EXCLUSIVE: Fighting Fraud With Jason Lane-Sellers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

After LexisNexis Risk Solutions hosted an excellent event, Trust:Live 2022, the topic of fraud and how to redefine identity trust has been illuminated for companies across the industry. The event brought together leading fraud experts and futurists to discuss what needs to happen today to reduce risk, emphasising the need for consumers and companies to have mutual trust in this mass digitalisation era. In speaking with Jason Lane-Sellers, Director of Market Planning at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, we took a deep dive into the current state of fraud, the flaws in fraud prevention, and how we should approach the future to best protect all players in our financial ecosystem.

With some arguing that the pandemic gave birth to the global “scamdemic”, it’s important to assess what fraud currently looks like today. Jason Lane-Sellers explained how a key trend is “the vast rise in targeted social engineering scams”, with impersonation, romance, and investment scams affecting citizens of all ages and across various geographies too.

“In our latest Cybercrime Report, we revealed that password reset is the new frontier in fraud across the customer journey. Growth in password reset attacks has massively accelerated in recent times, with 1 in every 8 password reset attempts being an attack in H2 2021, up from 1 in 50 in H1 2020.”

This emphasises the need for companies to be cautious with each individual point in the customer journey and utilise strong fraud detection tools across the whole user journey – including behavioural biometrics technology that can detect changes in the user’s behaviour – to safeguard their customers.

“Historically, what made identifying scams for banks difficult was that targeted social engineering scams make the victim login to their own accounts and send their own money to the fraudster’s account – hence authorising the payment or transfer it themselves”, highlighted Jason Lane-Sellers. Spotting the difference between a trusted customer transacting normally and a trusted customer transacting under the stress of an ongoing scam was tough for previous technologies to identify.”

Investment in various solutions across the user journey is therefore key when addressing this issue, with one example being LexisNexis® ThreatMetrix which utilises behavioural biometrics and other information to help detect whether a transaction is happening under “scam stress”. In conjunction with other elements across the customer journey, this can help identify and stop scams whilst in progress and is a great example of high-level technology being used to assess intricate scamming attempts.

We know consumers value speed and efficiency whilst making a payment, so how can firms provide this whilst counteracting new fraud attempts and remaining compliant in the process?

“Firms need to use tools which enable them to build trust with their customers even as they access or start to interact on the web page or app. Fraud prevention tools that do this are uniquely advantageous because profiling risk is faster and can be more accurate. However, these tools need to have global insight on each digital persona, as only monitoring local (UK) events is not robust enough to build a holistic picture of the persona’s potentially suspicious activity. Fraud prevention tools can only offer this through sufficient depth and breadth of data points and customers across a vast number of industries and regions.”

Whilst this is very much centred around the idea of technological innovation, it’s important to understand the cultural urgency of the matter too, and how a hybrid between the two worlds is essential. After all, customers want a fast, easy experience and to be made to feel safe without being polluted with digital jargon left, right and centre.

“This is where technology combinations, such as utilising digital identity analysis alongside behavioural biometrics can allow the business to authenticate the consumer with little to no friction, in order to both secure the transaction and enhance the customer journey.”

“Culturally, it is important to acknowledge trust as a two-way street. Consumers need to feel safe whilst interacting digitally with any industry, not just banking. Be it social media, TV streaming or shopping online – consumers need to feel trust between themselves and the organisation, which in turn creates customer loyalty to the organisation. One way to ensure trust is by creating trust partnerships across industries such as banking, crypto-exchanges, communications, mobile and media (to name but a few). These partnerships can form the basis of a trust network by sharing relevant data and best practices between organisations, in accordance with relevant regulations, that can be used to flag suspicious behaviour that might indicate fraud and take appropriate action.”

Jason Lane-Sellers paints an important picture here; ultimately, it is unity between the different sectors that is crucial, as it is everybody against fraudsters in this battle. Not coordinating a strong stance against fraud only makes the global effort weaker and with that, the losers are the many victims that lose substantial amounts of money, not to mention the psychological effects that come with the attack.
Jason Lane-Sellers concluded wisely, that “prevention is better than a cure – It’s far better to stop the fraudsters ever infiltrating the financial system than it is to try and stop them once they’re in, so our collective approach should be to keep the doors firmly shut to these individuals through effective analytics-based technology across every step of the online user journey, not just in financial services but across the entire online ecosystem.”