BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—As financial institutions improve their online and card security, experts say crooks are turning more to call centers to gain access to consumers’ accounts.
To battle this growing threat, some of the biggest banks in the country are turning to voice biometrics to verify if the account holders on the line with the call center are who they say they are. Just like a fingerprint, a person’s voice has characteristics that make it unique.
“That call to your bank is being recorded for more than just quality assurance purposes,’" said Bill Hardekopf, CEO at LowCards.com.
Customers’ voice recordings are kept on file to match against the next time they call.
"(Financial institutions) closed and locked the door online, but they left the window open with the call centers," Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of fraud detection company Pindrop Security, told CNN Money. He added that $10 billion was lost due to call center fraud last year.
But call centers remain a point of vulnerability. Once unscrupulous callers trick their way past security and gain access to an account, they can do things like take out loans, transfer money or request new credit cards.
Criminals will contact a call center, claiming to be someone else. “They sometimes appeal to the customer service representative's emotions to get them to break protocol. For instance, they'll claim to have lost their card while traveling and need immediate access to money,” reported CNN Money. “In a rush to help, the service rep might slip up and bypass a security measure or be more lenient.”
It's easy for a criminal to spoof a phone number to match the one on a customer's account even though the caller may be in a different country.
Fraudsters can call a company upwards of 20 times a day, pretending to be a different person or access the same account, Erica Thomson, sales specialist at data security company NICE Systems, told CNN Money.
NICE Systems can record call-in center conversations, verify the caller and then convert the voice into a “voiceprint” to serve as a comparison the next time that person (or someone claiming to be that person) calls.
NICE registers more than 120 different characteristics of a caller's voice, Thomson told CNN Money. Some are physical: the length and thickness of a caller's vocal cords, lung size and sinus shape. While other traits are personal, such as tone, pitch and pace.