consumers during the first half of 2021, amounting to a 30 per cent increase from the same period last year. This amounts to almost triple the per capita fraud rate seen in the United States in 2020.
“The most sophisticated fraud tends to start in the U.K., and then move two years later to the U.S. and then around the world,” Ayelet Biger-Levin, vice president of product strategy at New York-based cyber security firm BioCatch, said. “In the last 12 months we have seen more fraud attacks than we had seen in any other year in history. Data breaches have also accelerated, so there’s a lot more personal information out there that criminals can take advantage of.”
Last month, the Financial Ombudsman Service called on banks in the United Kingdom to do more to treat victims of scams more fairly, pointing out that there was a 66 per cent increase in the number of people asking for help with fraud during the second quarter of this year, while 75 per cent of the complaints that were made regarding financial service providers refusing to refund money lost through scams were upheld in favour of the customer. A spokesperson for the complaints body noted that these figures suggest that banks and other financial institutions “need to do more”, to resolve such complaints of their customers in a just and equitable manner before they are forced to seek help from the Ombudsman Service.
