The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States and the Financial Fraud Action UK (FFA UK) have each warned of the increase in phishing scams, in which fraudsters spoof an e-mail message from an executive, tricking someone at a lower level within the company to make a bogus payment to the fraudster. The FBI estimates that these scams have cost organisations over £2bn in losses over the past three years.
Unlike traditional scams, spoofed emails rarely set off anti-fraud alerts due to the fact they are well researched targeted phishing scams that are aimed at specific individuals rather than part of a mass mail out.
A is that there are no anti fraud technology solutions available that help them to prevent this fraud from occurring and as the average loss is around £50,000 without any recourse to getting the money back, it is becoming a serious problem, according to Facebanx. Its anti-fraud product, live streaming combined with face biometrics, hopes to fill this technology gap.
A director within an organisation can now live stream to their accounts department a broadcast of them agreeing to the transfer and it can be watched in real time or played back later to confirm that money transfer request was in fact official. A director can hold up their company ID card within the live stream to confirm they are in fact who they say they are in case the person is not well known within the organisation.
As an added layer of security, the director would have to log-in to their account to make the live broadcast by using a combination of face recognition and voice recognition. By using biometrics to access their account to create the live stream, it would make it hard for any fraudster to spoof, the firm says.
It claims that some banks are looking to integrate this technology into their corporate accounts so that it can be used to prevent phishing fraud.
Matthew Silverstone CEO of Facebanx said: “I have been incredibly surprised at how positively companies have taken to this technology. The first company I showed the solution to, a global bank, immediately requested we run a a pilot as it solved a particular fraud issue that they had which no other technology seemed to resolve.”
A video of the product can be seen at www.facebanx.com.
