Financial crime has increased in recent years and is a trend that is constantly evolving as criminals continue to get more sophisticated and more inventive with their approaches.
Fraud has long been a problem and the changes over the past year ensure it will remain a key challenge facing the payment industry, as well as an issue that can have a significant impact on both businesses and consumers.
In parallel new fraud prevention and detection methods and techniques have been developed and deployed. But this is a constantly changing game, with criminals adopting new strategies and the payment industry and other financial institutions deploying increasingly sophisticated techniques to stop them.
COVID-19 has created some degree of additional risk of fraud, thanks to an increase in online shopping including shoppers who have never previously shopped online in the past and are perhaps less familiar with some of the more obvious signs to be wary of. Criminals are all too aware of this and are happy to use this situation to their advantage.
Unfortunately, there is currently no way to full eradicate the risk of fraud. Payment providers continue to develop more sophisticated fraud prevention and detection tools to reduce the incidence. AI and other automated tools offer increasing levels of fraud detection —
but at the same time criminals are also using new and more sophisticated techniques to try to avoid detection.
The best way to win in the battle against cybercrime and fraud is to ensure that all businesses have robust and effective controls in place, whether these are around access to data, protection of physical assets such as laptops, or measures to prevent unauthorized access to the business’s IT network and system.
This is particularly important for any business that holds customer personal data or payment card information, where the business must ensure this data is fully protected to remain compliant with regulations and to avoid the risk of a costly and reputationally damaging breach.
