BioCatch Warns Against Duplicate Email Fraud

BioCatch’s Frances Zelazny is calling attention to a particularly pernicious form of fraud, in which fraudsters clone invoices and send duplicate emails in which all of the information is exactly the same, except for the desired payment destination. The victim thinks they’re paying a legitimate invoice, but is instead sending a large payment to an unknown party.

To make matters worse, the victim usually needs to provide personal approval for the transaction, which means that everything appears to be legal when it goes through. That can make the stolen funds nearly impossible to recover even though they were sent to the wrong location.

A growing amount of cybercrime attacks that human element, tricking people to go through with a fraudulent transaction. The attacks are often quite sophisticated, allowing fraudsters to get away with large sums of money, especially if they are able to compromise a business email account. According to the FBI, the frequency of cyber attacks went up 14.3 percent, but the losses associated with those attacks went up 90 percent, which demonstrates their effectiveness.

Of course, BioCatch is pitching its behavioral biometrics technology as a potential solution to the problem, providing continuous authentication that is able to tell when an unauthorized individual has gained access to an account. The company has previously called attention to the threat of business email compromise, and detailed several use cases in in which behavioral biometrics could help prevent such fraud.

The BioCatch platform was recently added to the ForgeRock Marketplace.

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August 7, 2019 – by Eric Weiss