Phone scammers' days may be numbered, as a Japanese university and tech firm have developed a technology to detect fraud based on keyword and voice analysis.

Nagoya University and Fujitsu claimed the technology —which can be used to thwart remittance-soliciting, phishing, and other phone-based scams— has a 90-percent accuracy.

"Starting this month, a prototype of this technology deployed in mobile phones will undergo verification testing in collaboration with National Police Agency of Japan (the National Police Academy) and The Bank of Nagoya, Ltd," Fujitsu said.

They added this is the world’s first technology to analyze phone conversations to automatically detect situations in which one party might “overtrust” the other party.

Fujitsu defined "overtrust" as a situation where an individual may have a diminished capacity to objectively evaluate an explanation being from the other party.

"There are limits to human powers of perception and judgment. When overwhelmed with information that may be distressing, some individuals, without knowing it, may have a diminished capacity to objectively evaluate information provided by another party — a situation known as 'overtrust.' In situations of overtrust, there is the risk of believing everything another person is saying, even in cases of remittance-soliciting phone phishing scams, for example," they said.

According to them, the research was part of the “Modeling and Detecting Overtrust from Behavior Signals” research area led by Kazuya Takeda in the research project “Creation of Human-Harmonized Information Technology for Convivial Society.”

Voice stress

Fujitsu said speech recognition systems have been used with technology that can detect when special keywords are included in a conversation.

But when a person is subject to psychological stress, the person’s voice can become indistinct, making methods that rely on keyword detection alone insufficient in terms of detection accuracy.

"Developing a way to detect situations of overtrust with a high degree of accuracy even under these types of circumstances has, therefore, posed a challenge," Fujitsu said.

Nagoya and Fujitsu's technology can infer situations of overtrust by detecting changes in voice pitch and level.

"In a test using this technology to detect remittance-solicitation phone phishing scams, it was demonstrated that situations of overtrust could be detected with over 90 percent accuracy, resulting in the impending creation of basic technology for detecting situations of overtrust," Fujitsu said.

Keyword catchlist

A function was developed using voice recognition technology to identify when the suspected perpetrator uses special keywords from a pre-registered list, such as “indebtedness” or “compensation.”

The function using word spotting voice recognition technology, which ignores everything except the keywords on the pre-registered list, detects the number of times keywords relating to remittance-solicitation scams are spoken

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