Analyst Chat #122: How to Deal with the Increase and Complexity in Consumer Fraud

Welcome to the KuppingerCole Analyst Chat. I'm your host. My name is Matthias Reinwarth, I'm Lead Advisor and Senior Analyst with KuppingerCole Analysts. My guest today for the second time for a short series of episodes is John Tolbert. He is Lead Analyst for KuppingerCole in Seattle, USA. Hi, John.

Hello, Matthias.

Hi, John. We want to continue this second episode of this short series - and it ends already with that - talking about technologies that are out there for quite some while already but they have not yet properly arrived within the enterprises, within the organizations. And this time we want to talk about a technology, a group of technologies, a family of functionalities that we have been talking about in an earlier episode when we covered your research on that topic, we want to talk about FRIP which stands for Fraud Reduction Intelligence Platforms. So it's really about mitigating the risk of falling subject or falling victim to fraud. And how is the situation in the field when it comes to fraud and fraud prevention, fraud detection?

You know, I think unfortunately, we all kind of have this feeling that it's one of those things that gets a little bit worse and worse all the time, and I think that that's actually true. Some statistics can bear that out. Cybercrime is a big problem. There are lots of different kinds of fraud out there. The numbers of victims and the amounts taken does tend to increase pretty significantly over time. There are lots of people, you know, the good guys out there that are trying to help protect businesses from that. They are trying to keep up with the fraudsters and thwart them everywhere that they can by developing technologies that are progressively better detecting those kinds of fraud. But the fraudsters themselves are constantly evolving their strategies and their tactics, looking in different kinds of targets and making use of things that we've talked about on the security side for years. AI, machine learning, these are tools that are also in the hands of sophisticated fraudsters. We typically think of financial organizations as being top targets. And that's because that's where the money is. But we've learned in recent years that pretty much anything that is convertible into any form of currency can be a target, too, especially if there's a way to access it remotely online. We've seen attacks against insurance companies, health care companies, retailers, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality. Think about frequent flier accounts or loyalty accounts, anything that could be turned into some sort of a cash reward or of any kind of value that can be converted into any other value. That's something that is a target for fraudsters. And there are a number of different tools out there that can work with various online retailers, financial institutions and other kinds of industries to help prevent those different kinds of fraud.

We can talk about account takeover fraud. It's one of the biggest types of fraud that organizations have to deal with. That's simply a fraudster getting a hold of a legitimate account and usually draining it or doing something nefarious like that. And for that, as in the last episode, we talked about multifactor authentication as a way to help prevent that. There's also account opening fraud where a fraudster will take bits and pieces of information about a real user and then use that to create a fake account, you know, where they can use that like a mutual account, move money around or something like that. There's a long list of other kinds of fraud that we as consumers probably see hints of everyday through spam and phishing messages and other evidences. One of the things that we're going to revisit the Fraud Reduction Intelligence Platform subject as a research subject in a couple of months. We're also going to be talking about that at EIC, the European Identity and Cloud Conference coming up in May. Just to give you a quick hint of the different kinds of fraud beyond account take over and account opening, we've seen things like sending out fake invoices, fake delivery notices to consumers in an attempt to try to phish them to get them to go to a malicious website and put their credentials in, fake tax refund notices, fake everything, fake tech support scams, and these are just some of the examples of the things that we want to try to cover in addition to standard fair, account take over, account opening fraud that may be focused on finance only. You know, there's a huge component that can be perpetrated by bots. So there'll be a bot detection, bot management element to this. And, yeah, I just want to encourage the listeners to join us for EIC, we will be doing an overview of fraud reduction intelligence platforms. And as we learn what's going on in the market, we will certainly relate that.

Absolutely. And it's really spreading the word about the risk that's behind that, but also that there are technologies around which can support in preventing that. And detecting that at real time. So that's really possible to reduce this risk in general. And you've mentioned it already. We highly encourage people to take part in the EIC in May between the 10th and 13th of May in Berlin, either in-person on site or virtually through our life platform so that you can listen in, even while not being in Berlin. Then of course, there's lots of research done by you on our website as well. And listen to the earlier episode of the podcast where the basics are explained as well, but nevertheless nothing is as good as a life event at EIC, of course. Thank you very much, John, for raising that topic, for explaining the developments and that we will continue to cover this area. So looking forward to seeing you in Berlin and looking forward to seeing some of the audience here as well, in Berlin or to listen in via the platform. Thanks again, John, for being my guest today and for raising these important topics. Sometimes technology is around and its useful and it's not yet leveraged in the way it could be.

Thanks, everyone, and we'll look forward to seeing you in Berlin or online.

Thank you, John. And bye bye.