Business Info - issue 149

businessinfomag.uk magazine 14 Voice fraud may not have the high profile of cybercrime, but according to Dr Nikolay Gaubitch, Director of Research at Pindrop, it is a very real problem and one that criminals are exploiting to support their online activities. “In the 10 years since Pindrop was started by CEO Dr. Vijay Balasubramaniyan, we've analysed over 2 billion phone calls and have detected around 1 million fraudulent calls, so somewhere between one in 700 and one in 1,000 calls received are fraudulent. In the retail sector, we have seen fraud rates as high as one in 100.” According to recent research conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Pindrop, the prevalence of fraudulent calls increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 59% of call centres in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) reporting a rise in attacks and 61% of respondents complaining about the impact on their bottom line. Gaubitch points out that despite high fraud rates, some call centre managers continue to underestimate the problem because the consequences are not always immediately apparent. “There are fraudsters who specialise Who’s calling? in very fine data. They get a list of data and all they do is call banks or retailers or insurance companies to confirm that the data is valid. Once data is confirmed, they may sell it on to somebody else. This is very difficult behaviour to catch because companies are not losing money. “Banking and retail customers can assign concrete value to losses. But that is not the case with utility companies, for example. They are huge targets for fraudsters wanting to get names and addresses, particularly in the UK where utility bills are effectively a form of ID. Because there’s no real monetary loss linked to it, it can be very difficult to persuade them to take action.” So what are some of the activities fraudsters use this data for? “In the banking world a typical example is where fraudsters get hold of some details – your account number, your name, your address – and then call up a bank pretending to be you. There was one fraudster we dubbed Postman Pat, who was calling up banks, claiming that he had lost his debit card and requesting a replacement card to be sent to the home address on file. Because this fraudster had access to bank customers’ addresses, he was able to intercept the mail, which is relatively easy to do especially if the victim lives in a block of flats. This fraudster had details of many people’s accounts and was doing this in volume.” Gaubitch adds that fraudsters also use phone calls to facilitate online fraud, the classic example being requests for new passwords that are then reset online to facilitate online fraud. Three pillars Pindrop offers a range of voice authentication and fraud prevention solutions to help banks, insurance companies, retailers and other customers to automate the identification of genuine customers and to identify fraudulent callers. These include Pindrop Protect (for fraudulent call detection), Pindrop Passport (for caller authentication) and VeriCall Technology (for Automatic Number Identification and spoof detection). As Gaubitch explains, all Pindrop solutions are based on three technology pillars. “One is obviously voice analysis and being able to match a known voice to somebody you’re talking to, which you can use to detect known fraudsters and/ or to authenticate known callers. “The second pillar is the patented technology of Pindrop, called phone printing, which analyses everything about a phone call, from background noise to artefacts in the audio that are introduced when it is compressed and transmitted across networks.We have about 1,300 features that we measure outside of the speech, which can tell you lots about where the audio is coming from. “The third pillar is the behaviour of callers. For example, when you see the phone number of a caller who calls many, many times it could indicate that something is not quite right. “These three pillars or engines produce a risk score for every phone call going into a call centre between zero and 100, with a low score indicating low risk and a high score high risk. This helps call centre agents and fraud specialists to deal with phone call security in a completely new and different way.” The benefits of technology Gaubitch points out that the artificial intelligence and machine learning We hear a lot about cybercrime, rather less about voice fraud. But as Dr Nikolay Gaubitch explains to James Goulding, this is a major problem and one that call centre managers must do more to address SECURITY Dr Nikolay Gaubitch

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