How One Agency Fought Back Against Rising Contact Center Fraud
Ketuman Sardesai
Senior Product Marketing Manager • June 17, 2025 (UPDATED ON June 18, 2025)
1 minute read
For many organizations, the contact center is a vital customer service hub, making it a prime target for fraudsters. As the first point of contact for many customer interactions, it’s where attackers often attempt to exploit weak authentication processes or impersonate legitimate users.
Thanks to AI-powered tools, fraud attacks are getting faster, more organized, and more convincing. Meanwhile, the defenses many contact centers rely on, like manual reviews or knowledge-based authentication (KBA), weren’t built to handle the volume or sophistication of today’s attacks.
If you’re still relying on security questions or reviewing suspicious calls after the fact, you’re likely to detect fraud when it’s too late and frustrate legitimate customers.
So, how do you modernize fraud detection without adding more friction to the customer experience?
Contact center fraud is more rampant than ever
Pindrop data indicates that in recent years, contact centers across industries have seen a surge in fraud:1
Fraud now occurs in 1 in every 599 incoming calls on average
This represents a 26% increase in fraud over 2023, and a 100% increase compared to 2021
Today, fraud attempts occur approximately every 46 seconds within contact centers
Yet many organizations still rely on outdated tools that are reactive, not proactive:
53% of fraudsters passed KBAs (Knowledge-Based Authentication)
22% successfully bypassed OTPs (One-Time Passwords)
Legacy authentication systems may flag fraud after a claim is paid or a customer account is compromised, but by then, the damage is done.
Modern fraud detection for modern threats
To keep up, modern contact centers need fraud detection that’s:
Proactive: Detects fraud before it reaches a live agent
Real-time: Works instantly, without waiting for enrollment or call history
Frictionless: Minimizes extra steps for legitimate customers
Integrated: Fits easily into existing call flows and infrastructure
This is where fraud detection that incorporates voice analysis, device intelligence, and behavioral risk scoring can make a difference by flagging high-risk calls the moment they come in.
One agency’s journey to smarter fraud detection
“You always need the balance of keeping your legitimate customers happy with stopping your fraudulent customers. Pindrop allowed us to do both, and we could customize it to fit within our system. That was one big selling point for us when we implemented it”
– Charles Boyd, Supervisor at VEC
What does this shift look like in practice?
A state agency responsible for handling unemployment claims—one that serves nearly a million calls a year—faced exactly this challenge. After years of relying on legacy authentication tools, the team needed a way to:
Spot fraud during the call, not weeks later
Reduce strain on agents reviewing suspicious cases
Improve the experience for genuine claimants
They deployed Pindrop® Protect, and in less than a year, they transformed their fraud strategy. The results: real-time detection, faster investigations, and nearly a million dollars saved from potential fraud losses.1
Read the full case study here to see how they did it, and what your team can learn from their approach.
1All data from Pindrop 2025 Voice Intelligence + Security Report
