Fraudsters target organisations in all sectors with large scale automated attacks to gain access to customer details and accounts. To fight back, businesses also need a cross-sector approach.
Fraudsters use contact centres at multiple stages during a fraud, often to gather the data that makes later attacks possible. Frequently, these attacks take place outside the contact centre in other customer channels, or indeed in other companies or sectors.
Smartnumbers data confirms this – recent analysis found that 68% of the fraudsters our clients identified have targeted more than one Smartnumbers consortium member. Contact centres are being exploited by fraudsters who use them as gateways to sensitive customer information. We know from our work with organisations in the airline, telco, banking and insurance sectors that these attacks are widespread and growing in scale.
To join the conversation and find out more about how Smartnumbers customers collaborate across sectors, register for our 2026 Consortium Conference.
The sector landscape
Across sectors, we see the same playbook repeated thousands of times by organised groups of fraudsters. We see bots are increasingly probing IVR systems to steal or validate stolen personal data: if a fraudster knows a person’s birth year and month, a bot can easily make 31 calls to find the correct day.
We also see calls to agents, typically low profile social engineering exploits, such as checking an address or adding a secondary number. Each action looks harmless in isolation and is often missed, but collectively they can be signs of a complex organised crime operation.
Fraudsters do not recognise industry boundaries. Data validated in one sector can also be used in another. For example, telco customer account records can be gathered to help bypass security with their bank. And stolen card details can be used to make last minute airline ticket purchases.
Our insurance customers see calls from “ghost brokers” – fraudsters setting up policies using stolen IDs that will be used to make later claims. Similar ghost brokers are reported by other industries, setting up bogus mortgages or buying airline tickets to resell.
In telcos, fraudsters hack accounts to add extra devices or enable SIM swaps that allow them to then hijack a victim’s mobile number and intercept one-time passcodes for use in card fraud. It’s a patchwork of vulnerabilities that fraudsters exploit, often collaborating with other groups to pool their expertise.
In each case, spotting this activity starts with a flagged phone call. Perhaps the caller’s number is on a denylist; perhaps repeated calls from this number have been received recently. Perhaps it’s worth investigating other calls made by this number.
Collaboration is non-negotiable
Fraudsters share information freely, but businesses rarely do. Yet it’s the only way to fight back. And for Smartnumbers customers, known as consortium members, who have access to each other’s contact centre fraud intelligence through the platform, the opportunity is there and the value is clear.
Flagged numbers turn intelligence into prevention. One mortgage fraud investigator explains: “By using [numbers flagged by other companies] as part of our deny list, we’ve identified a multitude of different frauds around particular mortgage brokers”. These are ghost-broking patterns that were previously hard to track.
The same gangs hit telcos, banks and airlines within days; the only credible response is to act like a network, too. Collect early signals, share them quickly across teams and widen the circle to adjacent sectors.
Another retail bank that does this well has made the contact-centre fraud team a hub for fraud signals. “We reach out to other teams about fraud they’re seeing, then go hunting for phone numbers,” says one of their investigators. “We’ve become a bit of a hub for other fraud areas to refer to.” The result is earlier flags on repeat callers and the ability to connect multiple numbers to the same criminal gangs.
Tackling a systemic threat
The fraudster profile features in our platform go some way to bridge these gaps for customers, enabling fraud investigators in contact centres to share intelligence with each other on malicious callers and tactics they use. But for intelligence to be even more useful requires buy-in from the whole organisation – and more widely across sectors. As the pool of insights grows larger, so our defences grow stronger.
There are still gaps in many organisations’ fraud defences. Closing the gaps demands collective action, because when fraud crosses sectors, so must the response.
To join the conversation and find out more about how Smartnumbers customers collaborate across sectors, register for our 2026 Consortium Conference.
