Tis the Season to Be Wary

This holiday shopping season promises to be the biggest one yet for people to shop over mobile phones from home, their cars and even from within retail stores. That means that the so-called “attack surface” for fraudsters bent on making false purchases or gaining unauthorized access to personal information is seasonally skewed toward inbound contact centers. With something like $750 billion in spending for retail goods at play, not to mention related plundering of bank accounts or phone services, the temptation for bad actors to commit phone-based crime speaks for itself.

Each shopper in the U.S. plans to spend about $1,000 for gifts this year. Pretty much the same as last year. How they go about deciding what to buy and where to buy it spans online search, consultation with friends and “influencers”, visits to stores or showrooms, chats with sales and support personnel and, in many cases, a call into a company’s contact center. Fraudsters could avail themselves of all these channels, but there is empirical evidence, that during times of high activity over multiple channels, they gravitate toward contact centers as highly vulnerable touchpoints in a multi-channel journey.

Contact Centers Don’t Have to be the Epicenter of Fraud

Contact center agents are trained to be helpful and to speed the processes involved in a customer completing a purchase. During the holiday season, they may, with all good intentions, speed through the knowledge-based authentication (KBA) or even try to help a person who claims to be a relative, caregiver or other so-called “third-party” bend the rules a little to make a purchase or track down an undelivered package.

For their part, fraudsters have figured out how to perpetrate crimes over the course of time and through a multiplicity of channels. They make a call on one day to change a mailing address or derive a small bit of personal information such as the final four digits in a credit card number. They can then use that information on another company’s site to support authentication and authorization of a money transfer, change a password to one of their liking, or arrange for delivery of what amounts to stolen goods.

A robust voice biometrics-based solution can put an end to such schemes in short order. The strongest defense at the point attack is caller authentication comparing the voice of an incoming caller to the stored voiceprint associated with the caller. Ideally, this can be performed passively in the background using as little as 10 seconds of natural speech to authenticate a registered user with very high confidence.

Seasonal fraudsters are often repeat offenders or part of cybergangs who make repeated attempts to gain entry. For that reason, assembling a “Black List” of voiceprints for known offenders is proving to be a valuable tool. Within seconds a fraud detection platform can display an alert that serves as a red-light to cut a call short or transfer it to an agent trained in anti-fraud procedures.

Note to Self: Add Fraud Prevention to the Shopping Cart

There is no reason to wait for the fraudsters to act. Some of them have probably started preparation for their holiday attacks by calling contact centers of various organizations to learn about their customer authentication process. There’s a good chance that there are recorded calls of these fraudsters. Organizations can be proactive and expose those unknown fraudsters before they act. Using fraud prevention solutions that incorporate voice biometrics, AI and machine learning, like NICE’s RTA, makes the fraud team’s work a lot easier, freeing them to enjoy their holidays.

Based on Opus Research’s ongoing monitoring of voice biometrics deployments, retailers have lagged behind Financial Services, Telecommunications, E-Government and even Healthcare in terms of hardening their contact centers with voice biometrics. Meanwhile they are evaluating fingerprint scanning at the point-of-sale and face recognition at retail stores in order to prevent theft of physical goods – which exceeded $45 billion in the U.S. in 2017. But it is definitely time for retailers to look for ways to make biometrics part of their LP (loss prevention) strategies for digital services as well.