Scams and fraud are unfortunate hazards of the digital age, and sellers and buyers alike need to follow best practices to protect themselves from fraud online. But even the greatest online controls can be insufficient in a world in which “social engineering” has opened up new vectors for fraud. With imposter scams becoming the most prevalent form of fraud, Square is taking proactive steps in an effort to protect our sellers even when bad activity occurs off of our platforms.
So what is social engineering? Social engineering relies on human nature, using a false pretense to manipulate people into sharing personal information, downloading hacking software, or making other mistakes that compromise their security. Using the information they’ve gained, bad actors can then access or take advantage of individuals, their accounts, or their businesses.
Over the last year, we’ve worked with Pindrop, a leading fraud detection company, to integrate additional protections into our phone customer service support in order to prevent Square sellers from being hacked through these new and increasingly sophisticated ways.
Using machine learning-enabled voice authentication technology, Square works to proactively identify fraudsters before they reach our customer support teams impersonating a seller. We analyze incoming calls to customer service across a diverse set of unique characteristics, including evaluating the phone number through carriers, various acoustic and device characteristics, and, in some cases, voice indicators, to detect high-risk calls and known fraud callers. With this technology we can determine with a high degree of accuracy within a few seconds whether the call is high risk, identify malicious callers, and prevent unauthorized activity on sellers’ accounts.
Keeping sellers and their businesses safe is our highest priority, and our work to-date has been effective at decreasing this type of phone fraud. Still, this work is never done, and we’ll continue to provide additional updates as we launch new, innovative protections for our customers.
Scams and fraud are unfortunate hazards of the digital age, and sellers and buyers alike need to follow best practices to protect themselves from fraud online. But even the greatest online controls can be insufficient in a world in which “social engineering” has opened up new vectors for fraud. With imposter scams becoming the most prevalent form of fraud, Square is taking proactive steps in an effort to protect our sellers even when bad activity occurs off of our platforms.
So what is social engineering? Social engineering relies on human nature, using a false pretense to manipulate people into sharing personal information, downloading hacking software, or making other mistakes that compromise their security. Using the information they’ve gained, bad actors can then access or take advantage of individuals, their accounts, or their businesses.
Over the last year, we’ve worked with Pindrop, a leading fraud detection company, to integrate additional protections into our phone customer service support in order to prevent Square sellers from being hacked through these new and increasingly sophisticated ways.
Using machine learning-enabled voice authentication technology, Square works to proactively identify fraudsters before they reach our customer support teams impersonating a seller. We analyze incoming calls to customer service across a diverse set of unique characteristics, including evaluating the phone number through carriers, various acoustic and device characteristics, and, in some cases, voice indicators, to detect high-risk calls and known fraud callers. With this technology we can determine with a high degree of accuracy within a few seconds whether the call is high risk, identify malicious callers, and prevent unauthorized activity on sellers’ accounts.
Keeping sellers and their businesses safe is our highest priority, and our work to-date has been effective at decreasing this type of phone fraud. Still, this work is never done, and we’ll continue to provide additional updates as we launch new, innovative protections for our customers.