The steady rise of call center fraud

Call centers. They’re often the first and preferred point of contact for customers wanting to do business with your credit union. While it’s important to provide an unparalleled customer service experience, agents also need to ensure that the customer calling in truly is the legitimate customer.

With the growing number of data breaches occurring across multiple industries, fraudsters are now armed with citizens’ “perfect” identities (which contain enough qualifying information such as name, date of birth, SSN and address to impersonate a legitimate customer). Readied with this information, fraudsters may navigate through a call center’s filtering system to reach a customer service representative, who they can then trick into granting account access, for example.

Call center fraud schemes are on the rise. In IDology’s 2015 Fraud Report, suspected call center fraud attempts rose from 2 percent in 2014 to 13 percent in 2015 – a six-fold increase. Credit unions and other financial services organizations can expect to be hit hardest in today’s post-EMV deadline because of the increase in card-not-present (CNP) fraud.

According to the report, when it comes to the types of call center fraud believed to be most prevalent, recon and social engineering dominate, followed by voice deception and ANI deception are tactics that criminals utilize to defraud the call center environment.

It’s also important to know that fraudsters are equal-opportunity criminals. They don’t discriminate on who they target to create a new account in someone else’s name or even take over an existing account. This is why your credit union needs to be able to quickly and accurately identify callers.

By employing a robust identity verification and fraud prevention platform with a call center component, your call center representatives will be able to complete age and identity verification while also driving revenue and improving the overall customer experience. With a system tailored to the unique needs of the call center environment, representatives are able to instantly process verifications without losing productivity or lengthening call time.

The ability to complete the authentication process in real-time with multi-layered verification methods deters fraud while also making it easier for legitimate customers to access or open accounts.