Call center fraud is increasing in scale and sophistication, thanks to AI automating phishing attacks and conjuring up deepfakes. But there’s a simple solution, one that doesn’t bury customers in longer waiting times and more complex security: Verifiable Credentials from Indicio. Instant cryptographic proof that the customer is real and that their voice isn’t fake — with the bonus that your customers can verify you too.
By Helen Garneau
Call center fraud has surged over the past five years both in terms of scam call centers, which the UN describes as a globally-spreading epidemic, and scam customers, with fraudsters leveraging AI tools to fake the identity of real customers and gain access to their accounts.
It’s a rich target area. A call center agent can handle up to 50 calls a day, which translates into millions of interactions across the world. People prefer to deal with live people for account changes, password resets, payments, and discussing sensitive personal data.
When being helpful hurts
Indeed, the features that make a call-center experience “good” for the caller — it’s fast and frictionless, it’s talking to a sympathetic human — are vulnerabilities that make it exploitable to the fraudster. The agent is under pressure to resolve an issue quickly and to the caller’s satisfaction — and move on to the next caller in the line, patiently listening to bad muzak.
Meanwhile, scammers use the same sense of urgency to convince people that they are talking to a real call center or a security department at their bank. To evade skepticism, the scammers use technology to spoof legitimate phone numbers and stolen personal data to convince people that they are talking to real call center agents.
AI has made call center scamming more sophisticated
Social engineering is no longer just someone guessing a mother’s maiden name. Today it includes cloning real voices (deepfakes), creating bots with synthetic, believable voices, and automating phishing attacks at scale.
All of which requires organizations to use good AI to defend against the bad AI, adding the increased cost of authentication to the existing costs of being scammed. Meanwhile, customers need their own new AI technology to monitor spoof call center calls.
But It doesn’t have to be this complex or costly. Verifiable Credential technology from Indicio provides a simple way to reset your call center operations
A better way to know your customer and for them to know you
Verifiable digital identity from Indicio is simpler, faster, and more effective. Instead of relying on shared secrets or fragile checks for authentication, organizations issue their customers with a Verifiable Credential, which the customer stores in a digital wallet.
When the customer calls the center, the center sends a push notification to the caller’s wallet to present the credential. The customer unlocks their wallet using the biometrics already on their device and approves the request with a tap. The call center uses cryptography to confirm that the credential is the one they issued and that it hasn’t been tampered with.
What this means: The agent immediately knows they’re speaking with the legitimate account holder. Just as importantly, the customer knows they’re talking to the real call center.
No passwords.
No security questions.
No SMS one-time passcodes.
Verifiable Credentials can’t be shared, copied, or stolen. And there are multiple ways to bind the credential to the customer, in addition to the customer’s biometric and code access to their phone and digital wallet app.
Knowing me, knowing you — aha!
When customer identity is verified upfront, agents skip the scripts and move straight to solving the problem. That means shorter call times, lower average handle time, and better CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores. Customers get what they need quickly, using only the information required for that interaction.
The same verified identity works across phone, web, chat, and even in-person interactions, creating a consistent experience instead of fragmented checks in every channel and it can be reused across interactions and future calls without friction.
Stop social engineering and AI deepfakes in their tracks
Deepfake audio is one of the fastest-growing threats to call centers. Voice cloning tools are cheap, fast, and frighteningly accurate. Traditional authentication has no defense against a convincing fake voice paired with leaked personal data.
Indicio changes that. For higher-assurance use cases, a verified customer’s voice can be captured during enrollment and issued to them in their credential. During a call, the customer speaks and presents their voice biometric credential for comparison and verification. . No biometric databases. No raw voice recordings stored. No compliance headaches. No need for complex voice analysis. Each customer has a cryptographic proof of their voice for instant cross checking.
Simple to deploy; ready for what’s next
Organizations sign a license, deploy Proven software in the cloud or on-prem, and start issuing credentials with hands-on support from Indicio. No rip-and-replace. No new apps for customers. Wallet capabilities can be embedded directly into existing mobile experiences with our mobile SDK.
As regulators move away from insecure methods like SMS OTPs, and attackers continue to exploit legacy authentication, verifiable digital identity gives call centers a way forward: faster for customers, safer for businesses, and built for the realities of technology-driven fraud.
Call center authentication doesn’t need to be painful. With verifiable identity, it finally doesn’t have to be.
Stop fraud without slowing customers down. Contact Indicio to see how verifiable digital identity changes call center authentication.
