Despite the recently released fraud statistics showing that card fraud has increased, as a percentage of the overall turnover of card transactions card fraud has decreased. This is due to more card transactions being made today than were made a few years ago, showing that card payments are becoming evermore popular and that confidence in using cards for transactions is increasing. This highlights the success that chip and PIN has had on increasing security since its introduction and this has resulted in the general public’s increased confidence in merchant services and making payments on plastic.

However, it appears that an area of fraud losses that requires serious address is that of card- not-present fraud. This fraud mainly takes place online where chip and PIN cannot be used to verify the owner of the card. Online retailers are increasingly using secure online payment systems such as Verified by Visa and cardholders and retailers who do not currently have a secure online payment system in place are being strongly encouraged to implement one of these systems to help reduce online retail fraud. Whilst online fraud figures have risen alarmingly in the past decade it is important to remember that the amount of money spent online has increased dramatically over this time period, rendering the online fraud figures not as shocking as they may first appear. However, tackling online fraud remains a strong priority.

Counterfeit card losses are made due to criminals stealing card details and making magnetic strip cards to use abroad in countries where chip and PIN is currently not in place. The main way to reduce these losses is by putting pressure on countries to upgrade to chip and PIN. The US doesn’t yet have chip and PIN amongst other countries.

With increasing online banking losses customers are being advised to keep their Internet security and firewalls up to date as much of the losses are down to malware attacks. Along with more customer awareness and increased help from the police and fraud agencies fraud losses can hopefully be reduced in the years to come.

Tags: card fraud

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 2:46 pm and is filed under credit cards, fraud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.