Business voice networks are under attack from a growing number of highly sophisticated criminals engaged in a wide range of fraudulent activity. These call fraud campaigns are designed to steal money, identities, and information. While businesses are highly focused on protecting networks and digital communication channels like email, enterprise voice channels are often left unprotected. This vulnerability can make call fraud a highly successful and lucrative pursuit for hackers and scammers. To combat this threat, business and contact centers must adopt sophisticated solutions to detect and mitigate telephone-based fraud activity.
What Is Call Fraud
Call fraud, also known as phone fraud or telecom fraud, are criminal schemes where fraudsters use phone calls to deceive victims into providing sensitive information, make unauthorized transactions, or performing actions against their interest. Call fraud campaigns often exploit a victim’s trust, fear, or confusion while leveraging psychological tactics to achieve their goals.
The Need for Call Fraud Solutions
Businesses around the world have made huge investments to secure computer data networks and digital channels like websites and email. At the same time, many organizations put little effort into securing enterprise voice systems and applications. This has created a significant vulnerability in enterprise security that allows fraudsters, hackers, and robocallers to target enterprise phone systems and voice calls with the same methods they use to attack data networks and web applications. To fully protect the organization, businesses must deploy the same multi-layered approach when securing voice networks that they use to protect data networks and digital assets.
Types of Call Fraud
While the varieties of call fraud are constantly evolving, the efforts of scammers, hackers, and fraudsters to defraud businesses via the telephone tend to fall into several categories.
Contact Center Fraud: In fraud campaigns directed at contact centers, scammers manipulate or deceive agents into granting unauthorized access to customer accounts or sharing sensitive data. This type of call fraud typically uses tactics like social engineering, where the scammer impersonates a customer or a figure of authority to extract information from unsuspecting contact center agents. Scammers may use call center fraudto steal information, conduct unauthorized transactions, or steal identities.
Vishing: Voice phishing, or vishing, uses fraudulent phone calls to dupe victims into sharing personal information, divulging details of financial accounts, revealing login credentials, authorizing transactions, or giving money. Vishing calls are usually characterized by urgent language and threats of consequences designed to get victims to act without a second thought.
Toll Fraud and Traffic Pumping: These scams flood 1-800 numbers with bogus calls that generate revenue for fraudsters, who have created fake companies to bill a toll call provider for carrier fees for a portion of each call.
Robocalls: Robocalls are automated calls generated by technologies that can dial thousands or millions of phone calls each minute. While robocalls are not inherently illegal, the majority of calls placed by these technologies tend to be fraudulent.
One-ring call fraud: In this type of fraud, scammers initiate a call that rings once before terminating, often prompting the recipient to return the call, which results in high international call rates and other connection fees.
The Impact of Call Fraud
Fraudulent phone calls can impact a business at several levels.
Financial Loss: Businesses may experience significant financial losses when employees are duped into authorizing fraudulent transactions or making payments for fake services.
Data Breaches: Fraudulent calls aimed at harvesting information can lead to data breaches that compromise confidential company data and sensitive customer information.
Operational Disruption: Call fraud can consume a significant amount of an employee’s time, distracting them from core operations and reducing productivity.
Reputational Damage: A business’s reputation can suffer irreparable harm when call fraud results in a public data breach or the exposure of sensitive data belonging to customers or partners.
Legal and Compliance Issues: When call fraud leads to the exposure of private customer information, businesses may face significant regulatory penalties, legal issues, and heavy fines.
Best Practices for Preventing Call Fraud
Businesses can effectively prevent call fraud or mitigate its impact by implementing robust security measures, fostering a culture of vigilance, and leveraging advanced technologies.
Deploy Robust Call Security Technology: Implement firewalls, call filtering, and intrusion prevention systems to identify and block potentially fraudulent telephone activity.
Adopt Call Authentication Technology: Utilizing protocols like STIR/SHAKEN to verify caller ID authenticity can help to block calls from fraudsters and scammers.
Monitor and Analyze Call Activity: Analyzing call logs for unusual patterns like repeated international calls or high volumes of calls during nonbusiness hours can help to root out potentially fraudulent activity. Technologies that enable real-time monitoring can block calls from reaching employees or contact center agents.
Deploy Multi-Layered Verification: Adopting robust verification protocols for financial transactions such as dual approvals and secure communication channels helps prevent financial fraud conducted via the telephone.
Train Employees on Call Fraud Awareness: Adding call fraud to security awareness training programs can help employees recognize scams like social engineering and vishing attacks conducted via phone.
SecureLogix: A Unified Solution for Call Fraud
SecureLogix is an industry leader in call branding, security, and authentication solutions. With proven technology and the most skilled team in the industry, we help protect some of the world’s largest and most complex contact centers and voice networks.
To combat call fraud, we provide to solutions that protect enterprise and customer experience channels from voice level attacks, call fraud, and unwanted traffic.
SecureLogix® Call Defense™ System: Blocking Fraudulent Calls from the Start
The Call Defense™ System is a call firewall that filters calls at the voice network edge, blocking unwanted calls and keeping networks secure from voice channel attacks, fraud, and business disruption.
Key Features
Comprehensive Protection from Call Fraud and Threats: Call Defense™ System protects your business from call fraud attempts via robocalls, spam, social engineering, spoofing, impersonation, toll fraud, and call pumping. This SecureLogix technology also helps prevent TDoS attacks and other telephony threats.
Call Intrusion Prevention (IPS): IPS technology detects attacks by analyzing call patterns and identifying anomalies. It also enforces thresholds for call volume and traffic velocity.
Reporting Forensics: Scheduled and ad-hoc reports provide insights into voice network usage, CDR analytics, and attack/fraud forensics.
SecureLogix® Call Secure™ Managed Service
Our Call Secure™ Managed Service combines the power of the Call Defense™ System with the convenience and assurance of a fully managed service. Call Secure™ Managed Service is powered by a team of call security experts with more than 400 years of collective experience — no team secures more enterprise voice networks, phone lines, and calls than SecureLogix.
Key Benefits
Comprehensive Protection: Effectively protect your voice network from call fraud, spoofing, and robocalls with proactive monitoring of new attacks and malicious calls.
Eliminate Disruption: Reduce call spam and unwanted nuisance calls.
Increase Control: Improve call visibility across the enterprise.
Enhance Existing Solutions: Call Secure™ complements all existing voice systems including session border controllers (SBCs)
Orchestra One™ Call Authentication Service: Affordable Automated Authentication
SecureLogix® Orchestra One™ Call Authentication & Trust Service is an automated, cloud-based call authentication and inbound call spoofing detection service that quickly authenticates every incoming call. With Orchestra One™, customer service agents can begin interacting with customers immediately without putting them through tedious and costly security interrogations. This SecureLogix solution dynamically orchestrates the call authentication process using a variety of metadata to assign a risk score for every call. By enabling 90% of calls to be verified with low-cost or no-cost methods, Orchestra One™ helps save money by authenticating each call at its lowest possible price.
With Orchestra One™, you can:
Reduce call fraud by effectively authenticating trusted callers before the call is answered.
Improve customer experience by eliminating frustrating knowledge-based authentication (KBA) measures.
Reduce call handling time by up to 30 seconds and save up to 50 cents per call over KBA technologies.
Orchestrate media fraud analysis tools for multi-factor authentication.
FAQ
Q: What is call fraud? In the business world, call fraud involves schemes that target a company’s phone systems, employees, or customers to steal information, money, or resources.
Q: What is caller ID spoofing? Caller ID spoofing is when fraudsters cause the caller ID of a phone call to display a trusted phone number or display name, gaining the trust of the intended victim.
Q: How does vishing impact businesses? Vishing, or voice phishing, is a social engineering attack where scammers impersonate trusted entities like banks or IT departments to obtain sensitive information from employees or to access business systems.
Q: Can call fraud lead to data breaches? Yes, fraudsters often use call fraud to target businesses to steal sensitive customer or company data, leading to potential data breaches and regulatory penalties.
Q: What are the warning signs of call fraud? Unusual call patterns, frequent international calls, pressure to share sensitive information, or impersonation of known entities are common warning signs.
Q: What should businesses do when employees suspect call fraud? Businesses should immediately report suspicious calls to the telecom provider, review call logs for anomalies, and inform relevant departments to mitigate potential damage.