For years now, accepting a certain percentage of fraud loss has been a way of doing business. That’s largely because criminals have gotten so good at avoiding detection that companies have had no choice but to eat losses they couldn’t recover. But while yesterday’s fraud losses made little impact on annual revenues, things are vastly different today.

With fraud and other social engineering crimes outpacing risk mitigation strategies across all customer channels — costing U.S. businesses $62 billion a year — organizations can no longer afford to accept fraud as a price of doing business. It’s simply costing them too much business, negatively impacting customer trust, and damaging their brands, all at the same time.

 While customer channels like the telephone have been protected by telephonic authentication like knowledge-based authentication (KBA), the methods that we know today are dying. In fact, they can work to the strength of criminals, who collect personal information online and use it to socially engineer businesses and financial institutions. That said, companies that still rely solely on traditional authentication tools that can be easily defeated are putting both their business and customers at risk.

Today, advancements in Caller ID and ANI spoofing undermine the reliability of multi-factor identity authentication, thereby threatening the telephone channel as a secure way to conduct business. In TrustID’s new white paper, “The Three Types of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Caller ID,” we provide detailed accounts of how Caller ID spoofing not only has a greater impact on business revenues, but is also compromising downstream decision making and creating new application risks in the financial services industry. The paper covers:

• The use of calling party numbers for location and identity authentication
• Why Caller ID and ANI spoofing may be putting your enterprise, customers and bottom line at risk, and what you can do to stop it
• How automatic caller authentication solutions can combat the growing spoofing threat to prevent fraud and increase call center efficiencies
• Real-world business use case

Overcoming the lies that criminals engineer to perpetrate fraud over the telephone is essential to stopping these costly threats. So, how can a contact center agent tell when a caller is lying? They can’t, even when interrogating them with a bunch of personal questions. There are just too many Caller ID spoofing tools that make it easy for criminals to deceive phone representatives.

While innovative spoofing and social engineering threats will continue to impact business profits, they don’t have to. There is an identity authentication tool that enables businesses and banking institutions to recognize thieves before the call is answered. The TrustID® network-based Physical Caller Authentication tool does this by validating the incoming Caller ID and ANI with physical information without relying on KBA or personally identifiable information (PII), both of which are no longer predictive for positively identifying customers over the telephone.