14 DAY TRIAL // The UK Card Association released a study which reveals that fraudsters turn back to primitive scamming methods. While credit card and online bank account fraud situations were seen less, checks and mobile phones were targeted more by fraudsters.
The figures show that in the first six months of 2011 a 9% reduction was recorded in credit card involved losses in the UK. It seems as this is a direct result of the measures implemented in the effort of reducing replication, such as the deployment of chip cards.
It's clear that the PIN and chip technologies have made it harder for villains to copy cards so they started focusing more on actually stealing them.
It seems as public awareness campaigns, combined with innovative online protection technologies really helped the citizens of the UK, as compared to 2010, a 32% decrease was recorded in relation to virtual banking fraud.
On the downside, profiting from the fact that people hardly protect their smartphones, cybercriminals took advantage and turned to banking operations made from phones, the results showing that a 48% increase was recorded in this sector.
When it comes to checks, the story has two sides to it. While the actual fraud losses rose from £14.0 million ($21 million or €16 million) to £16.4 million ($25 million or €19 million), the good side to this is that most of these scams were stopped before the check was actually paid. The numbers reveal that £254 million ($388 million or €293 million) were saved from the hands of crooks because the attempted check fraud was spotted and stopped just in time.
To make sure you are protected against these types of illegal activities, the authorities recommend:
- make sure you are the only one who knows the PIN number of your card; - be aware that financial institutions never ask for your security code over the phone; - when shopping online, only visit trusted websites; - never leave banking statements or other related document lying around in plain site and make sure you dispose of them properly; - don't accept high value checks and when writing one make sure you cross out the blank spaces to avoid illegal reproduction.