Call center fraud increased by 113 percent last year, says voice authentication solutions provider Pindrop. The number comes from the latest edition of Pindrop Labs’ annual Call Center Fraud Report, an analysis of data collected through the company’s Phoneprinting platform, which the company says processed half a billion calls last year.
According to Pindrop, the fraud rate in 2015 was one in 2,000 calls, while last year it reached one in 937 calls. Breaking down the data, Pindrop says that banks saw a relatively low rate of increase in fraud, with 2016 having seen a 61 percent increase over 2015; meanwhile, life insurance companies saw a substantial leap of 151 percent.
As for how the fraud is enacted, the year saw a seven percent increase in the use of VoIP lines and a 25 percent increase in mobile-based fraud, with services like Google Voice and Skype allowing fraudsters to hide their true locations and identities. And more fraud is coming from outside of the US, with the percentage of foreign-based fraud attacks rising from a little over 50 percent in 2015 to 83 percent last year.
It all points to the need for more sophisticated security in call centers, with solutions like Pindrop’s tracking various metadata – caller location, the device being used, etc. – to make fraud threat assessments, and biometric solutions like that of Nuance Communications using voice recognition to verify known bank customers. Fraud may be on the rise, but new technologies are emerging to fight it.
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May 1, 2017 – by Alex Perala
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