3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature
November 20, 2015
Call Centers Upping Fight Against Fraud
By TMCnet Staff
The burden of protecting customers’ account data has been somewhat intensified for card issuers recently, who need to beef up their security measures in anticipation of the growing levels of fraud.
Overall fraudulent activity seems to be on the rise, including suspected fraud attempts, as the base of perpetrators evolves from loose associations of basement hackers to more organized criminal operations. Call centers are an especially major target due to the relative ease of gaining unauthorized access to information through techniques such as extensive outside reconnaissance and social engineering.
The primary duty of a call center agent is to keep the customer happy, which in some cases may lead to some bending of the rules. Clearly, this leaves the opportunity open for shrewd manipulation by someone with ulterior motives, especially if they’ve done some outside research into the consumer they’re pretending to be or have gained personally identifiable information through a different, usually less secure source. A card issuer can only do so much without being affected by the lax security of other companies that store consumer data, and in turn the admittedly justifiable decision of unsuspecting consumers placing their trust in those companies.
But call centers have a range of other tools at their disposal to help with card-not-present fraud detection, including biometric identity authentication and a new innovation called phone printing, which compares the caller’s location with the given caller ID information to efficiently identify someone using an easily-disguised caller ID. In addition to improving authentication, card issuers can also invest more in cutting-edge encryption and tokenization solutions as well as online security protocols to help ensure data is not wrongfully accessed through the Internet by hacking attempts.
Now that card issuers have done most of what they can to ensure the security of cards themselves, it’s important to focus on the more trafficked and less secure online and phone channels. A range of solutions are already on the market to help companies deal with this growing trend, and with widespread implementation we can surely move closer to a future without fraud.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson