How technology can cut the rise of voice fraud

Coverage of fraud tends to focus on the online methods such as phishing, credential stuffing, opening fake accounts and so on.

But there's another side to the problem in the form of voice fraud via 'vishing' and the use of social engineering techniques, this is made simpler by the ease with which numbers can be spoofed so a call can appear to come from a legitimate number such as your bank.

According to a report from customer authentication specialist Pindrop this works both ways too with one out of every 770 calls incoming calls to call centers being fraudulent. Interestingly though the pandemic and increased call response times has led to a reduction in this type of fraud attempt by 25 percent. But that doesn't mean the problem has gone away.

"Fraud generally is a big problem, worth tens of billions globally. Data breaches are something we read about at least on a weekly basis compared to five to 10 years ago when they were very rare occurrence," Dr Nikolay Gaubitch, director of research at Pindrop says. "Voice is not the sort of place where there's an attack on the delivery itself, it's really a tool for fraudsters. And it's quickly become one of the favorite tools, where they use the telephony to do their work. So, very often, fraudsters can call companies to try to take over personal accounts, to take over people's identities, to augment data and verify data, the possibilities are endless."

According to the report 57 percent of companies say they are seeing more attempted fraud against their contact centers as a result of the pandemic, while 66 percent report seeing new types of fraud. However, only 36 percent believe they have a good understanding of how fraud against the contact center works.

Retailing is the most targeted industry with one in 142 fraudulent calls, followed by banking with one in 961. Pandemic-related schemes such as the PPP Loan Program and unemployment benefits have also seen an uptick in fraud attempts.

Gaubitch adds, "Phone technology as a whole can be very helpful with with fraud. Because in call centers today you have sometimes 1,000 agents talking to customers, and it's virtually impossible for any human being to actually recognize, whether you're talking to a genuine person, a genuine customer, or if it's somebody trying to defraud you."

The report also shows fraudsters are using interactive voice response (IVR) systems to gather intelligence and conduct social engineering attacks. In so called 'Man in the Call' attacks fraudsters use machines to process stolen dark web intelligence, or even randomly generated data, to attack an IVR to confirm correct account numbers and learn about an account.

Technology can also help to combat the problem though, "Machine learning and AI technology gives you the ability to screen calls very quickly and within a few seconds actually raise an alarm if there is something suspicious about a call, quickly confirm that the person they claim to be is the right person. It's not something that replaces humans but helps them to do their job better," says Gaubitch. "For example background noise is one thing that can really help you understand where a caller is. But there are also many other artifacts that you cannot hear, that are coming from the way voice is compressed before it's transmitted through the phone networks and the way it's transmitted through the networks, that can actually give you a lot of information."

Pindrop's voice intelligence security report is available from the company's site.

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