Why businesses need to tackle fraud differently
The Role of Employee Cybersecurity Training in Tackling Business Fraud
At 41%, fraud is now the most experienced UK crime, with 73% of UK adults (40 million people) targeted by scams, with 35% (19 million) losing money to the fraudsters.
A recent UK study found 22% of people surveyed had been a victim of fraud within the previous 12 months. Indeed, the scale of the problem could be far larger, with growing evidence that fraud is significantly under-reported.
For most organisations, the reality of existing desktop based fraud related programmes is that reach is limited to employees with access to corporate technology, who undertake training programmes on an annual basis, as a tick box exercise to demonstrate audit compliance. This means that the corporate resilience of an organisation is only as strong as its weakest link, ignoring the most readily available device in the hands of all employees and supply chain workers – that is their mobile phone.
Fraud and financial crime (including cybercrime) are now considered a threat to national security and form part of the Strategic Policing Requirement in the UK. For instance, indicative data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2023 reports that all socio-demographic groups are vulnerable to different types of fraud, with the greatest indicator of vulnerability to becoming a victim of fraud or cybercrime is already having been successfully targeted.
This means that every type of employee and customer are potentially vulnerable to the different types of fraud that criminals are continually developing – from email phishing to social engineering, from password hacking to dating scams, from identity theft to marketplace fraud by misrepresenting goods listed on online auction sites.
Ailuna believes that effective behavioural change is one of the most important ways businesses and individuals can protect themselves from fraud and financial crime, and cybercrime.
Through our app we can provide users with greater awareness of cyber security and fraud scenarios through the distribution of content, actions, programmes and campaigns that deliver personalised content, nudging and engagement. Our approach to employee cybersecurity training ensures that all users are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need.
Our solution is composed of three elements:
- User develops their skills by taking actions – with multiple actions per theme, linked to development of new habits
- User confirms their level of competence – by taking proof of learning tests
- User engagement linked to rewards – not only by building better habits, but also making sure via regular check-ins that habits are maintained
There are many ways that the capabilities of the Ailuna app – as a structured program based on science and inspired by sports – provide enhanced engagement characteristics across different variables beyond undertaking actions and passing tests to prove competency.
Compared to existing e-Learning training programmes, a gamified app user experience – accessed on the user’s mobile phone – means that employee teams can coalesce to form communities to identify and report scams, use chat to engage with peers and gain rewards with peer group recognition to motivate team members to help each other to better protect themselves.
Fraud prevention and cybersecurity behaviour change actions and programs in development. To be launched during 2nd half of 2024
What we know from behavioural science is that belief follows action, so using the Ailuna app to enable fraud prevention encourages users to take that first step and then continually reinforce those new learned habits. That’s how users who are unaware of their own vulnerability can gain newfound confidence to recognise the risks.
Reporting and engagement for cybersecurity
Reporting of user activity is key – the app provides continual engagement and data tracking of activity to ensure that users stay active using nudge techniques to undertake actions, to gain awareness by identifying scams, pass tests to prove competency, and gain colleague support through messaging. Users improve their personal security confidence levels over time, the hypothesis being that higher scores will correlate to lower future fraud for both individuals and the organisation as a whole. That’s a real win-win.
This type of technological innovation delivers the power of behaviour change across businesses to promote cyber security, GDPR compliance and situational awareness amongst both employees and customers. The potential outcome is to build a human firewall that will prevent fraud and financial crime across society.
