Enterprises have deployed increasingly sophisticated cyber security measures to protect against digital forms of fraud and scams. To bypass these defenses, criminals frequently turn to a more traditional channel to carry out their schemes: the telephone. One of the most potent telephone-based threats is vishing (voice vishing). Vishing scams rely on social engineering techniques and use voice communication to dupe individuals or employees into divulging sensitive information over the phone. Because enterprise security teams often prioritize security measures for cyber threats over telephony-based threats, businesses and employees may be at greater risk for falling prey to vishing scams.
What are Vishing Scams
Vishing scams are fraudulent activities where attackers use phone calls or voice messages to manipulate victims into taking harmful actions or providing personal, financial, or confidential information. In these attacks, scammers frequently pose as legitimate representatives from trusted organizations like banks, government agencies, technical support teams. Unlike traditional vishing, which each primarily uses email and fake websites, vishing scams rely on human interaction and the perceived authenticity of a voice conversation.
Common Types of Vishing Scams
While vishing takes many forms and continues to evolve, most vishing attacks involve a scammer posing as a trusted authority.
Bank Fraud Alerts: Scammers pose as a bank representative and call to warn a victim of suspicious activity on a corporate account or an issue with payroll. During the conversation, scammers ask the victim to share account information or verify login details.
IRS Tax Agency Scams: Fraudsters impersonate tax authorities and threaten legal action unless immediate payment or personal information is provided.
Tech Support Scams: Posing as members of a company’s IT department, scammers warn a victim that their computer is infected with a virus or has serious issues, prompting the user to provide remote access or to visit a malicious website where malware is downloaded to their computer.
Vishing Scams Directed at Contact Centers
Contact center agents are a prime target for vishing scams. The nature of their job means they have access to a great deal of sensitive information, and they are encouraged to be accommodating, helpful, and engaging with anyone who calls the center. Here are several of the most common types of vishing scams that target contact center employees.
CEO Fraud: Scammers pose as company executives or managers and urgently demand that the victim share access credentials, customer data, or account information.
Customer Impersonation Scams: Fraudsters may impersonate customers and seek to extract information or gain unauthorized access to accounts, often providing partial or stolen information to make their requests seem legitimate.
Tech Support Scams: Scammers claim to be from the contact center’s IT department or from a third-party vendor, requesting access to systems and accounts or asking the employee to enable remote access to solve a technical issue.
Compliance Scams: Fraudsters claim to be an auditor, regulator, or compliance officer performing an inspection or audit. They may urgently request access to customer records, system logs, or internal policies to meet fake deadlines.
Refund Fraud: Attackers pretend to be a customer and request a refund or payment adjustment, often using stolen or incomplete customer details to convince employees to bypass verification protocols.
How Vishing Scams Work
While vishing scams can vary greatly, most follow a similar pattern.
A Pretext: Scammers create a believable pretext for a call such as a security alert, a notice from an IT team, or a request for information from a customer.
Choosing a Target: Attackers often use publicly available data or information gleaned from data breaches to select and build a profile of a potential victim.
Establishing Trust: When contacting the victim, scammers build trust by spoofing the caller ID of a trusted organization or sharing information which they found from other sources.
A Request: Vishing scams inevitably involve a request for personal or sensitive information such as a full name, address, credit card details, account numbers, birth date, or login credentials.
Signs of a Vishing Scam
Employees and contact center agents may be able to detect a vishing scams by recognizing these common techniques and tactics.
Spoofed Phone Numbers: Vishing scams often involve spoofed phone numbers that appear to come from a trusted business or institution, adding credibility to the scammer’s request.
A Sense of Urgency and Fear: Scammers tend to make urgent demands or requests that prompt victims into acting quickly without taking a moment to reconsider their actions. Scammers also frequently seek to instill fear by threatening negative consequences if the victim doesn’t comply with the request.
Citing Publicly Available Information: Attackers frequently possess some information about the victim before the call, usually gleaned from public sources. Citing this data during the call can build trust and credibility with the victim.
The Business Impact of Vishing Scams
Vishing can have a significant impact on businesses and contact centers, disrupting operations, damaging reputations, and causing financial and regulatory damage.
Financial Loss
Vishing attacks can lead to significant monetary losses for businesses when scammers deceive employees into transferring funds or making unauthorized payments. The disruption to business can be costly, and the expense of mitigating damage can be high. When vishing scams involve the loss of customer or client data, businesses may be liable for losses incurred by their clients.
Reputational Damage
Vishing scams can erode the trust of clients and the general public in a business’s brand, making customers and prospects less likely to do business with the company. Negative publicity can tarnish a business’s image, resulting in lost opportunities and reduced market value.
Data Breaches
When targeted employees are duped into revealing login credentials, scammers may gain unauthorized access to networks and sensitive data assets, placing customer data and proprietary business information at risk.
Operational Disruption
Contact centers and customer service departments may experience increased call volume as a result of fraudsters who flood centers with fake calls. The time and resources required to handle scam-related incidents diverts resources from legitimate customers.
Regulatory Risks
Businesses and contact centers in regulated industries may face compliance and regulatory issues because of vishing scams. Businesses that fail to protect customer data may face penalties under regulations like GDPR, PCI DSS, or HIPAA.
How to Prevent and Mitigate Vishing Scams
Prevent vishing attacks requires a multi-layered approach to telephony security.
Security Awareness Training: Regularly training employees or contact center agents to recognize and respond to vishing attempts is the first line of defense for mitigating these attacks.
Call Authentication Protocols: Using caller ID verification and phone call authentication technology can block or flag potentially malicious callers.
Advanced Technologies: Implementing AI-powered tools can help to detect and block suspicious calls by analyzing call patterns and identifying anomalies.
Call Filtering: Call filtering technology screens incoming phone calls and blocks or redirects suspicious calls based on predefined rules and criteria.
SecureLogix: Advanced Technology for Preventing Vishing Scams
SecureLogix provides industry-leading technology that secures your business or contact center from attack, disruption, fraud, and abuse. For 20 years, we’ve profiled, tracked, and defended some of the world’s largest and most complex contact centers against the schemes and threats plaguing unified communications networks. Along the way, we’ve developed patented technology and assembled the most skilled team in the industry.
Our unified platform provides several solutions that help to identify and mitigate vishing scams.
SecureLogix Call Defense™ System
The Call Defense™ System from SecureLogix offers industry-leading protection for voice channels and business costs. This technology sits at the edge of your voice network to filter voice traffic, separating trusted traffic from suspicious callers and malicious threats like vishing scams.
Key Components
Call Firewall: Gain enterprise-wide call visibility and enforce unified security policies throughout your voice network. Prevent malicious calls, call fraud, and attacks like vishing scams through alerting, blocking, and/or redirection.
Call Intrusion Prevention (IPS): Identify anomalies and detect call pattern attacks in real time. Enforce limits on call volume threshold and traffic velocity to prevent denial of service attacks.
Reporting Forensics: Produce scheduled and ad hoc reports that reveal insights into voice network usage, CDR analytics, and attack/fraud forensics
SecureLogix Orchestra One™
Orchestra One™ Call Authentication Service provides authentication and spoofing detection that’s smart, efficient, and affordable. Orchestra One™ quickly verifies and authenticates every inbound call with automated, cloud-based authentication. While traditional approaches to automate call authentication are complex and costly, Orchestra One™ dynamically employs multiple zero-cost and low-cause metadata services to authenticate each call at its lowest possible price.
Key Benefits
Automated Risk Scores: The Orchestra One™ service assigns a risk score to every call, providing greater insight into potentially suspicious and malicious callers.
Shorter Call Duration: Orchestra One™ reduces agent called duration by up to 30 seconds through automated call verification.
Greater Customer Satisfaction: By shortening calls and helping to avoid vishing scams and other fraudulent calls, Orchestra One™ enables agents to respond to legitimate customers faster and with greater attention.
FAQ
Q: What is the purpose of vishing scams?
The objective of vishing scams is to trick victims into providing sensitive information like personal details, financial data, or account credentials that scammers can use for fraudulent activities.
Q: What is vishing vs. phishing?
While both are forms of social engineering, vishing scams use phone calls or voice messages to target victims, while phishing attacks usually involve emails and fake websites.
Q: What kind of sensitive data are vishing scammers seeking?
Vishing scams are often designed to obtain secure customer account details, payment card information, login credentials for protected systems, personal identification information (PII), or trade secrets and proprietary business data.
Q: How do vishing scammers impersonate legitimate entities?
Vishing attacks often involve tactics like spoofing caller ID, using partial or stolen information to build credibility, or mimicking the tone, terminology, and procedures of legitimate businesses.
Q: How can employees and contact center agents recognize vishing scams?
Employees should be trained to look for red flags such as urgent or high-pressure demands, requests to bypass standard procedures, calls from unfamiliar numbers claiming to be trusted entities, and inconsistent or suspicious information provided by the caller.