Criminals have been exploiting and adapting to Covid-19 with a growth in fraud and scams that target people online, warns the trade body UK Finance.
It suggests criminals have been turning away from more traditional forms of fraud due to the pandemic. Contactless card fraud, which uses lost and stolen cards, fell by 20 per cent to £8.2m, the first year-on-year decrease since this data started being collected in 2013. This may be due to the fewer face-to-face transactions by consumers using contactless cards during lockdown. Cheque fraud losses also saw a fall of 78 per cent to £6.4m. Losses to investment scams rose by 27 per cent to £55.2m in the first half of 2020, the largest increase of any scam type.
Katy Worobec, Managing Director of Economic Crime at UK Finance, said: “Criminals have ruthlessly adapted to this pandemic with scams exploiting the rise in people working from home and spending time online. These range from investment scams promoted on social media and search engines to the use of phishing emails and fake websites to harvest people’s data.
“The banking industry is working hard to protect customers from this threat, with almost £7 in £10 of fraud prevented in the first half of this year. But we need the public to remain vigilant against scams and remember that criminals are experts at exploiting events like Covid-19 to impersonate trusted organisations. Always take a moment to stop and think before parting with your money or information, and don’t let a criminal rush or panic you into making a decision that you’ll later come to regret.”
UK Finance is calling for fraud to be included in the scope of the UK Government’s new online harms regulatory framework.
Comment
Matthew Gardiner, Principal Security Strategist at the cloud cyber security firm Mimecast said that it was no surprise to see a rise in financial related scams. He said: “At Mimecast, our recent ‘100 Days of Covid’ report found a 33 per cent increase in these sorts of attacks from the period of January-March 2020 alone. It is extremely important that individuals and organizations remain vigilant to the increased activity of cybercriminals, who will use any deceptive means and technical methods to separate people from their money.
“The majority of online scams rely on some form of innocent human involvement, as it is far easier to compromise people than systems. Threat actors know this well and are continuing to exploit the human by tailoring scams to global events such as the current coronavirus pandemic to take advantage of its inherent urgency and disruption. These scams are also often focused on trying to exploit the move to remote working, with more people spending time at home and online and thus increasingly operating outside the protective shield of their organizations.
“Often such attacks come in the form of email and web based impersonation attacks, in which the cybercriminal uses sophisticated social engineering tactics to dupe victims into transferring funds to or buying fake goods from what they believe to be a trusted individual or company. To demonstrate just how prevalent such attack are, our latest State of Email Security report found 74pc respondents reporting impersonation attacks increasing in the last year alone. People must take a moment to think before parting with any money online and organizations must evolve their security investments to those which are a better at stopping these new waves of attacks.”
