Ebrahim Dinat , COO at South African customer experience solutions provider Ocular Technologies , says customer service is more important than anything in business , including protecting against fraud .

Research by Pindrop Labs shows that one in every 491 calls to a retail contact centre is fraudulent veryone has a unique voice . In the same way

The recent case of a KwaZulu-Natal based occupational therapist brought this type of fraud to the forefront in South Africa when she discovered incorrect debit orders on her bank statements . A call mandate was all that the company required for her money to be debited and , yes , the company received and recorded this call they received . However , it was from a person with a radically different voice and accent to the victim .

Nick Ismail , a reporter for Information Age , said : “ When most of us call a contact centre , after a few simple identity-based questions such as name , address and date of birth , we are given complete freedom over our account . Unfortunately , the same goes for a fraudster able to correctly answer the same questions , with many of the answers freely available on the Internet . Telephone fraud also represents a low risk , low cost method for perpetrators that is easy to carry out from anywhere thanks to the growth of VoIP networks .

“ The rudimentary technology-based security that can sometimes be in place such as caller ID and automatic number identification can also be easily fooled using simple spoofing technology , making the chances of being caught extremely low . For this reason , it is estimated that between 30 to 50 % of all fraud incidents are initiated with a phone call , meaning telephone agents in contact centres are particularly vulnerable to social engineering and manipulation .”

Furthermore , the average contact centre agent will only be dealing with a fraudster once in approximately every 2,000 calls , meaning that identifying and handling them is not a core competency for most .”

Dinat says that the KwaZulu-Natal call fraud is certainly not an isolated case in South Africa . “ For this reason , a technology that ’ s currently booming and that we ’ ll be seeing much more of to combat call fraud is voice biometrics ,” he said .

An example of new technology is Pindrop ’ s patented Phoneprinting technology that creates an ‘ audio fingerprint ’ of each call by analysing over 1,380 unique call features , such as voice , location , background noise , number history and call type .

It highlights unusual activity , identifies potential fraud and deters fraudulent callers and cracks down on fraudulent tactics like caller ID spoofing , voice distortion and social engineering with no need for customers to provide any additional information .

According to leading industry analyst firm , Forrester Research : “ As users increasingly demand frictionless authentication everywhere , biometrics solutions have garnered significant attention for both authentication and fraud prevention , especially on mobile and IoT devices . Furthermore , as their adoption increases , they will hasten the demise of the industry ’ s least user-friendly method : passwords .”

Dinat concludes : “ Naturally , voice biometrics greatly impacts customer service . The quicker a customer is authenticated and verified the more efficient is their journey . Precious time is saved through immediate and correct identification . At the same time , both customer and contact centre agents will no longer be targets for fraudsters , and the devastating consequences of wrong actions trustingly taken .” u intelligent PHYSICAL SECURITY www . intelligentciso . com | Issue 02

67