Gear Up Security With Voice Biometrics To Prevent Fraud In This Deepfake Era

What happens when an employee gets a phone call from the CEO of his company asking to wire $243K to a particular account? The person follows the instruction even though having a strange feeling about it. What happens next? The person gets to realize it was not a real call from his boss, but a fake voice created, mimicking the voice of the company’s director, using Artificial Intelligence.

It is not a fictional story. In March 2019, this money heist happened by cybercriminals with the use of voice-synthesis software powered by deepfake technology.

Another tremendously shocking heist took place in 2020 when cybercriminals used the same technology to deceive a banker from UAE into wiring $35 million into their account.

Deepfake technology is widely being used to deceive human senses, and modern hackers use it to trick people and steal money & valuable data. In fact, a significant vendor reported experiencing three cases of such cyber-crimes stealing millions of pounds.

Is there any way to prevent such identity theft and fraud? Well, there are many. But the best way to prevent fraud is by leveraging the power of AI itself. Today’s post will talk about why you should consider AI-powered voice biometrics as the best option and how it can help in preventing fraud in online banking. But before diving into that discussion, let’s first have a quick view on what deepfake technology is, how it is rising and why it is important to prevent fraud and identity theft.

What is Deepfake Technology?

Together with two phrases, “deep learning” and “fake,” deepfake technology first emerged at academic institutions in the early 90s, later used by amateurs across online communities. Day by day, this is being adopted by cybercriminals across all industries.

With this technology, cyber crooks do audiovisual manipulation and create realistic stimulation of somebody’s voice, face, or actions. It makes people believe that someone did or said something they actually did not or an event took place that never really happened. With the advancement of deepfake technology, such identity theft is getting easier to create. By having a few image or voice samples, deepfake audio & visual models can be created, and the worst part is that it is extremely commercialized.

The Rise of Depfake Technology

It goes without saying, through deepfake, one can easily synthesize the fake voice of a person similar to the real voice. Therefore these deepfakes have become an advancement in artificial synthetic media technology.

By leveraging powerful methods based on AI and machine learning, deepfakes can manipulate or create audio content to trick. Day by day, the quality of generated fake voices through deepfake technology is improving. For a cyber crook, this is an easy process, which includes:

• Assessing voice samples
• Combining samples to generate an artificial voice
• Grabbing the best chance to exploit
• Using that artificial voice to make a request to a user for taking action

The voice recording assessment process is becoming easier day by day. With online videos, social platforms, voice mail services, etc., cybercriminals can easily collect voice samples for exploitation. What’s more, the quality of generated fake voices is getting better, in other words, indistinguishable.

Today, businesses all over the world are facing deepfake attacks. Cyberattacks are already costing each banking company an average of $18.3 million annually, and the deepfake technology makes things even worse for the banking companies. So, it is high time businesses should put their foot forward to prevent fraud and identity theft.

Let’s talk about the importance of preventing fraud and identity theft in the next segment.

The Importance of Preventing Fraud & Identity Theft

Nearly 1.4 million identity theft cases were reported last year, and the rate is expected to grow this year. Therefore, needless to say, among all the methods a company requires in order to secure itself, eliminating the risk of identity theft is the most significant one. Here’s why you should give importance to preventing fraud and identity theft:

• Improve employee security– Hackers can easily access a company’s database by hacking its employees’ personal accounts. And when your company’s employees’ security is at risk, the possibility of your business’ identity theft increases. So, you need to secure your employees’ email credentials and other accounts.
• Increase productivity– Restoring lost or breached identity is time-consuming work, which, as a result, affects productivity in the workplace. By preventing identity theft, you can make your employees save that time and focus on other important work.
• Have protection against cybercrime– By preventing identity theft, you can protect your business from cyber scams, thereby eliminating the risk of losing money.
• Maintain company reputation– If your business is a victim of cybercrime, not only your data is breaching, but also your company may face further negative consequences. Your brand can lose reputation, consumers stop trusting your business, and eventually, you face financial loss or pay a regulatory fine. Therefore take the best step to say goodbye to cyberattacks and identity theft.

How to Prevent Cyber Frauds in Business with Voice Biometrics

As fraud and identity theft cases are rising, there is a dire need for companies to secure their communication channels from cyber threats. Authenticating through voice biometrics is certainly the best option for fighting cybercrime and securing both company and consumer databases.

Why is voice biometrics the best option?

• It helps fast and accurate authentication
• It can be easily integrated across different devices and CRM systems
• It’s available on varied deployment mediums
• It offers quality solutions with budget comfort

How can you use voice biometrics to prevent fraud?

Voice biometrics provide real-time voice authentication. In the voice biometrics authentication process, it compares a saved voiceprint to a voice coming from a telephonic conversation and detects whether the voice is authentic or a fraudulent breach attack. Voice biometrics makes it possible by comparing numerous voice traits that most people do not even know for identifying a person’s identity. Voice biometrics uses a person’s unique features in the identity authentication process; thereby, it is accurate and completely secure.

One can use active or passive voice biometrics to prevent fraud. The user might need to utter a specific password that they created while setting up the profile or the user has to recite a dynamic password created by the system. Each method works differently; you can see our active Vs passive voice biometrics comparison to get a better idea.

As an extra layer of protection, some AI-powered voice biometrics systems like armour365™ are equipped with an anti-spoof layer, which intelligently detects the recorded voice or cloned voice sample and shuts the breach.

Companies Which Already Use Voice Biometrics To Prevent Fraud

Some brands, especially a few banks, have proactively adopted voice recognition technology to protect users’ data and money. Below are some example

• HSBC used voice biometrics to prevent £249 million of customers’ money from frauds recently. HSBC management has also mentioned that the voice biometrics system helped them reduce fraudulent activity by up to 50%. To date, 2.8million HSBC customers are using the voice biometrics system, and the active users count is increasing steadily.
• Lloyds Banking Group had also introduced voice biometrics systems to their users back in 2018, and within a period of one year, more than one million successful usages were recorded.
• Barclays was the earliest adopter of the voice biometrics system. The Barclays group introduced its voice biometrics service in 2012.

There is no doubt that the benefits and returns are just great when a company invests in voice biometrics to prevent identity theft and make sensitive data and financial transactions secure. It does not need any complicated integration or deployment process, and there are no hidden costs involved. What are you waiting for? Embrace cutting-edge voice biometrics technology, fight against cyber frauds, eliminate the risk of identity theft and make a strong brand reputation.

You can try our demo to get a clear-cut idea of how voice biometrics systems works and help you protect customer data.

AI-Powered Voice Biometrics Demo