3 Tips for Building Your Fraud Team

Fighting fraud is not a singular role. Rather, successful fraud fighting begins when it becomes a priority throughout an organization. Every employee should understand the value of fraud prevention and the impact of fraud on the company, its customers, and its reputation. 

As you’re building a dedicated fraud team, there will be certain objectives you’ll need to achieve to keep your fraud prevention efforts on track. Here are our top tips on how to build a fraud team from the ground up.

Develop Initial Fraud Policies

When companies build a fraud team from zero, they first need policies to guide team activities and decisions. This process varies for every company, depending on several factors:

• How fraud is likely to occur within your organization
• How fraud team members can verify fraud has taken place
• The appropriate responses when fraud is detected

Fraud policies will serve as a guiding light for all fraud team members. Once the initial policies are established, they should be continually reviewed, updated, and expanded as new needs arise. Many companies begin with hiring a fraud policy development manager rather than bringing in a consultant. This way, you can begin your fraud program with an in-house expert who can get to know your company’s unique fraud landscape and make changes over time.

Hire Dedicated Fraud Team Members

For some employees, fighting fraud will be a small but mighty part of their daily duties. For your fraud team, though, fraud detection and prevention will be their central focus every day.

Fraud review duties shouldn’t be pushed onto other departments (usually customer service). This increases their existing workload, which can lead to oversight and missed opportunities. 

What’s more, there could be a conflict of interest when the people who communicate directly with your customers are also tasked with sorting out fraudulent inquiries from legitimate concerns. Customer service teams’ role is to make doing business as fluid and friction-free as possible, which is counterintuitive to fraud detection. 

The best approach is to build a fraud team whose sole duties are to review behaviors and activities. This avoids a conflict of interest, ensures duties are fairly distributed, and allows those team members to become the in-house experts of fraud detection.

Augment Your Operations with Machine Learning

Fraud is an ever-evolving beast, one with which it is difficult for humans to keep pace. New techniques of evasion emerge all the time, allowing criminals to conduct illicit activities under the radar at the organization’s expense. 

To supplement your fraud team, consider outsourcing some tasks to machine learning. This allows you to maximize your people resources and scale fraud detection and prevention efforts without incurring additional personnel costs as your company grows. 

In fraud prevention, machine learning fills gaps by reviewing fraud cases in real time across multiple channels, making quick decisions, and allowing fraud team members to focus on higher priorities. 

To learn more about building a fraud team and machine learning’s role, download our new ebook: How to Build an Effective Fraud Team.