The call centre is a key customer touch point for your brand, but fraudsters are squeezing more and more cash out of it. Data collected by Pindrop® Labs found that, in the UK, £0.86 per call was lost to phone fraud in 2016 – a 68% increase from £0.51 in 2015.
Not only are fraudsters taking your customers’ money, they’re also putting a significant drain on the call centre operation. They use a variety of methods and tactics to exploit the weaknesses in the call centre for their benefit.
- They use technology to bypass your defences
Freely available VOIP tools allow fraudsters to spoof the caller ID and location of actual customers. Meaning that attackers can very easily bypass some of the call centre’s traditional authentication methods. - They take advantage of your call centre agents
Staff on the phones may take hundreds (or thousands) of legitimate calls for every one fraudulent call. They might be more worried about the potential downside of mistaking a legitimate customer for a fraudster than the risk of an attack. - They turn your efficiencies against you
Resolving a call quickly is part of a great customer experience. Fraudsters use this pressure to social engineer conversations with call centre agents, who subsequently give out account information and access to callers they believe to be genuine.
To find out about the other tricks fraudsters use to take your customers’ money, read our free 2017 UK Call Centre Fraud Report.
