TeleSign releases fraud guide for holiday season

In its recently released fraud guide, TeleSign advises a three-pronged defense strategy:

• Educate your Call Center Representatives Call center agents, especially those that authenticate riskier transactions (e.g., password resets) have to be trained to identify and stop social engineering techniques;
• Establish a Trust Anchor by requiring your users to provide a verifiable phone number at the time of account registration, call centers can later authenticate users for any risky transactions or account changes using the phone number on record;
• Leverage Technology Call center representatives can now identify the high-risk phone types (e.g., certain VoIP phone numbers) associated with the inbound calls, enabling them to flag or block questionable transactions. Although call centers still rely on challenge questions, they need to augment this method with two-factor authentication for high-risk transactions. Emerging technologies like caller ID spoofing detection are also showing promise in limiting call center fraud.

Online retailers expect even higher spikes in sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and according to experts there will be fraud losses of USD 3.4 billion by the end of 2012.

TeleSign has executed more than 1 billion authentication and verification transactions in more than 200 countries and over 50 languages.