The finance industry stopped £2 in every £3 of attempted unauthorised fraud last year, but fraudsters still managed to steal £1.2bn from victims.
Figures published by UK Finance today (March 21) showed £1.66bn of unauthorised fraud was prevented in 2018, with £318m of this being attempted remote banking fraud.
But a total of £1.2bn was stolen by criminals committing fraud last year, consisting of £354m in authorised fraud and £845m in unauthorised fraud.
In an unauthorised fraudulent transaction the account holder does not provide authorisation for the payment to proceed and the transaction is carried out by a third party.
This differs from authorised fraud whereby a genuine customer is duped into processing a payment to another account which is controlled by a criminal.
Though losses from unauthorised fraud in 2018 had increased by 16 per cent compared with the previous year, money lost through internet banking, telephone banking and mobile was down by 2 per cent with banks preventing £318m of attempted fraud of this nature.
Katy Worobec, managing director of economic crime at UK Finance, said: "Fraud is a crime which poses a major threat to us all – it can have a devastating impact on victims and the money stolen funds even more damaging crimes such as terrorism, drug trafficking and people smuggling.
"Every business, from online retailers to social media companies, as well as the public sector, has a duty to work together to beat fraud and prevent stolen data getting into the hands of criminals."
There were 84,624 authorised push payment scams last year, totalling £354m in losses.
In February the finance industry, consumer groups and the Payment Systems Regulator agreed a voluntary code designed to offer greater protection to victims of authorised payment scams.
Due to take effect on May 28, signatories of the code committed to reimbursing victims of authorised push payment scams in any scenario where their bank or payment service provider is at fault and victims have met standards specified in the code.
Under current legislation if a customer authorises the payment themselves they have no legal protection to recover any losses.
rachel.addison@ft.com
