We just got our first call today, via TTY Service. I understand that, according to the ADA, we need to accept these types of calls, but privacy concerns me since there is a person in the middle of the communication besides us and the customer. I'm looking for what others are doing with these types of calls. Should we have our customer sign something stating that they do business via TTY, will our standard identification procedures suffice? I guess I really hadn't thought about it before now. Can anyone offer me some advice?

We have had attempted fraud through this...you are right to use caution. I cant remember the procedures we implemented, but they were somthing along the lines of noting with a warning during the new account process / training staff on the issues.

We had attempted fraud at my previous bank too. Someone claiming to be an elderly customer of ours was requesting to send a wire transfer. They knew lots of her personal info when we tried to verify if it was her, but we knew our customer and there wasn't any reason she'd be using the TTY service. We contacted her and she confirmed that. We told the middle person and she told us "off the record" that they had many reports of attempted fraud. The next day they tried to call back again, but it just so happened our customer was in the bank when they called. We relayed that info and as far as I know they didn't call back again. I didn't work directly in that department so am not sure if additional procedures were put in place.

A couple of off-the-cuff thoughts --

1. If a customer hasn't already informed you that he or she will be using TTY access, you should verify the authenticity of at least the first TTY connection by contacting your customer using other means -- a standard voice call, email to a known email address, contact via a relative, etc. -- and not act on the TTY communication until that verification is completed.

2. Once you know that a customer may use TTY, establish some "out of wallet" challenge questions you can use to verify the customer's identity via the TTY channel. Try to ensure these questions don't involve information that the customer may have posted in social network channels (first pet, favorite car, sports team, etc.), or that might be commonly known by the customer's friends (mother's maiden name, favorite teacher, spouse's mother's first name, etc.).

3. Enhance and use a call-back verification process.