It appears an increase in regulation and the implementation of cutting-edge technologies like BioCatch’s behavioral biometric intelligence have sent fraudsters in the UK scrambling to adapt and innovate.
Our new Digital Banking Fraud Trends in EMEA report shows the voice scams rampant across the rest of the continent (and around the world) fell by 25% in the UK last year. The percentage of account-takeover (ATO) attacks, meanwhile, crept back up, rising by 13% in the UK, with more patient criminals evading bank defenses by repeatedly logging into their victims’ accounts and waiting to make any fraudulent transactions to build trust with banks before finally transferring away the money they planned to steal all along.
Throughout the rest of the region, we see bad actors besieging financial institutions with a smorgasbord of bank-impersonation, purchase, romance, investment, and other scams. Our global advisors and threat analysts warn of still more attacks employing artificial intelligence (AI) to target victims in their native languages.
In our latest research, we highlight these and a host of other fraud trends plaguing financial institutions across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in 2024:
• Everything Happens on Mobile: 75% of reported fraud cases among BioCatch’s European customers took place on mobile devices, up 6% from 2022.
• More Stolen Devices Used for Fraud: Stolen-device cases reported to BioCatch rose by 43% in the region, with the UK and Spain accounting for the brunt of the increase.
• Mules Are Everywhere: BioCatch’s Mule Account Detection solution identified more than 10,000 mule accounts among the company’s European customers.
• The UK an Outlier: The voice scams plaguing the rest of the continent fell by 25% in the UK last year. Account-takeover (ATO), meanwhile, started to rise again, with its slice of the total fraud pie growing by 13%.
• Regulations Forcing Fraudsters to Pivot: As banks tighten digital security to align with ever-changing regulation aiming to protect fraud victims, bad actors have begun to change their tactics, leading to an explosion in social engineering scams across the continent.
To access our report, click here and fortify your defenses against fraudsters with BioCatch’s next-generation insights on the ever-evolving world of digital-banking fraud and financial crime in EMEA.
