The Communications Fraud Control Association’s annual meeting and educational event was held last week (June 14 – 16) at the Allerton hotel in Chicago, IL. The Communications Fraud Control Association is made up of communications and security professionals, fraud investigators, analysts, and managers, law enforcement, those in risk management, and many others. As an organization, they started out as a small group of communications professionals from the major long distance carriers who were looking for a better and more collaborative way to address communications fraud. Now, almost 30 years later, they’ve got over 60 members – a great representation of the industry yet still a nimble size. From what I hear, this makes for a specialized but quite effective “working” conference.
Unfortunately I was not able to attend the conference but my colleague, Kennis Wong, attended and presented on the topic of Account Takeover and existing account fraud. It’s an area of fraud and compliance that Experian has spent some R&D on recently, with some interesting findings. In the past, we’ve been more focused on helping clients prevent new account and application fraud. It might seem like an interesting time to expand into this area, with some studies citing large drops in existing account fraud (2011 Identity Fraud Survey Report by Javelin). BUT…consumer costs in this area are way UP, not to mention the headline-grabbing news stories about small business account takeover. Which means it’s still a large pain point for financial institutions. Experian’s research and development in existing account fraud, combined with our expertise in fraud scores and identity theft detection, has resulted in a new product which is launching at the end of this month: Precise ID for Customer Management. Stay tuned for more exciting details.
