Fraud Prevention in the Contact Center

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.

In the first post in this series about the rise of the modern fraudster, we explored how cybercriminals – the twenty-first century’s version of bank robbers – are continually looking for new opportunities to part consumers from their cash and credit.

As financial institutions layer on more security to prevent cyberattacks and online fraud, the criminals have begun looking for new ways to earn their dubious livings. In this post, we’ll explore the ways fraudsters are using call centers and self-service customer support technology to score.

Frank Abagnale spoke at this year’s EBT Next Generation Conference about Identity theft, and had two sound pieces of advice for everyone.  The first is to follow the money. The second is to think outside the box.

Who is Frank Abagnale and why should we listen to him?

Frank Abagnale was the subject of the movie Catch Me If You Can, and famously scammed the banks with check cashing schemes while also impersonating an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. He has since become an authority on identity theft working for the FBI for 40 years, and writing several books on identity theft, including Stealing Your Life in 2007. 

When it comes to financial crime, most of us still have a quaint, old-fashioned mental image of the traditional bank robber. A group of shady-looking men would arrive in a getaway car and empty the safe. It was easy to see them coming, and when they left, we knew they were gone. They even looked like we expected: dark clothes, masks and weapons drawn.  If only fraudsters fit that classic stereotype.

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.