Payments: The number of scams is decreasing, but large amounts are being targeted

orange with media services, published on Sunday, July 31, 2022 at 08:00

The cheated amounts reached 1.24 billion euros in 2021. Fraudsters are developing new scams such as check fraud or wire transfer fraud.

A fall in deceit that causes a change in nature. In a statement from the Banque de France published on Friday 29 July, the Payment method fraud cases fell by 3.8% in 2021, but the average amount of damage increased by around 14% to 166 euros. The total amount of fraud reached €1.24 billion in 2021, an increase of 8.5% with constant scope and methodology.

“Check fraud continues to increase and these are average amounts of several thousand eurostherefore, if the share of checks in total fraud increases, the average amount of fraud also increases, in a very mechanical way,” explained Julien Lasalle, secretary of the Observatory for the Security of Payment Methods (OSMP) at a press conference. , which the Banque de France, authorities, banks and brings consumers together.

A “Remittance Scam” affecting businesses

“The same goes for wire transfer scams, which we shudder a little at: it’s a scam that can mostly hit businesses with unit amounts Tens or even hundreds of thousands of euros‘ although the cases are fortunately few, he continued. The transfer is 0.0007% (70 cents cheated for 100,000 euros paid).

However, the card value fraud rate is 0.059% the cheated piece amounts are lower. In addition, the development of strong authentication has made it possible to reach “an all-time low” for online payment fraud.

Scammers posing as bank advisors

However, increasing the security of the means of payment tempts the crooks to act increasing use of manipulation techniques trick the victim into making or validating the payments themselves, in particular by posing as a bank advisor.

“The development of these techniques, which we call ‘manipulation’, must not lead to a gray area with excessively long repayment periods” or even non-repayment, warned the governor of the Banque de France, François Villeroy de Galhau UFC Que Choisir filed lawsuit against 12 banks end of June on this topic.