Pindrop Report Highlights Rising Threat of Deepfakes and Voice Fraud

Pindrop is warning about the growing threat of voice fraud in its latest Voice Intelligence Report, which found that voice fraud attacks occurred at a rate of 90 per minute in 2018. The rate of voice fraud climbed more than 350 percent between 2014 and 2018, and had the biggest impact on insurance companies, retailers, and financial institutions.

According to Pindrop, the risk facing those businesses – and insurance companies in particular – will still be high even if the number of fraud attempts goes down, largely because fraudsters are using more advanced techniques to go after bigger and more lucrative financial targets.

“Cybersecurity crimes are increasing every day as fraudsters and the technologies they use become more sophisticated,” said Pindrop Co-Founder and CEO Vijay Balasubramanian. “As we examine the biggest threats, we urge enterprises to assess their fraud and authentication strategies to ensure they are prepared to safeguard their customers’ assets.”

Pindrop went on to explain that the rapidly expanding conversational economy will give fraudsters more channels and more opportunities to attack. The conversational economy describes the growing range of devices with voice capabilities, and includes the voice assistants used in smartphones, cars, and speakers, as well as the voice authentication technology that is becoming more popular in call centers.

Deepfakes are expected to be especially problematic in that regard. Pindrop indicated that deepfake fraud will become more common as the Generative Adversarial Networks used to make them gain the ability to mimic convincing human voices and vocal tics in real time.

Major corporations like Verizon and the UK’s Shop Direct have already deployed Pindrop’s voice authentication tech to safeguard their call center operations. Pindrop has since secured $90 million in funding and announced that it plans to expand its offerings to cover smart cars and other IoT devices.

–

November 14, 2019 – by Eric Weiss