FF Virtual Arena: Fraud Awareness Week – The Scamscope Report

The insurgence of open banking and new payment methods like digital wallets and crypto have completely rebuilt the payments ecosystem and our relationship to money. From real-time high-volume transactions to buy now pay later, consumers are exposed to a feast of innovative payment services and products and are using money in ways the last century could not have anticipated. With all this noise of growth, however, old offenders have not been deterred and fraud and cybercrime have evolved into an even more sinister thorn in the bankers’ side. Hence, Fraud Awareness Week was born.

In this Virtua Arena, we take a deep dive into the ambiguous world of cybercrime and financial fraud with two professionals in the field, Tanya Kopytina, a Senior Fraud Consultant at global software company ACI Worldwide, and Samuel Murrant, the Consultant Director at GlobalData. Together for International Fraud Awareness Week, we discuss the companies’ joint collaboration on their Scamscope report, and explore how scams have changed in the last couple of years and what fraudsters are looking for now as digital payments become more commonplace. 

“As fraud detection systems have become more sophisticated, criminals have turned their eyes to more vulnerable and unprotected parts of the financial services chain, the customers themselves,” explained Kopytina. “Criminals have started to exploit human nature because they simply can’t bypass fraud detection technologies anymore.” 

Criminals are also customers, and the move to real-time payments benefits them too. The flood of phishing scams, whether it is an authorised push payment (APP) or imitating a customers banking institution, shows that fraudsters are aware of the growing personalisation of financial services, and will use its features to tap into customer confidence – and finances. 

“By this year, we are expecting APP fraud losses to overtake card losses in the UK,” said Murrant. “Consumers are thinking of the type of fraud that was more relevant a few years ago comparatively because it has had more time to filter into the consciousness, but it is going to be more so that we are worrying about scams and confidence tricks and getting consumers to act on behalf of a fraudster or directly deliver that information that they are looking for.” 

It is with these pain points in personal judgement that criminals seek to isolate customers from their banks and financial services providers and cut them off from the payment channels needed to sustain the industry. The most integral line of defence that the financial sector can implement in the face of this new fraud is transparency and working with other institutions. By opening up the conversation and educating their customers about the different types of fraud now at play, companies can ensure that their customers do not feel alienated, and that they can avoid falling for the scammers’ tricks at first glance.