A total of £503.4 million was stolen from bank customers by criminals in the UK through authorised and unauthorised fraud in the first half of 2018, according to a new data from the trade body UK Finance.
During the same period, the finance industry prevented £705.7m of unauthorised fraud, equivalent to £2 in every £3 of attempted unauthorised fraud.
Newly-collected data, published for the first time, reveals that purchase scams were the most prevalent authorised push payment (APP) scam in the first half of 2018, accounting for almost two-thirds of reported APP cases with a total of £19.4 million lost.
In these scams, the victim pays in advance for a product or service, such as a car, electronics or a holiday rental, which is never received or does not exist. It often takes place online, through auction websites or social media.
There was a total of 3,866 reported cases of impersonation scams in the first six months of 2018. In these scams the criminal purports to be from the police, bank and other organisations and tricks the victim into transferring money, often claiming there has been fraud on the account.
The nature of these scams means the victim is often persuaded to transfer a significant sum, with an average loss in a police and bank impersonation scam of £11,402 and in other impersonation scams of £7,504.
The APP scams data for January to June 2018 shows a total of £145.4m was lost due to APP scams, split between personal (£92.9m) and non-personal or business (£52.5m) accounts. In total, there were 34,128 cases of APP scams, split between personal (31,510 cases) and non-personal (2,618 cases) accounts.
Financial providers were able to return a total of £30.9m of the losses in the first half of 2018.
Katy Worobec, Managing Director of Economic Crime at UK Finance said, “fraud and scams pose a major threat to our country. The criminals behind it target their victims indiscriminately and the proceeds go on to fund terrorism, people smuggling and drug trafficking, whether or not the individual is refunded. Every part of society must help to stamp out this menace, especially by stopping the data breaches which increasingly are fuelling fraud”.
