Following the trail of scammers’ breadcrumbs in phone calls to banks

Hester Abrams: Communications and New Business Manager at Stop Scams UK

Among all the calls banks receive in a day, have you any idea how many callers are mounting a scam and how many of those are targeting other banks too??

Recordings of scammers’ phone calls to banks, made to spec out their chances or to carry out a fraud, leave unique prints that could identify them, and industry is now on their trail.?

Telcos and banks who are part of Stop Scams UK have started a project to match speech recordings. One potential outcome could be the creation of a system that will alert call agents to a scammer on the line before they do harm.?

A proof of concept kicked off in January led by the consumer security team of

英国电信集团 , bringing in fellow telco TalkTalk and three banks. They are all members of the cross-sector collaboration Stop Scams UK. Voice prints – unique sounds that identify an individual – are being assessed using

纽昂司 Voice Biometric technology.

This voice matching example of a collaborative approach to beating scams was mentioned at BT’s AI and Data Driven Fraud Protection Conference in London last month.?

The project’s overall aim is to find ways to upset -- and ultimately break – criminal business models, which see phone channels used by scammers to “phish” for personal and financial information that they then combine with other moves to deceive banks’ customers to empty their accounts.?

In the first phase which is due to conclude this month, researchers have been looking for initial matches among audio clips shared by the participating banks and telcos about people known to have committed fraud.?

Where a participant is found to have a match in their data, they will receive a copy. If a recording throws up no matches, other participants will be offered the recording so they can add it to their “watch lists”, adding a new way to protect customers before a scam happens.?

Such exchanges potentially could become industry-wide, pursuing the kind of collaboration that data sharing innovation under the auspices of Stop Scams UK is already seeing take place.?

Future phases of the project will proceed according to what the first uncovers.?

To find out more about the Voice Matching pilot by Stop Scams UK members, talk to our Director of Technical Collaborations Jonathan Frost .