Social network trawling and related phone phishing attacks have been blamed for an 28% increase in online banking losses.
According to figures from the UK Cards Association, online bank fraud losses jumped to £21.6 million in the first six months of the year, up from £16.9m a year ago.
The increase reverses a trend for declining losses and has been blamed on phone phishing attacks, where criminals call potential victims in a bid to get people to hand over their online banking details.
“They’re using social networks, as well as other sources like the phone book to build up a picture of who you are so that they can use social engineering techniques to make the phone call more believable,” Mark Bowerman, a spokesperson for Financial Fraud Action told PC Pro.
There’s a lot of information out there that people can get hold of and with that they can sound convincing
“Previously those sort of attacks were looking for phone banking logins, but they are now primarily trying to get online banking login details so they can go into the account.”
The increase in online banking attacks is in marked comparison to a decrease in phone banking losses from £8.6m to £6.7m.
The announcement comes with the usual warnings over never divulging information relating to passwords, but Bowerman said the attacks were increasingly believable, which could lead to vulnerable being duped.
“There’s a lot of information out there that people can get hold of and with that they can sound convincing,” he said.
The increase was also partially driven by an increase in online phishing attacks where victims are infected with malware after following links in emails, the UK Card Association said.
Card not present fraud, which includes online shopping, increased 6% to £115m for the first six months of the year, the figures showed.
Disclaimer: Some pages on this site may include an affiliate link. This does not effect our editorial in any way.
