How Conversey Reduced Frontline Scam Losses by 85%

Phone-based social engineering scams have become an operational problem hiding in plain sight.

At Gellert Hospitality Group, a Five Guys franchisee, the issue was not a lack of policy. It was a lack of frontline awareness at the moment the scam call happened. Scammers posed as corporate, vendor support, or area leadership and pressured store teams into acting quickly before anyone could verify the request.

The pattern was familiar and costly:

• fraudulent refunds
• cash removed from the safe
• gift cards purchased under false instructions
• “test transactions” pushed through by phone

The company had already sent warning emails. But email was not reaching the people who actually needed the message in the moment of risk. Many newer or younger managers had simply never seen prior scam history, or they did not remember it when a convincing caller created urgency.

The operational challenge

In the year before Conversey was implemented, when the operator had roughly 60 stores, the impact looked like this:

• 8 successful scams
• average loss per scam: about $700
• total annual loss: about $5,600

Those numbers matter, but the deeper problem was consistency. Scam prevention depended too much on who happened to be in the store, how experienced they were, and whether they had recently heard about prior incidents.

That is not a policy problem. It is a communication problem.

The intervention

Conversey was deployed as a direct communication channel to every above-store manager, store-level manager, and relevant crew member.

The goal was simple: close the awareness gap that email and passive training could not close.

That meant three practical moves:

• broadcast scam alerts instantly to every store
• repeat reminders during high-risk periods
• embed “never do this over the phone” rules directly into onboarding and frontline communication flows

Instead of relying on a manager to remember an old email, the system pushed timely reminders into the channels people were already paying attention to.

Why it worked

Scam prevention in frontline operations is less about having a policy written down and more about whether the right person sees the right warning at the right time.

Conversey improved that by making scam awareness:

• direct
• repeatable
• immediate
• consistent across stores

The result was that store teams did not have to rely only on memory or experience. They had an active communication layer reinforcing what to do and what never to do.

The measurable impact

The results were strong even while the business got larger.

Before Conversey

• about 60 stores
• 8 successful scams
• about $5,600 in losses
• average loss per store: about $93/store

After Conversey

• about 104 stores
• 1 successful scam
• about $700 in losses
• average loss per store: about $7/store

That represents:

• 87.5% fewer successful scams
• 87.5% lower total losses
• 92% lower average loss per store

Even more importantly, those gains happened while the operator scaled from roughly 60 stores to more than 100.

The broader impact

The direct financial savings are easy to understand:

• estimated losses avoided: roughly $5,000 per year

But the operational value goes beyond the raw number.

The program also helped:

• protect employee confidence during suspicious calls
• reinforce operational integrity around cash handling
• improve compliance with store-level policies
• standardize scam response across a much larger footprint

The operational lesson

This case shows that many “small” losses are really messaging failures.

A policy in a handbook does not stop a scam call. A real-time warning delivered to the right person might.

Conversey helped transform scam prevention from a passive awareness effort into an active frontline communication system. And that turned a recurring operational risk into something far more controllable.

That is the bigger lesson: when information flows directly to the people who need it most, even messy frontline risks can be reduced dramatically.