As the internet becomes filled with online attackers coming up with new methods each year, call centers are always in danger of fraud.
In fact, 90% of financial service contact centers see fraud attacks increasing yearly. This threat includes all industries, financial services, governmental institutions, airlines, and many more.
Moreover, many experts agree that contact centers are commonly attacked since they are seen as an easy target.
Your call center could be at risk right now and you might not know it. Therefore, in this article, we will learn more about the main types of fraud and discuss the solutions you can use for dealing with them.
The Most Common Types of Call Center Fraud
There are many types of cyber-attacks and the sad part is that each year, there are new attacks you might have never heard of. However, to simplify a few things, we’ll discuss more about common contact center attacks that occur frequently.
ID Theft
ID theft is probably the most common type of contact center attack. Fraudsters will complete this action by stealing sensitive information from public WiFi connections, or those that have weak security, stealing mobile devices through data breaches, and even information that is shared by the user. Intentionally shared information is usually done by clicking on links where they are manipulated by someone.
Online attackers will always reach out to contact centers and try to manipulate them with false information. Don’t be fooled though, these hackers are smart and they make you think their message is legitimate, putting you into a trap.
Preventing ID theft is done through a series of verification processes, employee training, and regular monitoring of contact center activities. The most important part is to stay vigilant of fraudulent behaviors.
More importantly, you need to train your staff to be prepared for it. Many agents struggle to detect ID theft because of online attackers getting a hold of accurate customer information.
Account Hijacks
After ID theft, hijacking someone’s account is another common method of how fraudsters take control of a user’s information to achieve monetary gains. Many times, they will try to manipulate contact centers by changing a user’s login data, PIN number, and other important contact details.
In order to get ready for these types of attacks, online attackers will read more about their victim’s personal information, such as where they live, when they were born, and more.
Credit Card Fraud
This happens when a fraudster gains access to someone’s credit card. When the card is stolen, they’ll start purchasing items that don’t belong to them and even subscribe to different pages. The worst part is that nobody knows that someone else is using the card.
How to Prevent Call Center Fraud
Even though there might even be more attacks that we may not know of, or that may be created in the future, we will show you a few tips you can use for preventing them.
Use Fraud Detection Software
Fraud detection software is becoming increasingly important for call centers to detect fraud. Each software may differ from each other slightly, but in general, they all have the same goal and that is to prevent online attackers from getting into your database.
The software implements real-time monitoring, applying predictive analytical techniques such as Machine Learning (ML) that creates a fraud risk score for suspicious activities. The higher the score, the more the user will be flagged. This is great for recognizing ID theft since agents can struggle to detect them when they get a hold of accurate customer information.
Fraud detection software can either be in an open-source or proprietary version. Key features in fraud detection software include:
- Customer Relationship Management Integration
- Password and Access Management
- Multi-user Capabilities
- Application Programming Interfaces (API)
- Two-factor Authentications
- Customer Database Management
- Calendar Management
- Data Visualization
- Data Import and Export
Moreover, fraud data analytics methodologies can either be statistical data analysis or artificial intelligence (AI). Moreover, there are four important parts to a fraud prevention and detection process:
- Capturing and unifying all data types from all channels and incorporating them into the analytical process.
- Always monitoring transactions and employing behavioral analytics for facilitating real-time decision-making.
- Incorporating an analytical culture into your business through data visualization.
- Employing layered security techniques.
In short, it’s important to have this software, so it can keep an eye out for you when you least expect it.
Train Your Employees
Let’s face it, you can’t be the only one in the company to know how to prevent fraud attacks. Therefore, it’s essential to teach your team how to do so as well. You can set up training courses for your team to help them be aware of certain behaviors and stay vigilant on upcoming attacks.
Training has to include identifying fraudulent calls, what actions to take when your team sees suspicious activities, and making sure they know which questions they can answer and can’t.
Use Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) Methods
As new technologies emerge over time, it’s becoming crucial to overcome manipulations made on the web. Multi-factor authentications (MFAs) are great since they require a user to provide more than one method of proof to access certain information.
MFAs can include using one-time passwords (OTPs), questions only you can answer, voice recognition, and many other unique features that can’t be stolen by anyone else. Overall, MFA is rising in popularity and predictions claim that by 2025, its market share will reach around $20 billion.
Use Biometric Technology
While many organizations like the idea of MFA, there’s nothing more original than implementing biometric technology, with an emphasis on voice recognition. You can’t steal someone’s voice – even though the technology for that does exist, it requires you to trick voice-recognition systems and have a substantial amount of voice data from the intended person. Maybe fraudsters in the future might come up with a way to do so more easily, who knows!
Companies have to implement customer identification techniques and fraud prevention measures across all of their communication channels including mobile apps, contact centers, web self-service and more.
For example, if a caller fails the voice verification test, the contact center won’t refuse to serve them, since there might be many angry customers. Instead of this, the contact center can carry out biometric and non-biometric checks to fulfill the caller’s request and reduce the risk of fraud.
Verify Caller Identity
Asking questions might seem contrary regarding a call center’s objective, but following a few strategic inquiries can help you fight call center fraud. The whole key is to understand what type of questions you need to ask.
A fraudster won’t be able to give answers to all of the following questions:
- What is your account number?
- What is your reference number?
- Please, give me the contract number you have on file.
- Write down your telephone number.
- What is your name?
- List your date of birth.
- Do you have any other contact telephone numbers?
- What is your partial address?
- What is your postcode?
The caller’s identity can be identified much easier when you ask all of these questions. In most cases, the fraudster won’t be able to answer all of these questions. They will rarely have all of this information available to them, so this is a great way to verify caller identity.
If you find it difficult to do so, you can get the help of fraud detection teams. If you are using fraud detection software, you can automatically include these questions for your team members to know. Some popular tools you can consider using are:
- SEON
- CybeReady
- ArkOwl
- Fcase
- FraudHunt
- FraudLabs Pro
Additionally, some call center software has the option for using one-time passwords for an extra security layer when a clients are seeking to reset their account credentials.
Set Restrictions on Your Internal Team
Statistics show that 75% of employees have stolen from their employer at least once in their lifetime.
Unfortunately, this is why many organizations fail to recognize who committed fraud. Internal fraud is the worst since internal team members can act like it came from an external source. A solution to this is to implement role-specific permissions to limit employee access to need-to-know parts of your business.
Only employees who need to use sensitive information for organizational purposes should be granted access. Otherwise, there is no need for them to know about it.
Your Preparation Matters in the End
In the end, it’s important that you put all the steps we mentioned into practice. Having software that always monitors suspicious activities and prevents fraud is great to have. Moreover, training your staff members is important too, since you can’t be the only one to detect fraudulent activities.
MFA, voice recognition technologies, and setting restrictions on employees are all part of the process too. All practices play their own part in preventing fraud, and the best part is that when you include all of them, you are making your life much easier.
As online attackers continuously come up with new methods to attack your organization, you need to be more prepared than you have ever been.
Tony Ademi
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. For roughly four years, Tony has managed to write more than 500 SEO-optimized articles and most of them have ranked #1 on Google. When writing, Tony’s main focus is to carefully do research and make sure that his content is high-quality.
