German bank customers victims of Internet fraud
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German banks Postbank and Deutsche Bank said that their customers had been recent victims of Internet fraud via copycat web sites.
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Responding to a scourge of online fraud and identity theft that threatens to undermine public confidence in Internet commerce, major companies are rolling out new services to encourage the adoption of better technology to identify customers, business partners, and employees online.
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(InfoWorld) - WithÂ Internet fraud on the rise, French banks and merchants are not putting in place antifraud technology to catch bad online transactions, an official from France's central bank said Thursday. Some banks are reluctant to put into place stronger mechanisms, such as requiring customers to use one-time passwords, because of high deployment costs as well as the reluctance of customers to use it, said Marc Andries, who works in the non-cash means of payment oversight division for the Bank of France. Paradoxically, the introduction of authentication technology prompts some consumers to question the security of their bank, said Andries, who gave a presentation at Fraud World 2007 in London. Nonetheless, the rise in online banking fraud and card-not-present (CNP) fraud -- in which someone's credit-card details are used for an online transaction without the need for the physical card -- demands a solution, he said. As a result, the Bank of France is in an "intensive dialog" with financial institutions to adopt new security technology, Andries said. The Bank of France will not, however, dictate how banks should strengthen their security or what technology they should use, he said. That is in contrast with the U.S., where the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, which supervises U.S. financial institutions, mandated that banks implement two-factor authentication by the end of 2006. Merchants in France who conduct e-commerce transactions tolerate CNP fraud because e-commerce is soaring, and they can buy insurance to guard against losses, Andries said. "They accept it because it's part of the business," he said. CNP fraud has risen as face-to-face transaction fraud has fallen with the widespread deployment of so-called "chip and pin" technology in Europe, where consumers must enter a four-digit personal identification number in a terminal before completing a transaction. As a result, criminals have turned to CNP fraud, where the credit-card details, obtained through phishing or other scams, are used for e-commerce transactions. But that fraud can be reduced by using systems that use a combination of data to better authenticate the transaction. Security software can check the card's security code -- the three-digit number on the back of the card -- along with part of the customer's post code or house number. Consumers aren't putting much pressure on either banks or merchants since they can contest fraudulent CNP transactions, Andries said. But they don't get off that easy, since "in the end, the losses are paid by the client of the merchant through inflation, and that's not good for the central bank," Andries said.
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(InfoWorld) - Online consumers in the U.S. have had a million things to complain about. Literally. The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says that it received its 1 millionth complaint earlier this week. Launched seven years ago as a clearing house for reports of online fraud, the IC3 is jointly run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center. It passes on information to law enforcement agencies, and keeps track of trends in cybercrime. To date, it has referred nearly a half-million complaints representing almost $650 million in losses to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. Crime has changed since the IC3 first opened shop, according to Donna Gregory, an FBI employee who is a supervisory management program analyst with IC3. "Most of the complaints we saw at the beginning were your typical non-delivery auction fraud," she said. "Now we are seeing more complex schemes, involving identity theft and issues where people are using anonymizers and are being affected by keystroke loggers... everything is more sophisticated now." Gregory couldn't say what the 1 millionth complaint was about, but she said thatÂ auction fraud and online financial scams are still the top problems. Auction fraud accounted for nearly half of the complaints received by the IC3 last year. Â ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Consumer group Which? says banks should automatically compensate victims of online phishing frauds.
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Phishing is one of the fastest-growing forms of personal fraud in the world. While consumers are the most obvious victims, the damage spreads far wider--hurting companies&#39; finances and reputations and potentially
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US consumers and businesses have lost an estimated 500 million dollars to a relatively new Internet scam known as &quot;phishing,&quot; according to a survey released this week.
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Irish banks unite Irish banks have responded to internet scams such as phishing by setting up a forum to share information on high-tech crime.â¦
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Crackers Updates to Germany's computer crime laws banning so-called "hacking tools" have been criticised as ill-considered and counterproductive.â¦
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Criminals are not the only ones profiting from identity theft; financial institutions are making money, too.
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Italian authorities are bringing charges in a scam involving fraudulent e-mail to bank customers.
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LONDON: Fraudsters have developed a potent new computer program that steals Internet banking customers&#39; details by duping them into opening up a bogus e-mail, a British security firm said Wednesday.
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Germany pursues 12,000 suspects in what is said to be its biggest case of internet images of child abuse.
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More than three million customers of global banking giant HSBC have been left vulnerable while banking over the internet for more than two years because of a security flaw, a newspaper reported.
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The rise in online scams has companies spending hefty sums to educate customers about fraud prevention and to address 'phishing' damage.
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(InfoWorld) - Users of online banking sites tend to bypass critical clues that the integrity of those sites may have been compromised, according to the working draft of a study released on Sunday by researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The study, which will be formally released in May at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California, underscores how new technologies and warnings can't completely protect Internet users fromÂ scams such as phishing. It also throws doubt on the effectiveness of site-authentication images, which have been implemented by financial institutions such as Bank of America, Vanguard Group, and ING Bank. The images, selected by the customers, are shown when a bank customer logs in from a different computer than is normally used. The study involved 67 users, with more than 90 percent under 30 years old. Because of varying parameters in the study, not all qualified to be included in the results for each of the three tests. Users were ask to conduct common online banking tasks, although precautions were taken to ensure users weren't put at risk. For the first test, HTTPS indicators -- which show that an encrypted connection is enabled -- were removed from the address bar along with the lock that appears in the bottom right corner of Internet Explorer 6. Although the absence of HTTPS indicators should be a warning, all 67 participants continued with their transactions, the study found. The researchers then conducted a test where the site-authentication image was removed along with the HTTPS indicators. The researchers wrote it is the first empirical investigation into site-authentication images. Only two of 60 people chose not to log in when the image was removed, a key sign that a site may have been tampered with or is a phishing site, the study said. Of users who were actually using their own bank account for the study, 23 of 25 continued to enter their passwords. "We find them [site-authentication images] to be ineffective," the study concludes. In the last test, researchers made it more obvious, this time replacing a password-entry page with a warning page from Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3. The page advises of a problem with the security certificate of the chosen Web site. Despite the warning, 30 of 57 users entered their passwords. The study comes as U.S. banks are beefing up their authentication technologies amid new requirements from federal regulators. In October 2005, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) mandated that U.S. banks implement stronger authentication protections by the end of last year, particularly for high-risk transactions such as sending money to a different person's account. Bank of America uses site-authentication image technology called SiteKey. Users pick an image and assign a phrase to it while also setting three "challenge" questions. If a user logs in from a computer that doesn't already have a cookie, they're asked one of the challenge questions and then to verify the image and phrase. If the image doesn't appear or the phrase is wrong, consumers shouldn't proceed. Bank of America said the image system benefits users since it's free and doesn't involve extra hardware or software.
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Two clients of Germany's Postbank (DPBGn.DE) fell for an e-mail fraud that led them to reveal money transfer codes to a bogus Web site -- the first case of this scam in German, prosecutors said on Thursday.