In January this year, the FCA announced banks must publish fraud data and improve their scam prevention, and it is proposing Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud victim reimbursement.
In the first half of 2021, APP scams totalled £355 million, which is likely to be below the real figure as APP scams are often not reported. As banks may soon be liable for expenses such as these, they are redoubling their efforts to strengthen their fraud prevention techniques.
APP fraud is where a person is tricked into authorizing a payment from their bank account to a fraudster. It’s difficult for banks and payment service providers to detect it because the account holder approves transfers, so everything appears normal until the victim realizes their mistake. The most common types of APP fraud are impersonation scams, which is when a criminal pretends to work for a trusted company and purchase scams where a victim pays for goods and services that don’t exist.
Alex Cambell, Sales Director at Webex CPaaS Solutions, spoke on how they are helping banks and financial organizations to combat APP fraud.
“Through our enterprise-grade cloud communications (CPaaS) platform we are helping banks, payment service providers, and other companies to take advantage of the new, secure, verified messaging channels such as RCS Business Messaging. We can still send the traditional SMS and make voice calls, but these new channels are making it much more difficult for fraudsters to impersonate a bank or business.”
“By adopting the new messaging channels and combining them with our ability to orchestrate end-to-end customer journeys, financial organizations are able to deliver messaging experiences for opening accounts, verifying transactions, fraud alerts, and much more that customers can trust are completely genuine.”
A verified channel includes sender verifications, reasons for contact, and branding on calls and messages – “When a business wants to leverage one of these channels, they go through a verification process with the technology provider, such as Apple, Google, or Meta, before they can start engaging with customers. Due to this process, it would be extremely difficult for fraudsters to imitate verified channels due to this process.”
“In addition, companies can leverage the rich media capabilities of these messaging channels to educate customers on the APP threat and how to spot a fraudster, by sharing videos and documents to create easily consumable content. Such campaign programs will help companies to be seen as proactively trying to tackle the issue, leading to an increase in positive sentiment from customers.”
SIM swap fraud
Cambell also commented on their SIM swap fraud solution “Along with APP fraud, we are helping banks to fight SIM swap scams by leveraging our connections with mobile carriers and customer journey orchestration capabilities.”
SIM Swap is a form of phishing fraud in which the fraudster obtains and uses an individual’s bank details and personal details to switch the victim’s mobile number to a SIM in their possession. This allows the fraudster to receive the victim’s call and text, including one-time passwords for banking which can then be used to access their bank account.
“There are many things a bank can do to improve its SIM swap vulnerability, such as running SIM swap checks on all services and improving authentication processes. System alerts for contact centres and customer service teams, for example, can help agents to identify fraudulent activity. In addition, banks can much more effectively utilise customer data generated by mobile networks and devices to prevent fraud from taking place before customers have their money stolen. Through our platform, we can tailor the solutions we deliver to each bank, as they all have their own unique ecosystem and infrastructure to consider.”
Act now to fight the latest fraud threats
APP and SIM fraud both threaten the relationship a business has with a customer, with trust being damaged if a bank does not effectively respond or proactively protect customers.
Webex CPaaS Solutions already serves many well-known high street banks, such as Lloyds, Barclays, FNB (First National Bank), Capitec, RBS, and Absa.
If you are interested in finding out more about the anti-fraud solutions offered by Webex CPaaS, you can get in contact via their website and visit their APP solution page here.
