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Phishing Attacks Double But Online Banking Fraud Declines

On March 12, 2008, the UK payments association, Apacs, released statistics for 2007, which revealed that although there was a near doubling of phishing attacks in 2007, yet incidents of banking fraud on the Internet dropped notably. The association indicated that the rate of fraud in the country increased by 25% over 2006-2007 from an amount of £427 Million to £535.2 Million. Despite those losses from online threat, banking plummeted considerably to £22.6 Million.

Phishing is a kind of an e-mail fraud in which seemingly legitimate e-mails are sent to computer users so that the perpetrator might be able to obtain financial and personal information from e-mail recipients.

Furthermore, Apacs noted that the decline in banking fraud on the Internet could be accounted to increase in customer vigilance along with measures of fraud detection by banks. The detection methods enable the banks to find out suspicious money transfers. Also, there have been less incidents of hacking to steal and manipulate data of cardholders from Websites providing retail services.

In reality, most fraud incidences with Internet card involve a crook obtaining details of genuine cards that are subsequently used for online shopping. A spokesman for Apacs said that the payment authentication efforts by the 3-D secure mechanism of Mastercard and Visa are aiding in stopping Internet fraud.

Moreover, Simon Stokes, Chief Executive of secure payment systems provider, CyberSource, acknowledge that Mastercard and Visa schemes are equipped to help retailers protect their operations, as reported by Itweek on March 12, 2008.

But, Stokes added that as fraudsters get more sophisticated with their methods they could possibly combine different approaches to grab customer data. These methods include breaching Website security and employing card generators instead of just committing physical theft of card details.

Officials at Detica, a consultancy for fraud prevention, said that over protection could lead customers to become more reckless while shopping online or dealing in similar banking transactions.

The Detica spokesperson commented that customers do not need too much technical information from Apacs on how the fraudsters operate their scams rather more commonsense and memorable instructions on how consumers can prevent getting duped.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 3/19/2008

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