Preventing Fraud

As the number of logins per user grows, users increasingly reuse passwords across numerous online accounts, meaning hackers can gain access to multiple datasets with a single breach of credentials – with serious costs to all legitimate parties. With nearly 60% of consumers worldwide having experienced online fraud at some point, there is now widespread recognition of the need for multifactor authentication solutions to minimise the potential fallout from individual breaches. 

Among the inherent advantages mobile operators possess in the identity space is their ability to support multifactor authentication solutions, due both to their knowledge of user attributes and the capacity of mobile networks to be easily integrated into many other technologies. Operators are subject to rigorous regulatory requirements to ‘know your customer’ – this means they hold considerable amounts of identity information on their subscribers as a matter of law, and are established as trusted custodians of that information. 

This allows them to check a credential entered by the user against such datasets and identify anomalies which could indicate fraud.  UK operators EE, Three, O2, and Vodafone, have collaborated for example to launch an antifraud product for businesses seeking to enhance the security of their registration processes, which validates a customer’s identity by verifying their attributes against their mobile phone number. 

With fraud and cybercrime estimated to cost organisations an estimated $5.2 trillion globally by 2025, solutions of this kind – which can be turned to a wide variety of business use cases across sectors with ease – are set to become increasingly sought after.