Patent Issued for System and method for intercepting and interdicting telephone fraud (USPTO 11943387): Sentien Corporation

2024 APR 16 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- A patent by the inventors Funk, Thomas (Littleton, CO, US), Lingayat, Sunil (Issaquah, WA, US), Wolinsky, Jonathan (Stamford, CT, US), Wolinsky, Robert (Fairfield, CT, US), filed on May 19, 2022, was published online on March 26, 2024, according to news reporting originating from Alexandria, Virginia, by NewsRx correspondents.

Patent number 11943387 is assigned to Sentien Corporation (Stamford, Connecticut, United States).

The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: “Telephone Fraud

“Each year, millions of elderly Americans fall victim to some type of financial fraud or confidence scheme, including romance, lottery, and sweepstakes scams, to name a few. In committing the fraud, criminals gain the trust of their targets and communicate with them directly via computer, phone, and the mail; or indirectly through the TV and radio. Once successful, fraudsters are likely to keep a scheme going because of the prospect of significant financial gain. Fraudsters commonly retarget victims, exposing them to continued and greater levels of loss.

“Seniors are often targeted because they tend to be trusting and polite. They also usually have financial savings, own a home, and have good credit-all of which make them attractive to fraudsters. In addition, seniors commonly may suffer from varying degrees of cognitive decline, therefore, making them potentially more trusting and less able to identify a fraudulent proposition.

“Furthermore, seniors may be less inclined to report fraud because they do not know how, or they may be too ashamed at having been scammed. Seniors might also be concerned that their relatives will lose confidence in their abilities to manage their own financial affairs and, as a consequent, lose financial independence. And when an elderly victim does report a crime, they may be unable to supply detailed information for law enforcement to act upon.

“The U.S. government and various private institutions have set up hotlines for reporting elder financial abuse. Unfortunately, the vast majority of elderly suffer varying levels of cognitive decline and, as such, may never become aware of the financial fraud; sometimes until all their savings have been lost. Consequently, hotlines have not stemmed the tide of senior financial fraud.

“Fraudsters rely on the cognitive decline affecting seniors and their inability to either recognize a crime has occurred or report enough information to authorities. Consequently, senior financial fraud is a very lucrative business where perpetrators have little to no prospect of being caught or receiving punishment. Many scam artists are domiciled outside the U.S.

“Various U.S. government and NGO estimates place senior financial fraud between $30-$50 billion, annually, and there are an estimated 3.5 million senior fraud instances in the U.S. each year. These estimates may be low because much of the fraud is never reported. Since most seniors cannot or intentionally do not report a fraud, and their adult children may never know about the fraud or discover the fraud after it is too late, it is really difficult to know the full extent of the problem. Some authorities say the actual national loss could be double the estimates.

“Elder abuse victims-including those who suffer financial exploitation-die at a rate three times faster than those who haven’t been abused. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call elder financial fraud a public health crisis.

“In more recent times with so much of senior’s money being lost to fraud each year, there have been a few attempts at designing systems, including apps, that look at the financial activity of seniors in order to alert adult children and financial caregivers of suspicious behavior. According to experts, getting seniors to pass access or control of their assets, cash and property over to their adult children or allowing adult children to peer into a parent’s finances is like getting them to give up the keys to the car, which seniors fear is the “end of the line.” While passing independence to adult children, many of whom may not be trusted in the mind of a parent, is a bridge too far for many seniors. To date, these apps have had little to no impact on the huge losses piling up due to senior financial fraud.

“Many seniors lose huge amounts of money to fraud because of fear and distrust of family members, whether justified or unjustified, and the scam artists know this and, in fact, the fraudsters rely upon that disconnect between family members. Not many seniors will be letting their children use these systems and, more importantly, such apps are generally a post facto service because by the time suspicious activity is reported via an app and the senior or family member can take action, the money is gone, usually to offshore environs with little or no recourse to U.S. authorities.

“According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, financial judgment can start to falter before normal cognition does, regardless of whether the person was savvy with money when he or she was younger. In other words, faltering financial judgment can happen even when the person seems normal. Recently, William Webster, a former director of the CIA and FBI, a 90-year-old senior, was the subject of a financial lottery scam that included threats of violence, which suggests that financial scams can happen to anyone.

“With the average estimated loss of a financial scam at $23,000, $43,700, and $39,000 for the most targeted senior demographic segments, ages 60-69, 70-79 and 80 and up, respectively, the senior fraud industry is well capitalized to open and grow a myriad of vectors unhindered by the new wireless and telephone rules designed to stem the billions of robocalls Americans receive each month.

“In recent years, the telecom industry has implemented a technology approach to slow the billions of robocalls. The system is called STIR and SHAKEN. STIR, or Secure Telephony Identity Revisited, functions as a call-certifying protocol. While SHAKEN, or Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENS, functions to verify the caller’s right to use their phone numbers. However, the STIR and SHAKEN protocols are no silver bullet solution to stopping senior fraud and have had little impact on reducing the annual loses of senior financial fraud because STIR and SHAKEN are designed to address spam calling using spoofed telephone numbers not senior fraud calls. Additionally, even if the protocols alerted seniors of suspicious telephone calls, it is unlikely a senior suffering cognitive decline would reliably react to such notifications. A single fraud call getting through to a targeted senior could result in loss of life’s savings, independence, and possibly early death as a direct effect of the loss of savings.

“Crucial to understanding the senior fraud process, a telephone communication is generally used at some point in the financial fraud program, however, a phone call is not always the first step. Much of senior fraud relies on confidence-building inducements to get seniors to call the fraud businesses. Inducements may come from many non-threatening vectors, such as: television ads, friendly emails, popup computer messages, computer advertisements, personal letters and junk mail, or acquaintances. The bottom line is that STIR and SHAKEN protocols are not designed to address the myriad of vectors associated with senior financial fraud.

“The NCOA (National Council on Aging) lists the Top 10 Financial Scams Targeting Seniors as: (1) Medi-care/health insurance fraud, (2) counterfeit prescription drugs, (3) funeral & cemetery scams, (4) fake anti-aging products (5) IRS Phone scams, (6) internet fraud, (7) investment/timeshare schemes, (8) homeowner/reverse mortgage scams, (9) sweepstakes & lottery scams, and (10) the grandparent scam. Many of these scams do not require telephone solicitation to be effective, but will typically use telephone communications at some point in the transaction. The fraudsters are very creative and extremely persistent.

“With the elderly population growing to 22% of the U.S. general populace and seniors racking up $30-$50 billion in losses annually, elder fraud is a significant and growing problem with no solutions. Presently, the U.S. government considers elder fraud to be the largest fraud segment in the United States.

“Telephone Call Management Systems

“Call centers receive calls from customers who generally have inquiries, complaints, or other concerns with accounts, products, or otherwise. When a customer service representative at a company receives a call from a customer, the customer service representative typically handles the call to assist a customer. In situations where the customer service representative desires to transfer a call of a customer to a different department, for example, the call center telecommunications equipment provides a call transfer feature, where the customer service representative is able to transfer a call directly to a telephone line of another customer service representative (or manager). In the event where a conference call is desired or needed with the customer and multiple parties, the call center telecommunications equipment includes 3-way calling capabilities to add a third party, such as a supervisor. Some call center communications equipment supports a conference bridge in which multiple parties, such as the customer, customer service representative, and manager, may use the conference bridge to conduct a discussion with more than two people as an alternative to a conventional 3-way call.”

There is additional summary information. Please visit full patent to read further.

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent, NewsRx journalists also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “To address and combat senior financial fraud, a system and method for monitoring telephone calls for likely fraudulent communications by scam artists, and, when appropriate, interdict the telephone call in order to protect the senior from falling victim to fraud. More particularly, a system and method may enable telephone users to purchase or subscribe to a fraud-call monitoring and interdiction service (hereinafter “monitoring service”) that may operate on a computer network and use artificial intelligence, such as neural network technologies, in performing real-time analyses of telephone call conversations. The system may “sniff” telephonic communications of a protected caller, user, enrollee, customer, participant, or subscriber (hereinafter “subscriber”) inbound and outbound calling, analyze the communications for language, words, phrases, voice biometric data, calling and pattern data, related technical indicia (e.g., call metadata), and other call data, for example, in order to make contemporaneous and predictive assessments that can be utilized to determine the relative safety of a telephone call.

“In one embodiment, a subscriber’s inbound calls are routed through a computer gateway, or fraud-call monitoring system. The system may selectably communicate an announcement, such as a recorded message, commonly known as early media, announcing to the caller or recipient, that the recipient of the call, the subscriber, is protected by the fraud-call monitoring system. In addition, the caller’s telephone call information, which may include headers, metadata and other routing and identifying indicia as is known in the art, may be analyzed to determine if the call is a known “good” or “bad” telephone number stored in a database of the system, or a potential risk or unknown telephone call. The “good” and “bad” telephone numbers may be organized and stored as “whitelisted” and “backlisted” telephone numbers, (i) provided by the subscriber or surrogate, (ii) acquired through third parties, and (iii) automatically or semi-automatically accumulated by the fraud-call monitoring system. In the event the fraud-call monitoring system determines the telephone number may be a known “bad” number (i.e., a number known or determined to be associated with a fraudster), the fraud-call monitoring system may automatically terminate the telephone call without involving the subscriber. Alternatively, the fraud-call monitoring system may initiate a late media message, or cancellation message, informing the caller of the monitoring system’s determination, provide remedying information and, thereafter, terminate the call, again without involving the subscriber.

“In the event the monitoring system determines the inbound or outbound call is a known good number (i.e., a number known or believed to not be associated with a fraudster), the monitoring system may permit the telephone call to connect to a subscriber destination, with or without any early media message and, thereafter, cease any further examination of the telephone call. In an alternative embodiment, the monitoring system may continue monitoring the call until the parties-the subscriber and caller-exit the call.

“However, the monitoring system, by elimination of known good and bad telephone numbers, may, thereafter, classify the call as either an “unknown,” or a “risk” call. In the event a subscriber inbound or outbound telephone call is classified as a risk call, the monitoring system may initiate an early media message notifying the inbound caller (to the subscriber) or the recipient of the subscriber’s outbound call of the fraud monitoring service activity while connecting the parties’ telephone call. The message engine may be configured to generate a simple recording or function as an IVR (interactive voice response) intelligence engine. The message engine may be configured to play the message periodically (e.g., time-based, such as monthly or at selected points in a telephone call) to particular callers or recipients or aperiodically (e.g., event-based, such as every certain number of calls, randomly during a call, or otherwise). In addition to completing the connection to the subscriber, the monitoring system may initiate the risk call examination system that operates in real-time, near real-time, or post call environment.

“The monitoring system may utilize a neural network to perform the call examination service. The neural network may be composed of, for example, an artificial intelligence engine, natural language processing (NLP) software, voice identification and voice biometric analysis technologies, vocal behavior analysis, facial recognition technology (for video calls), and data analysis that may execute independently without the neural network or may be collectively arrayed to facilitate input layer patterns, or data, into a multi-layered perceptron (MLP) neural network. In one embodiment, the various inputs may be used to support the neural network’s hidden layers that may extrapolate salient features in the input data that have predictive power regarding the outputs, for example, assess and rank the risk potential of the monitored call. Hidden layers fine-tune the input weightings until the neural network’s margin of error is minimal. The neural network’s outputs may provide both linear and non-linear responses and predictive solutions to fraud detection. In real time the neural network may be configured to “sniff” or listen to risk calls for words, phrases, statements, voice identification markers, and/or voice biometrics and other such voice, facial and telephony data that may indicate the progression of a fraud call. Neural networks utilizing NLP technology are capable of operating simultaneously in several languages.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A method of establishing a call, said method comprising: receiving a call from a calling party to a called party; opening a conference bridge; placing the call from the calling party into the conference bridge; establishing an outbound leg of the conference bridge; and placing an outbound call via the outbound leg of the conference bridge to the called party such that when the called party answers the outbound call from the conference bridge, the calling party and the called party are connected with one another via the conference bridge; establishing another communications path with the conference bridge to enable an audio stream to be output from the conference bridge by establishing a communications path with an artificial intelligence (AI) threat detection engine; transcribing, by the AI threat detection engine, the verbal communications between the calling party and called party to form a transcription; and identifying, by the AI threat detection engine, a potential threat made by one of the called party or calling party to the other party; automatically determining a threat level by monitoring verbal communications between the calling party and called party in the audio stream; and in response to determining a threat level, automatically causing a communications path with the conference bridge to be disconnected therefrom or added thereto.

“2. The method according to claim 1, wherein receiving a call from a calling party to a called party includes receiving a call at a call center.

“3. The method according to claim 1, wherein identifying a potential threat includes determining whether a financial or security threat is being made by identifying one or more potential words or phrases that are indicative of a potential threat based on previously training the AI threat detection engine using words or phrases indicative of a potential threat.

“4. The method according to claim 1, further comprising automatically disconnecting either the calling party or the called party in response to automatically determining that the determined threat level is a threat level at or above a threshold threat level.

“5. The method according to claim 1, wherein in response to automatically determining a threat level, automatically causing a communications link with the conference bridge to be added thereto includes automatically establishing a communications path to be added between a security agent and the conference bridge.

“6. The method according to claim 5, further comprising populating a user interface for the security agent to view the transcription of the verbal communications between the calling party and called party.

“7. The method according to claim 6, further comprising enabling the human security agent to control operations of the conference bridge during the call between the calling party and called party via controls provided on a user interface.

“8. The method according to claim 7, wherein enabling the human security agent to control operations of the conference bridge via controls provided on a user interface include enabling the human security agent to place either the calling party, called party, or both parties on hold, and enabling the human security agent to speak with the party not on hold.

“9. The method according to claim 5, further comprising enabling the security agent to place either of the calling party or called party on hold.

“10. The method according to claim 1, wherein receiving a call from a calling party includes receiving a call from a subscriber as an outbound call to the called party.

“11. The method according to claim 1, further comprising: monitoring, by a call managing system, the call between the calling party and the called party to determine if a dialogue therebetween includes language indicative of a potential fraud being perpetrated; and in response to the call managing system determining that a probability of a fraud being perpetrated exceeds a fraud threshold level, automatically interdicting the call to enable interrogation of one of the caller or recipient.

“12. The method according to claim 11, wherein monitoring, by the call managing system, includes analyzing transcribed words of the dialogue between the caller and recipient by an artificial intelligence (AI) engine.

“13. The method according to claim 11, wherein monitoring, by the call managing system, includes analyzing voice biometrics of the dialogue between the caller and recipient by an AI engine.

“14. The method according to claim 11, wherein automatically interdicting the call includes automatically adding a third-party call participant to the conference bridge during the call between the calling party and the called party via a communications network.

“15. The method according to claim 14, wherein adding the third-party call participant includes adding a human to the conference bridge.

“16. The method according to claim 15, wherein adding the third-party call participant further includes adding an interactive voice response (IVR) system to ask initial questions to one or both of the calling party and the called party prior to adding the human.

“17. The method according to claim 15, wherein adding the third-party call participant further includes adding an AI engine to the conference bridge.

“18. The method according to claim 14, further comprising: enabling the third-party participant to disconnect the call between the calling party and called party in response to determining that a potential fraud is being committed; and enabling the third-party participant to re-initiate the call between the caller and recipient in response to the third-party participant determining that no potential fraud is being committed.

“19. The method according to claim 18, further comprising enabling the third-party participant to add information associated with either the caller or recipient to a “bad” caller database.

“20. The method according to claim 11, wherein determining that the probability of a fraud being perpetrated exceeds a fraud threshold level includes determining that the probability of a fraud being perpetrated exceeds any of a plurality of threat tier levels.”

URL and more information on this patent, see: Funk, Thomas. System and method for intercepting and interdicting telephone fraud. U.S. Patent Number 11943387, filed May 19, 2022, and published online on March 26, 2024. Patent URL (for desktop use only): https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/external.html?q=(11943387)&db=USPAT&type=ids

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)