An article relating to this blog post on Finextra:
Crooks net $13m in ATM heist
Crooks broke into the computer network of FIS earlier this year, upped the limits on pre-paid cards, cloned them and then withdrew $13 million from ATMs around the world, according to security blogger...
See article
Every time that a fraud hits the headlines there is naturally a huge focus on how the crooks got hold of all those personal banking details – this
Finextra story is a good example. But there is often less attention given to how they were then able to use the customer details to extract money from customers bank accounts.
Take card cloning. Of course it’s a massive problem, but if the fraudsters couldn’t take advantage of the cloned cards, the resulting loss to banks – and significant impact to customers – would be vastly reduced.
The problem for banks is that increasingly the personal details of their customers can be “stolen” from any number of sources, for example in the recent
Sony data breach. Banks tend to only come into the picture when the crooks try to use that information for their own gain, but the impact of their fraud harms public trust in banks and creates a general climate of insecurity around financial technology.
At a time when many in the industry are betting on exponential growth in mobile payments, that can only be very bad news indeed.
The key lies in robust customer and transaction authentication, relative to the bank’s perceived risk of the transaction – speed, strong security, efficiency, good customer service, ease of use – while shutting down the scope for fraudsters to benefit from
their crime. The key lies in real-time detection, prevention and immediate resolution enabled by the empowered customer.