Research from The Financial Ombudsman Service, a U.K. based organization dedicated to helping citizens with free financial advice, has found an increase in Authorized Pushed Payment (APP) scams. These attacks are rising both in number and sophistication.
The Financial Ombudsman Service is a U.K. organization dedicated to helping residents with all things financial-as-a-free service.
As part of this service, they take in a large number of complaints around financial fraud. In their latest blog, they note that complaints related to fraud and scams have reached an all-time high:
- Over 8700 cases in one quarter
- Over half related to “customer approved online bank transfers, also known as authorised push payment (APP) scams”
- Increased sophistication involving multiple banks
The challenge with the use of APP is that once the money is sent, there’s no easy way to recover it. The U.K. does have the Contingent Reimbursement Model (CRM) code – a voluntary code financial institutions sign up for that provides additional protection for consumers, reimbursing them in APP fraud cases unless there are exceptional circumstances.
In the case of the second quarter, 4,752 APP scam cases we received by Ombudsman, and, of those, 2,734 were not covered by the code.
In other words, it’s better to be vigilant than to rely on being bailed out.
And vigilance is only attained by continual new-school security awareness training that teaches individuals about such scams and social engineering techniques used by scammers.
With APP scams only increasing, it means that they are working and are profitable, further pointing to the importance to train users to be vigilant.
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