Contact centers, while they seldom handle cash or expensive merchandise, are often the scenes of crimes. While they may not handle the kinds of things thieves traditionally like to steal, they have far more valuable merchandise: private customer information, including social security numbers, passwords and banking details.
As a result, crimes committed with the help of a contact center – with individuals posing as legitimate customers for fraudulent transactions – are on the rise, and the problem is growing faster than anti-fraud solutions can keep up with it. The targets, most frequently, are financial services institutions. Aite Group senior analyst Shirley Inscoe recently told eSecurity Planet that financial institutions are experiencing a significant increase in contact center fraud being perpetrated by organized criminal gangs.
In other words, these frauds aren’t generally done by one-off, small-time crooks, but large, well organized groups that know their way around authentication technologies. While most financial services companies have moved to triple-factor identification for financial transactions, these are often simply not enough for sophisticated fraudsters.
According to Inscoe, one of the most valuable technologies a contact center can implement is voice biometrics, which is largely impossible to fool. It can also help companies and law enforcement keep track of fraud patterns.
"Many companies will create a hot file of bad voice prints from prior calls that turned out to be fraudsters," said Inscoe. "They'll use that hot file to compare the voices on incoming calls and quickly identify those who have caused fraud in past situations, so those calls can then be quickly passed to someone in the organization who is better trained to deal with suspicious activity.”
Analytics can play a large part in combating fraud as well: these solutions can look for unusual patterns in customer requests – a secondary bank account that the customer has never used before, changes in transaction behavior or previously unused IP addresses. Some analytics solutions can spot anomalies in originating phone numbers that can spot “spoofed” calls, particularly those on IP calling services originating from nations that should automatically generate a warning signal: Nigeria, for example, which is a hotbed of Internet fraud.
It’s also helpful to train call center agents to recognize the “red flags” of fraud: suspicious requests to divert funds to addresses or P.O. boxes not ordinary linked with a customer’s profile, for example. Since most call center agents never deal with fraudsters, it’s impossible to rely on their personal experience to help catch thieves.
Financial services looking to reduce the astronomical costs of telephone and Internet fraud would be well served to begin their efforts at ground zero of the customer experience: the contact center.