Voice technology continues to sweep the nation, with Gartner predicting a growing number of searches (30 percent) will be screenless by this year. With voice-enabled devices becoming more prevalent in consumers’ lives, voice presents many new business opportunities with the power to transform and streamline the customer experience, especially when it comes to customer security and authentication practices. But the conversational economy doesn’t come without risks, as evidenced in Pindrop’s newly released 2020 Voice Intelligence Report, showing increasing fraud threats in the contact center and beyond.
According to Pindrop’s 2020 Voice Intelligence Report, voice fraud continues to plague the contact center, with 90 voice fraud attacks occurring every minute in 2019 – that’s one out of every 770 calls to contact centers. And when it comes to these attacks, fraudsters are hitting where they can get the most bang for their buck, with the banking industry seeing the most notable increase in fraud in 2019. This is particularly notable as banking remains the single largest channel for contact center calls.
But threats aren’t just limited to the contact center. With advances in AI, voice fraud has taken on new forms – like deepfakes – that pose increasing threats to businesses and even to national security. Last year, we saw the first successful synthetic voice fraud attack on a CEO, resulting in the company being scammed out of over $200,000. We also saw how simply slowing down audio could threaten a public figure’s reputation with altered video in which Nancy Pelosi appeared to slur her speech. As deep learning technology continues to improve, these attacks will only become more severe with the potential to defraud businesses and wreak havoc on a company or individual’s reputation.
Despite these new and increasing threats, the report showed that consumers still fail to follow many security best practices, choosing weak passwords and even sharing passwords among friends and coworkers. Even worse, businesses continue to engage in insecure behavior that could put them and their customers at risk, such as using Knowledge-Based Authentication (KBA) questions to authenticate customers and failing to fully implement new security solutions or processes.
To counter increasing fraud, enterprises must consider new authentication practices to ensure customers are protected, such as:
- Adopting a risk-based solution, considering the unique risk of each person who calls into your call center
- Using layered intelligence, thinking even beyond two-factor authentication
- Utilizing continuous analysis, moving authentication from one simple “event” to a full process
- Opting for a passive, continuous process, which allows frictionless enrollment rates of more than 60 percent in 12 weeks and multi-factor authentication rates of more than 60 percent in 26 weeks
You can check out the full 2020 Voice Intelligence and Security Report here. To help guard your customers against increasing voice fraud in the contact center, contact Pindrop today.
