Fraudsters better than customers at answering security questions

We're all used to those irritating questions you have to answer when you contact a company: the make of your first car, the town where you were born, the dog's maiden name, etc. But it seems that criminals may actually be better at answering them than we are.

Fraudsters are able to pass knowledge based authentication (KBA) questions 92 percent of the time, based on a national contact center case study, while genuine customers only pass KBA's 46 percent of the time.

A new study, from voice technology company Pindrop, finds data dealers are growing more sophisticated, offering more service, more details, and more organized information.

Data dealers are selling access to accounts based on balance amounts or other factors like platform credentials. Information that can be easily used by bad actors to compile a fraud target dossier to enable them to bypass all types of knowledge based authentication.

Meanwhile, call center agents from both retail and insurance companies, are failing to verify customers’ identities as much as 12 percent of the time. 2021 has also seen several cybercrime services started up with the aim of incepting one-time passwords

"With 2021 seeing a 68 percent increase in data breaches, bad actors are compromising data easier and more efficiently," says Vijay Balasubramanian, CEO and co-founder of Pindrop. "Now is a good time to change the locks and advance the way customers can open more worlds safely and privately with just their voice."

On a positive note, 65 percent of enterprise company board members expect customer engagement and loyalty to improve as a result of increased investment in IT, technology, and digital business capabilities. The report shows that customers prefer more advanced authentication methods than they are currently receiving over the phone.

The full report is available from the Pindrop site.

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