Over-the-counter (OTC) transactions remain a top fraud concern for financial institutions of all sizes. Checks continue to be the subject of more fraud than any other payment method, according to the 2018 Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) Payments Fraud and Control Survey. Financial institutions encounter check fraud in many ways: counterfeits, forgeries, alterations, serial numbers, stop payments, and check kiting.

Transaction fraud also accounts for a large percentage of fraud perpetrated against financial institutions. Transaction fraud includes deposits, return deposit items (RDIs), remote deposit capture (RDC), and duplicate deposits through ATMs against new, dormant, and closed accounts.

Other items requiring scrutiny for fraud include preapproved debits, ACH account takeovers, unauthorized ACH transactions, account takeovers by ATMs, using checking accounts to withdraw from HELOC or other LOC accounts followed by wire transfers, deposit of items on the transit watch lists, and large or split deposits.

The ability to accurately detect fraud in real time reduces loss and the reputational cost of customer offense due to false positives. In order to combat OTC fraud, financial institutions need an automated solution to evaluate teller transactions at the point of presentment.

ARGO’s fraud solution, OASIS™ (Optimized Assessment of Suspicious Items), provides cross-channel, multi-fund analytics and adjudication workflow to detect fraudulent transactions and suspicious items. It has the highest accuracy and capability in the industry for detecting check and deposit fraud for counterfeits, alterations, forged-maker signatures, on-us items, and transit items during deposit, as well as kiting and other internal fraud scenarios.

Download ARGO’s Mitigating OTC Fraud in Real Time interview brief.