Call Center Management Featured Article
With the COVID Pandemic, Call Center Fraud Is on the Rise
While call centers are generally a force for good – providing support to people who need it, when they need it – their very nature sometimes leaves them open for exploitation by less-than-honest players. Fraudsters often engage in “phishing” of call centers to collect personal information about customers. They’re often a tool used by fraudulent fund-raisers. In recent months, however, many call center-based scams have opportunistically focused on the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Fraudsters are using new and updated versions of old scams to leverage the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 community response, as well as opportunistically scam financial relief, benefits and stimulus money out of individuals and companies.
“Significant increases in phone, text and email phishing are enabling fraudsters to take advantage of the current financial uncertainty and public health concerns,” according to a recent blog post by Pindrop. “Access to personal information leads to validating the data with targeted institution’s own customer services tools, mainly through contact center agents directly, or through the automated interactive voice response systems.”
How Are These Scams Playing Out?
Call center scammers are skilled at portraying legitimate customers and getting call center agents – many of whom are overworked in recent months during the pandemic – to lapse on security protocols. This might include asking a company to lift fraud monitoring procedures from account because the customer will be traveling out of the country, or prompting agents to supply the fraudster with some missing information required for an account takeover, such as an address or account number.
In some cases, fraudsters are posing as call center agents raising money for charity causes, or promising services that never appear after the victim’s credit card or bank account is debited.
Earlier in the spring, credit agency Transunion found that increases in call center traffic as a result of COVID-19 have been seen across several, if not most, major industries. According to a Transunion blog post, the Aite Group estimates that banks have seen spikes in call center volume in the 40 percent range, and telecommunications providers have shared that their call center traffic has spiked upwards of 25 percent.
Preventing Call Center Fraud
Now is the time to emphasize to agents that they must be following company protocol for security, and not providing any confidential account information to callers without proper authentication. Security professionals recommend implementing three-factor authentication for all accounts, employing device-based verification, and training agents to recognize the red-flags that fraudsters should throw up (a change in shipping address, for example, or repeated requests for personal information without authentication. It’s also critical, experts say, to ensure that these security procedures apply across all media, since scammers may try alternative communication methods if they can’t get any traction with a phone call.
Edited by Maurice Nagle