BANKS, government and law enforcement must work together to “break the spell” of crooks, Santander warned.
In a new report released today, the lender called for more to be done to crack down on authorized push payment (APP) fraud, where customers are tricked into authorizing a payment into an account controlled by criminals.
Santander said the industry needed more consistent rules on data sharing and the mandatory use of beneficiary confirmation – a fraud prevention system that lets customers know if the name of the person they they think paying is the bank account number they are sending money to.
The Online Safety Bill should also be introduced, the bank said, and “consideration should be given to linking where the scam originally started, for example the social media platform, to whom is responsible for reimbursing the victim”.
Santander data shows that over 70% of shopping scams come from social media.
He also said law enforcement “needs to allocate a lot more resources to combating these kinds of scams.”
“The scale and value of APP fraud can detract from the true impact of these crimes on individual consumers, who can lose more than just money – their confidence and mental health can also be significantly affected,”
“We all need to come together and fix the problem because right now the only real winners are the fraudsters.”
Santander calls came as peers
“With so much disruption from strikes, cost of living challenges and the sheer volume of misinformation circulating, we anticipate that scam artists will certainly try to take advantage of this to mislead the general public,”
(c) 2022 City AM, source
