• Hosted Call Center
• Articles

Caller Impersonation on the Rise

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

A friend visiting Bali recently discovered that his flights had been canceled and his checking account frozen because of an overly aggressive anti-fraud algorithm. When he tried calling the bank to let them know he really was in Indonesia, he couldn’t fix the problem because his cell reception kept cutting out before he could answer all the automated identity questions.

Suffice it to say, the friend was screwed. But even customers not in Indonesia regularly struggle with call security measures that are onerous and sometimes hard to answer easily.

The trouble is that caller identity questions are needed more than ever as identity thieves increasingly target the contact center.

Photo courtesy Shutterstock
Phishing and other attacks by cybercriminals sometimes yield enough information about an individual to trick contact center agents into giving attackers complete control over a victim's account.

"If the fraudster gets one additional piece of data about that customer, they are happy and they can do this repetitively and get all the information they need to ask for a password to reset or set up online banking for first time," Shirley Inscoe, a fraud expert and senior analyst at Aite Group, told news site CRN in a recent interview. "The service representative's focus is not on antifraud measures; it's on taking care of the customer's needs and handling the call as quickly and efficiently as they can."

There needs to be more awareness by IT security teams about the fraud that contact centers actually encounter, Inscoe found when she interviewed executives at 19 of the top 40 U.S. financial institutions.

"Sometimes the bad guys know the answers to the [knowledge-based authentication] questions better than the real customers do, and oftentimes the customer gets irritated when they don't know the answer to a challenge question," Inscoe said, highlighting that current anti-fraud systems are not up to snuff.

One possible solution to the problem is voice biometrics. Criminals are taking notice of the increased volume at call centers due to ongoing denial-of-service attacks, and they are leveraging the fact that shortcuts are taken when contact center operators are inundated with calls. But with voice biometrics, this practice of gaining a little info at a time could be halted.

Some bank call centers are boosting knowledge-based authentication with voice printing and other voice biometrics technologies designed to verify callers by the tone and tenor of their voices. Behavioral analytics also sometimes is now being used to score callers against the potential for fraud—although this can help as much as hurt in some cases, as the story of my friend in Bali illustrates.

Early adopters of voice biometrics are using the technology at a less granular level, in many cases, going less high-tech than identifying a user by voice and just making sure that a male speaker is not impersonating a female customer.

The problem has been identified, but the solution is still being worked out by the industry.