Like other sectors, insurers’ digital channels are typically well protected from fraud – the blind spot lies in the telephony channel, where the human element leaves organisations exposed. Read on to understand how fraudsters target insurance company contact centres and how to prevent it.
The Association of British Insurers’(ABI) figures reveal £1.1 billion in bogus claims were detected in 2023, plus a 17% increase in fraudulent applications totaling 583,000, as scammers continually look for new opportunities to perpetrate their crimes. The chances are that many of these fraudsters will have touched the insurer’s customer contact centre at some point.
Professional and organised fraudsters will abuse any vulnerabilities they find in systems and processes to defraud insurance companies for financial gain, adapting their approach to the changing environment. And our work with the insurance sector shows that contact centres – which are often more vulnerable than online channels – remain a popular target.
As we expand our customer community across several sectors, we’re gaining increasing insight into how fraudsters are exploiting the telephony channel to gain access to customer accounts and commit fraud – and we have the tools to help insurance companies to combat it. Read on to find out out how.
Criminals regularly exploit the relative vulnerability of contact centres (and contact centre agents) to initiate new quotes, to set up existing policies for takeover and at the claims stage, even if the policy is typically managed online. They operate under the radar and at scale.
Spotting calls from fraudsters
The challenge in the contact centre is to find a fast, frictionless way to identify calls from fraudsters and stop their activities that does not impact customer experience. This can be tricky using standard verification checks, especially if the ‘customer’ is calling from an unknown or withheld number and seems genuine. But there are certain essential elements that can help policy sales and claims teams stay ahead of the game in the contact centre:
- A reliable internal denylist of phone numbers known to be used by fraudsters
- Unmasking capabilities when callers withhold their phone numbers
- Intelligence about fraudsters operating across multiple organisations, not just your own
- The ability to identify suspicious calling patterns before numbers are known to be fraudulent
- Access to structured fraud intelligence from multiple companies, including methods and fraud types
- A motivated, well-integrated team of fraud investigators ready to connect the dots
With these elements and the right technology in place, it is possible to spot and flag suspicious callers in the contact centre and stop fraud before it impacts your customers and your growth targets.
How Smartnumbers can help
The Smartnumbers Protect platform offers insurers an additional layer of fraud protection by helping identify and flag suspicious calls in the contact centre, before they are answered.
The platform does this by examining call signalling data to unmask withheld numbers and cross-checking them with local and Smartnumbers consortium members’ intelligence on numbers and tactics used by criminals. It also applies machine learning techniques to analyse caller behaviour for unusual patterns, such as multiple calls in quick succession. Flagged calls and the policies they relate to can then be referred for investigation.
Once the phone numbers used by fraudsters become known to an organisation, they can often be linked to multiple customer accounts and seen targeting multiple organisations and sectors at the same time. Smartnumbers Annual Fraud Review 2025 found that 68% of the fraud cases flagged by our platform had targeted more than one of our clients.
Deeper analysis of calls flagged with these risk factors, and the policies the calls are associated with, helps fraud teams gain deeper insight into the fraudsters targeting them and the scale of their activity.
This enables them to:
Stop insurance fraud in its tracks
Put a hold on quotes, policies and claims that have been confirmed as fraud. Stop further calls from numbers associated with fraudulent activity, before new fraud is committed.
Get a complete picture of fraud in your organisation
Understand what types of fraudulent activity are taking place in the telephony channel. Build out fraudster profiles with numbers and tactics used and share with other internal and external fraud teams.
Maximise contact centre efficiency
Spot fraud risk the moment a call is received and pass to fraud teams for quick resolution. Enable contact centre agents to deal with genuine new customers, policiues and claims without the risk that it might be fraud.
Collaborate across organisations
Our shared fraud intelligence is at the core of our solution. All Smartnumbers clients become members of our intelligence-sharing consortium. Fraud investigators from multiple organisations in several sectors can operate as one interconnected fraud team, cross checking and validating suspected fraudsters and the numbers and tactics they use.
To find out more about how Smartnumbers have helped protect a UK insurance company contact centre, get The Proof.
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