Cybercrime used to be something that only happened to large companies.
Who can forget the dramatic headlines about data breaches at Target, Sony, and eBay which cost the companies millions in damages?
While giant public and private sector organizations are still under constant threat of cyberattacks, we’re all targets now. Online scams targeting individuals have been on the rise over the past five years, increasing the need for cybercrime customer care.
In 2021, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 847,376 complaints from cybercrime victims — a nearly three-fold increase compared to 2017.
Online scams range from bogus tech support offers to copycat government websites requesting people to pay money for fraudulent unemployment benefits. Phishing emails are typically the way cybercriminals trick individuals into sharing financial information. Cybercriminals also find victims via fake posts on social media and fake profiles on dating apps.
While it’s scary and stressful enough to be scammed, language barriers that prevent someone from obtaining assistance only make matters worse.
On the cybercrime support side, if you are a bank, a credit card company, or a government or law enforcement agency, customer support for cybercrime victims requires a special touch. You need to be ultra-sensitive to customers who are under duress. And when you’re serving victims in different languages, you need to ensure translations for support FAQs, chats, and emails are fast and accurate.
Here are some reminders about delivering empathetic and multilingual support to victims of a cyberattack.
Cybercrime customer care needs to be clear and quick
The majority of cybercrime victims are split between the under 25 years old and the over 75.
The younger group (Gen Z) tends to fall victim to cyberspace scams because they’re too willing to share personal information. The over-75 crowd usually become victims of cyberattacks because they’re not tech-savvy enough to recognize phishing emails.
But whether customer support teams are assisting Gen Zers, their Baby Boomer grandparents, or anyone in between, multilingual support translations and content should have the following characteristics:
Translation clarity and accuracy
Cybersecurity is rife with jargon — “malware,” “phishing,” “ransomware,” “spoofing,” and “social engineering,” to name a few. These terms are common knowledge among security enthusiasts, but will confuse non-technical victims of all ages.
Therefore, customer support teams should craft text that uses everyday language over tech jargon to explain how online scams happen, and how to guard against them in the future.
Companies should also apply this approach to translations. Simplifying both technical language and cultural idioms when translating across multiple languages will put worried cybercrime victims at ease.
It’s worth noting generic machine translation tools alone — such as Google Translate — are not designed to handle complex translations. For the clarity and accuracy needed for cybercrime support, human editors are required to finetune translations so that explanations are jargon-free and crystal-clear.
Cybercrime support demands fast turnarounds
The three-fold increase in IC3 victim complaints since 2017 demonstrates that cybercriminals are committing more digital fraud every day. As a result, cybercrime customer support translations need to be clear and accurate about security measures, and also must happen in near real-time. A translation strategy that relies solely on humans will fall short. People are simply incapable of translating fast enough in multiple languages to handle the volume of cybercrime support.
Enter artificial intelligence. AI can seamlessly translate text from one language to many others much faster than any team of people could ever do it. However, machine translation quality can leave something to be desired as machines sometimes fail to grasp the nuances of human speech. That’s why the best solution is human-in-the-loop AI, a combined effort where expert human linguists check machine translations for language quality and tone of voice.
Localization to engage distressed cybercrime victims
For all organizations that support cybercrime victims, it’s important to localize content, FAQs, and guides that educate about safeguarding against cybercrime. This means updating content for each location so victims know where to get more information on laws and victims’ rights, who to call, and even understand how criminals are prosecuted in the target jurisdiction.
Cybercrime warrants an end-to-end translation solution
While all customer support and marketing content have a certain level of urgency, cybercrime carries one of the highest urgencies of all. Customers have just had their identity or their money stolen. Support needs to be fast and crystal clear.
This is why cybercrime customer care is a quintessential use case for human-in-the-loop AI.
In such high-stress situations, machine translators turn around translations in near real-time while human editors clarify tech jargon and make sure language is lucid and empathetic.
International victims of cybercrime are going through a crisis. At the very least, their customer support should always have the right information, in the right language, at the right time.
Unbabel specializes in scale, speed, and quality for translations and Localisation of marketing and customer support content (chatbots, emails, FAQs). We take a man-and-machine approach, using a combination of advanced artificial intelligence with human editors, for fast, efficient, high-quality translations that get smarter over time.
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