Credit unions’ desire to always help their members is playing into the hands of fraudsters, who are taking advantage of call center agents by spoofing member IDs in order to take over their accounts. In this first installment of a two-part series, we’ll look at how credit unions are addressing caller identification.
The “2019 State of Call Center Authentication” from the Portland, Ore.-based caller authentication and fraud prevention systems provider TRUSTID, a Neustar company, reported 51% of financial services respondents recognized the phone channel as the primary source of account takeover attacks.
As credit unions have strengthened their cyber defenses, fraudsters have instead targeted call centers with easily-obtained personally identifying information from the dark web, Patrick Cox, Neustar vice president and general manager of TRUSTID, emphasized. “One hundred percent of account takeovers occur after weak authentication. None of your credit union readers would ever offer to give money to an unauthorized person or a stranger.”