Phone fraud might seem like an old enemy in the telecoms space, but it remains a common concern for many businesses. This criminal enterprise represents a multi-billion pound opportunity for criminals. According to some studies, the financial damages of phone fraud are even more significant than credit card fraud, with a global cost to consumers and businesses of around £25.5 billion per year.
Fraud is one of the most significant risks that businesses face each day. The UK appears to be one of the countries under the greatest degree of threat - as the world's third most-targeted location. Although companies around the world are beginning to build their strategies for cybersecurity and online fraud prevention, phone fraud is regularly overlooked. Despite this, Pindrop labs suggest that call centres are seeing a rise in fraudulent calls.
The good news?
There is a way to reduce call fraud and protect your company. With analytics - specifically speech analytics, it's possible to detect potential fraudsters using even the tiniest of details.
Using Speech Analytics to Tackle Fraud
To beat call centre fraud, you need first to understand it.
Fraudsters in the modern age are using a variety of strategies to trick call centre agents. Many companies don't know that they've been a victim of fraud until it's already too late. Some fraudsters build rapport with the company they hope to steal from over time. Others simply swipe certain details about a customer and contact a company pretending to be their client.
Although it may never be possible to prevent 100% of telephone crime, there are steps that companies can take to reduce their risk. For instance, simply training agents in how to detect instances of fraud is a good first step. However, the best option currently available on the market, combines innovative analytics software with language processing, to detect issues that a human being wouldn't notice alone.
Speech analytics software captures text and voice conversations and transcribes them into searchable databases of information. This tool is becoming increasingly popular in the management of fraud, as it allows companies to establish rules that may identify suspicious or fraudulent behaviours. Some advanced speech systems can even detect when a caller is likely to be lying, to help companies mitigate their risk.
The Innovators in Fraud Analytics
Already, leading vendors in the communication market have begun to transform the way that we handle issues of fraud, by introducing exceptional strategies for speech analytics. For instance, Pindrop, one of the leaders in voice intelligence, offers a "phoneprinting" technology to help companies tackling fraud. The phoneprinting system takes a small amount of information from a call and analyses it to get a fingerprint of the audio. Using machine learning, the system can then determine whether the call came from a fraudster or a legitimate customer.
Pindrop's PhonePrinting strategy gives companies greater insight into their communications so that they can properly fight back against the issue of fraud. Service providers can even monitor threats in real-time, and set-up predictive analytics to protect themselves against attacks in the future. Because the system has machine-learning built-in, it's consistently growing more intelligent, meaning that it can provide increasingly accurate alerts on potentially fraudulent calls.
