Nagoya University and Fujitsu today announced their successful development of the world’s first technology to analyze phone conversations to automatically detect situations in which one party might over trust the other party. Specifically, this is the kind of situation in which an individual may have a diminished capacity to objectively evaluate an explanation being given by the other party. By combining this technology for detecting situations of overtrust from voices over the phone with the detection of characteristic keywords, Nagoya University and Fujitsu have also developed basic technology for detecting remittance-soliciting phone phishing scams.
When a person is subject to psychological stress because the other party is conveying distressing information, situations of overtrust can occur. To address this issue, Nagoya University and Fujitsu developed the world’s first technology that can infer situations of overtrust by detecting changes in voice pitch and level, as illustrated above.
In preventing remittance-solicitation fraud, a serious social problem, effective methods are believed to entail support in detecting remittance-solicitation phone phishing scams and alerting the intended victim as well as alerting the intended victim’s family or other objective third-party member. The detection process, as illustrated above, involves inferring situations of overtrust and then detecting certain keywords that indicate whether the conversation potentially involves an attempted fraud. These results are then integrated to detect remittance-solicitation phone scams. Operation of this technology is checked by using a keyword list provided by the National Police Academy and recordings of actual remittance-solicitation phone scams.
In cases of remittance-solicitation phone phishing scams, the suspected perpetrator will often pretend to be an acquaintance of the victim or a person in a position of authority, such as a police officer or lawyer. They will then convey distressing information, such as relating to a scandal or crime supposedly committed by an acquaintance of the intended victim. Nagoya University and Fujitsu developed a function using word spotting 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.
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.
