Across the board, insurers found they were experiencing a huge uptick in fraud. As insurers (and other enterprises across industries) invest in technology to prevent and detect fraudsters from hacking their way into accounts, the fraudsters invest their time in researching and scheming ways to get around it. Fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated, moving their targets away from common account values to going after high dollar accounts that are valued at half a million dollars.
Within the insurance industry, account takeover and elder exploitation are the biggest trends being seen right now. Account takeover is a technique where fraudsters are able to use social engineering to call individual agents at the agency to gain access to hundreds of consumer accounts. Once this access is gained, the fraudsters are able to pick and choose which accounts to move forward with.
Additionally, fraudsters focus on the retirement space, where they are able to hack into a specific plan, and similarly, they can then access a number of participants and choose from where they perceive the high dollar amount accounts will be. Here, elders are often specifically targeted due to their age. With age in mind, fraudsters assume elders would be very easy to manipulate over the phone to access their account information and unlikely to check in with accounts.
So, how do we work together – in the insurance industry – to prevent fraudsters from taking over accounts? Fraudsters bring different levels of risk to insurance agencies, and there is a need to understand that risk – systematically. Understanding and acting on the risk posed by fraudsters, however, doesn’t need to come at the cost of customer experience. Moving forward to protect your customers from fraud, omni channel authentication is key for the insurance industry. As we move forward into the future, protecting every facet of the customer experience is important for enterprises’ reputation. For more information, regarding protecting your enterprise from fraudsters, whether you are in the insurance industry or not – contact us here.
