Authorised push payment used to steal £616m during first six months of 2019

The amount of money stolen by criminals through bank transfer scams has risen by 40% in a year and is running at more than £1m a day, according to official UK data.

Scammers stole £616m from UK bank customers during the first six months of 2019, according to banking body UK Finance. Of this total, £207.5m was lost to scams in which people were duped into authorising a payment to an account controlled by a criminal. This was up 40% on the £148.2m figure for the same period in 2018, although UK Finance said the year-on-year numbers were not directly comparable.

This type of scam is officially known as authorised push payment (APP) fraud and includes cases where criminals hack into email accounts, either of individuals or companies the individuals have employed, to dupe consumers into sending large sums to criminal accounts.

UK bank customers lost £500m to scams in first half of 2018 Read more

Despite an outcry about the large sums being lost and claims that banks are not doing enough to stop this, the amount of money being clawed back and refunded to victims has fallen slightly: from 21% of the total in the first half of 2018 to 19%.

A voluntary code of conduct requiring banks to improve the way they treat fraud came into effect on 28 May 2019. However, the banking body said the latest figures “reflect just one month” of the code.

From next year, name checks will be carried out when UK bank customers send money to other people – though this system has been delayed and was originally set to start in summer 2019.

UK Finance said it had also seen an increase in criminals deploying “digital skimmers” to steal card data from online shoppers. This typically involves malicious code being added to a retailer’s website, which steals sensitive information including card details at the checkout stage. These stolen details are then used to buy items online.

Old-fashioned financial scams are also increasing, with a 789% rise in the amount lost to cheque fraud. This is largely down to criminals targeting businesses, some of which are apparently failing to keep their cheque books locked up securely.

While cheque usage is in rapid decline, losses jumped from £3.3m in the first half of 2018 to £29.4m in the same period this year, a rise of 789%. The number of cases during the latest six-month period totalled 1,515.

This may be fuelled by the fact that some large businesses print their own cheques, but may not be using security watermark paper. It appears some businesses are not storing their company cheques in fully secure locations.