More Hacks, Fakes and Fraud What the New Decade Will Bring to Contact Centers

As we enter a new year and launch a new decade, three trends help shape demand for, and end customer attitudes toward, voice-based authentication and fraud prevention:

• Factor One: “Hacks” (of all kind) are now commonplace. Thanks to news coverage at unprecedented levels, everybody knows about them. That means heightened end-customer awareness and sensitivity to vulnerabilities, as well as reputational damages.
  
  

  Latest case in point: last month’s (December 2019) viral account of a malevolent individual talking to an 8-year-old girl through the family’s Ring Nursery Camera

• Factor Two: Fakes and “DeepFakes” are stealing the spotlight with their star power. New software comes to market every other month; some claiming to need only 3 minutes of recordings to train a voice synthesizer to sound like you. This gives brands incentive to employ anti-fraud solutions that detect synthesized voices in real time.
  
  Related Fact: 14,698 deepfake videos were identified on the internet in June and July (2019), up from 7,964 last December — an 84% increase within only seven months. Clearly, we have the roots of a fraud problem.
  
• Factor Three: “Vishing” (the voice equivalent of “phishing") incidents are accelerating. Chalk it up to the siren song of speech technology combined with AI. Such a strong combo creates an irresistible challenge for imposters and fraudsters. Voice is their new chosen weapon.
  
  Reality check: Training is a big factor in this instance because enterprise employees are well-trained on spotting potential phishing emails, they are not ready to do so for voice, especially because synthesized voices sound so convincing.

Each of these factors, in effect, supercharge each other. Successful hacks embolden criminals to expand their efforts. The high quality of deepfakes is lost on nobody. It is so inexpensive to “fake” a voice that it is inevitable for us to see more fraud that involves the voices of influential individuals (like a person’s boss or business partner) in the coming years.

No Better Time to Make Security Customer-Centric

The ease with which criminals can enlist Deepfakes to act as their imposters makes it more important than ever for enterprises to turn to solution providers with robust approaches to real time authentication (RTA). Fraud prevention is the product of an approach that starts with simple enrollment of voiceprints for known customers to support strong authentication across multiple voice channels and build trust. Then it must be augmented by real-time and rapid detection of possible fraudsters, based on detecting and exposing new suspects, in addition to using a black list of known imposters. Detection of synthesized or “spoofed” voices is the icing on the cake but, given the growing incidence of Deepfakes and Voice Spoofing, the icing is core to selection process.

Investment in voice biometric-based authentication and related resources is most often justified by calculating the corresponding fraud loss reduction. This will continue to be true, especially at banks, credit card issuers and financial institutions. In the next decade, we expect the value of building a trusted relationship with customers to meet or exceed that associated with fraud. It is not an “either/or” situation. In addition to the financial sector, retailers, healthcare providers, insurance carriers and government agencies will benefit financially from hardening their IT and customer care infrastructure and processes against Hacks, Fakes and Fraud *and* they will find that they have improved the bond of trust they must build with both customers, prospects and constituents.

Read more about NICE’s real time authentication solution here.