April 18 2007

Financial services deploy against online fraudsters

While card fraud has been dropping in most situations where payment cards are used online, the banks and building societies have seen fraud increase in recent years. Barclays Bank and Nationwide Building Society have introduced measures to combat the fraudsters.

Barclays Bank is sending out handheld chip and PIN card readers to customers of its online banking service. This is the latest in a series of Barclays initiatives to increase the security protection for online banking customers - free anti-virus software and SMS text message confirmation service have already been introduced.

Later this year, Barclays Premier Account customers will be able to use a PINsenty card reader to authenticate their identity at log in and for making certain payments. "This will replace the need for passcodes and memorable words," says Barclays.

Nationwide Building Society has recently deployed anti-phishing solutions from US company MarkMonitor to automatically identify and shut down phishing scams. The system has paid for itself in three months by preventing phishing, and other online fraud attacks.

In the past, Nationwide staff manually tracked phishing scams carried out against the company. "It became extremely difficult to shut down phishing sites quickly enough and cope with the number of incoming e-mails from customers reporting phishing attacks or suspicious-looking websites," said Peter Corrie, Head of the Strategic Fraud Initiative for Nationwide.

Emma Herrod