Call centre card fraud
The 6,000 call centres in the UK employ more than 700,000 agents and process £2billion in credit card transactions each year. The vast majority of these payments are currently taken over the phone, exposing the business to the risk of agent fraud.
Unfortunately, the nature of contact centre work (relatively low pay, high attrition and access to sensitive data) means that agents can be tempted to leak data. This can be on an opportunistic basis (as in the case of the call centre worker in Kirkby, or in the more sinister context of organised crime.
DCI Derek Robertson of Strathclyde Police says: “We know of organised crime groups which are placing people within call centres so that they can steal customers’ data to carry out fraud and money laundering.”
Alternatively, criminal gangs can ‘recruit’ existing contact centre workers and coerce them into stealing credit and debit card information, which they can then use to make fraudulent transactions.
This phenomenon is more commonplace than you might think.Strathclyde Police estimates that one in ten of Glasgow’s financial services contact centres have been infiltrated by these gangs – and research by Strathclyde University found that six per cent of employees or their colleagues had been offered money in exchange for customer data.
In a separate survey by CIFAS, over 60% of surveyed companies reported that employee frauds they had uncovered involved collusion with people outside the company.
Homeworking, outsourcing and offshoring all make it more difficult for call centre managers to control the sensitive data in their operations. Almost 90% of IT managers have admitted remote workers make it harder to ensure compliance with company policies – and 50% go so far as to say mobile workers actively ignore IT policy (source: Quality Remote Associates, 2008).
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