COVID-19 is heightening fraud concerns, and for good reason. Payments fraud is increasing during the pandemic, with simple fraud such as phishing and business email compromise attacks creating the biggest mishaps.
Google reports that since the beginning of the year through May 10, the number of phishing sites it discovers each week has surged 46%.
Sudden shifts in working conditions are exacerbating this threat. With companies migrating their organizations to remote work environments--call centers included--without much guidance on simple fraud prevention, the opportunity for risk is increasing significantly.
To guard against these new vulnerabilities, organizations must prioritize educating their employees on methods of simple fraud and put measures in place to prevent social engineering attacks.
Most B2B payments fraud is carried out by people familiar with the space. They have either worked for B2B payments companies or have gone out of their way to educate themselves on finding loopholes or weaknesses in the system.
Highly alert teams and smart technology are your greatest defense. Educate your employees on creative phishing attacks, which often include impersonating trusted entities to gain access to sensitive data.
Ultimately, everyone in an organization plays a role in fraud prevention and the more knowledge-sharing there is, the better.
Beyond educating employees, companies must ensure security firewalls are running optimally and consider using third parties for external monitoring. Think, too, about applying technology such as internal multi-factor authentication and endpoint detection, which monitors and evaluates risk factors on your network, allowing you to mitigate and respond to insider threats quickly while working remotely.
Additional methods our organization is using to prevent payments fraud for customers include:
Cognitive fraud prevention: Leveraging artificial intelligence to support frictionless payments and provide high fraud detection rates helps reduce false positives, improves response time, and provides higher flexibility for fraud teams to adapt to ever-changing attacks.
Improved app security development: Increased static code scanning, vulnerability scanning, web application firewalls, expanded penetration testing, and standardization around DevSecOps process can improve the security and compliance our customer-facing web applications, thus reducing the exposure to fraud through more secure applications and business logic.
Migrating to chip-and-PIN cards: Magnetic stripe cards – many of which tie to fuel and gift cards – are easier to clone and compromise than chip-and-PIN cards.
COVID-19 has forced organizations to take a closer look at security processes and fraud prevention technology. Addressing security weak points and safeguarding against payment fraud is even more important now.
Through employee education and deploying tools that allow you to rapidly thwart threats internally and externally, you can reduce the risk of payments fraud and gain greater peace of mind.
