Bank fraud prevention in a post-COVID-19 world

By Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier, Founder and CEO, iBanFirst

Fraud on the rise

According to recent research from a leading UK retail bank, there was a 66 per cent increase in reported scams in the first six months of 2020 compared with the last six months of 2019 – due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Across the summer months, Action Fraud UK reported a total financial loss of £11,316,266 by 2,866 victims of coronavirus-related scams.

The rise in fraud rates is a warning that banks, building societies and other financial providers need to be as alert as ever in identifying fraud.

So, what do banks need to do to ensure their customers are protected from fraud in a post-COVID-19 world?

Educate your customers to safeguard against fraud

On the customer level, banks need to be informing their customers on the types of common fraud to ensure that they are protected for all eventualities.

Authorised push payment scams are one of the fastest growing types of fraud. According to the FT, £354 million pounds was stolen this way last year. It is where a company or individual is tricked into paying money into a criminal’s account. Emails come from a genuine email address but are then intercepted by a criminal, so it’s imperative that businesses have end-to-end email encryption, and the customer double-checks the account details with the supplier on the phone prior to making a payment.

At the same time, scammers can also exploit the company’s invoicing process, where criminals create a bogus invoice for a small amount and send it to a company’s accounting department. If the finance team does not identify this as fraudulent, it can result in the business losing a considerable amount of revenue over a long period of time.

Supplier fraud is also a widespread scam. This involves the fraudster taking on the appearance of a supplier that has changed their bank details. The fraudster will have collected information on the suppliers of the targeted company, in order to pose as an official supplier. This can be prevented by ensuring that the supplier is contacted to confirm the legitimacy of the communication. It’s important not to call or email the supplier using the details provided on the suspected fraudulent correspondence. Instead they must check the original details of the supplier and speak to them on their official telephone number or email on file.

Banking malware is the least commonly cited type of fraud but has a greater financial risk attached to it. Malware is sent by email redirecting the recipients of the message to a fake banking interface, as a way of transferring funds to offshore accounts.

Remodel processes post-COVID-19 to keep customer data safe

To fight cyber fraud and scams, banks must also play their part. In a world where entire workforces are working from home banks must remain vigilant with customer data. COVID-19 has created a change in working habits and banks need to carry out the right level of training for its employees to protect customer data. Virtual team meetings and remote data sharing poses a threat to exposing sensitive information to malicious actors, and banks need to put the necessary safeguards in place.

All virtual meetings should use the banks’ private company network, and file sharing should be carried out through secure, encrypted company drives. Meanwhile, banks need to provision for all employees to receive regular software updates that will keep customer data safe, and ensure that they are aligned with new and existing data processing regulations.

Monitoring suspicious payments

A vital element to fraud detection is through monitoring customer transactions in real time, and harnessing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to spot the signs of a scam or fraud before it is too late.

One way that banks protect businesses from fraud is through keeping a log and examining regular transactional history. Any transactions which appear suspicious based on location, amount, the beneficiary, and the method will be alerted to the business customer, to mitigate the immediate and future financial risk to the business.

Know your transaction

To understand financial flows better, every bank has a Know Your Customer (KYC) engine. This is a payment infrastructure that supports onboarding processes and risk-based transaction monitoring. This system is already well known and we don’t need to elaborate on this further, as it is the fundamental building block to ensure the highest level of traceability across all transactions – including remittances and receipts of funds and foreign exchange transactions internationally.

However, KYC is limited and doesn’t include real-time analysis. What can be overlooked is a KYT engine – Know your Transaction. The aim of KYT (Know Your Transactions) is to identify potentially risky transactions and their underlying unusual behaviour for detecting money laundering, fraud or corruption. An automated concentration of transactions with accurate and relevant information directly from the original data sources is essential.

Finally, banks and payment companies need to implement anti-fraud modules to defend against cyberattacks, based on the latest algorithms capable of analysing transactions issued in real time and detecting anomalies or suspicious behaviour upstream, strengthening the security and transparency of payments and building a network of trust between issuers and recipients of payments.

In a post-COVID-19 world it’s clear that scams will become more common place. Within this environment there is a shared responsibility when mitigating the risk of financial fraud. The bank must educate and inform customers to enable them to protect themselves, while ensuring a robust technological infrastructure and ways of working are in place that protects customer data; their finances, and fundamentally their business and livelihood.