GenAI is changing fraud: Protect your customers from account takeover in your call center

There’s a very real cost to account takeovers (ATO). It’s estimated that there was over $635 billion in ATO losses globally in 2023 alone, which is the same as the GDP of Argentina. GenAI will only make this problem much bigger and harder to defeat.

Companies—and their contact center service channels—in the financial, fintech, iGaming, and healthcare spaces are already under siege from fraudsters looking to compromise customer accounts and scam the system, and Generative AI (GenAI) is making that even more complex.

While most firms may feel that their digital front door is well protected, fraudsters are now actively targeting the call center using GenAI to turbocharge established fraud MOs, such as impersonation and social engineering. GenAI allows the scammer to easily replicate the customer’s voice, face, and even generate convincing ID—rendering many of the existing call agent’s fraud tools worthless.

For company leaders and risk managers worldwide, they’re left to wonder, “How can my business keep up with the threat of AI?”

Before understanding how to combat GenAI and bad actors, companies need to understand the foundational obstacles that allow account takeover to happen in the first place:

1. ATO prevention tools aren’t developing as rapidly as fraud methods and are typically weakest in the contact center where digital checks are unavailable.
2. While GenAI can be positive and negative, it has allowed fraudsters new means to execute account takeover.
3. Standard ID&V practices may be robust for account creation, but they aren’t as comprehensive during other account activities (e.g., account recovery). And, in the call center, the toolkit is typically much less comprehensive.

Taken together, these developing threats have snowballed into a real problem for companies, regardless of industry. In fact, in the first three months of 2023, there was a 425% increase in ATO attacks when compared to all of 2022.

What’s a company to do?

Identity Proof Your Organization

You want to know your customers are who they say they are whenever they engage with your services, especially for high-risk activities and when contacting your call center. But upgrading to modern protection against new, Gen AI-fueled fraud attacks probably requires long, painful, expensive integration projects, by which time you’re behind again.

Luckily, there are options that can be set live with no integration, that take on ATO scammers in a matrixed way, and which pair fraud detection with integrated ID verification. These solutions offer protection when it comes to high-risk requests from customers calling your contact center.

Imagine being able to detect fraud and confirm your customer identities in the call center channel through an easy-to-access tool that:

• Effortlessly analyzes device and user behavior data
• Easily checks it against authoritative data sources
• Cross-references customer and account data with previous entries

All with zero integration effort and a “start using it tomorrow” capability.

These checks reveal signals to who a real customer is that even GenAI can’t fake. With this verification in hand, businesses have the confidence of knowing their company and customers are protected from bad actors looking to do them harm.