IVR), we found that one in 360 (1/360) calls are fraudulent, with each individual fraudster accessing multiple accounts, usually with spoofed telephone numbers. An alarming 25% of fraudulent calls lead to the successful compromise of an account. The analysis also revealed which outlets fraudsters use to conduct malicious activity:
- Disposable cellular phones – 50%
- Anonymous voice over IP (VoIP) connections – 47%
- Landlines with spoofed number – 3%
This extensive data enables us to see patterns from behaviors and practices, and anomalies that may not readily appear unusual at first glance. Additionally, these findings highlight the growing threat to contact centers, making it more imperative than ever for organizations to adopt a layered approach to detect phone fraud.
In the next post in this series, we will dive deeper in the findings from our proprietary analysis and discuss ways companies can prevent their organizations from getting compromised through real examples of outsmarting the fraudsters.
