Identifying fraudsters through biometric voice data is not a new technique, but now it appears that financial institutions have adopted it to create blacklists of people trying to gain access to customers' bank accounts.
At this year's Black Hat security conference, Pindrop Security CEO and CTO Vijay Balasubramaniyan gave a presentation on the benefits of acoustic malfunction detection in a bank call center call.
Pindrop Security is a company that provides phone fraud prevention services by analyzing audio anomalies to determine when a call is from a scammer. Balasubramaniyan said the technology recorded a false alarm rate of less than 2% and was successful in more than 80% of cases.
Major banks like JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo rely on voiceprinting to identify fraudsters who impersonate the real account holder when they call the call center. The data is taken from recorded phone conversations between customers and the bank.
Gary Davis from McAfee says this method is proving to be “surprisingly effective in fighting fraudsters” and that biometric blacklists could become accepted in the future.
