FICO and Jersey Telecom Team to Combat APP Fraud

FICO is working with Jersey Telecom (JT) to push back against authorized push payment fraud.

The analytics software company said Wednesday (Sept. 18) it has collaborated with the British Channel Islands-based telecom to develop a solution that allows for “direct, near real-time intervention” to protect customers against fraud.

“FICO and JT worked with leading UK banks to identify the most relevant telephony signals that indicate an active scam,” the company said in a news release.

The term “telephony” refers to the technology that lets people communicate across long distances via things like voice or fax.

FICO’s Customer Communications Service Scam Signal, the release notes, is available in Jersey, the U.K. and Spain, and is the first real-time application of telephony data being used with customer and payment data to prevent authorized push payment (APP) fraud, in which consumers are duped into sending authorized payments to scammers.

“This type of fraud is growing around the world; 2023 losses in the UK alone reached £460 million,” said Clare Messenger, head of mobile intelligence solutions at JT. “To protect customers from being caught by such scams, the new FICO and JT solution enables direct intervention with the customer to quickly determine if a payment should proceed.”

According to the release, FICO’s analysis uncovered strong correlations between a customer’s mobile phone behavior and the likelihood that a scam was occurring.

For instance, a victim might be “actively coached through security or manipulated by a fraudster into making a payment” during a phone conversation, the company said.

Scam Signal, the release added, uses advanced analysis of real-time network data coupled with customer and payment data, during live transactions, to detect and mitigate social engineering attempts aimed at tricking and defrauding consumers.

APP fraud’s prevalence in the U.K. has led regulators there to introduce new reimbursement rules for banks and payment companies. Those rules are set to go into effect next month, requiring financial institutions to repay victims up to 85,000 pounds.

In other fraud prevention news, PYMNTS earlier this week looked at the rising threat of invoice fraud, targeting companies’ finance departments.

Fraudsters “will call your back-office staff who are not trained in payments fraud prevention and try to communicate false information over the phone. And these staffers, they are great, smart, hardworking people, but they do not have the tools and that is why the fraudsters are attacking them,” Ernest Rolfson, founder and CEO of Finexio, told PYMNTS in July.