Financial Crime & Fraud


Bank of England tackles “critical” cybercrime attacks

A major new effort spearheaded by the Bank of England and the UK Treasury has been launched to shore up the cyber defences of the UK financial services industry, amid rising concerns that testing has exposed serious unaddressed weaknesses.

Tokenisation may offer antidote to soaring cyber crime epidemic

As the number of cybercrime incidents increases, financial institutions and their corporate customers should take renewed steps to protect their data – including using tokenisation and hosted payments pages, according to a new report by Chase Paymentech.

The race is on: banks and regulators prepare for AML changes

The European Union and the larger international policy community have given substantial attention to anti-money laundering regimes this year, cueing both financial institutions and regulators to begin the race to implement and enforce respectively, writes Aamir Khan, general counsel and head of London office at Clutch Group.

Cyber criminals target “vulnerable” applications

Security breaches at major institutions in financial services, healthcare and other industries are going undetected for months at a time and are often caused by basic errors of security, such as weak passwords, vulnerable applications and a lack of interest in security, according to a new report by cybercrime specialist company Trustwave.

Survey: KYC action plans 2014

Looked at from a data perspective, many new regulations have overlapping requirements that come back to customer data. Banking Technology joined forces with Markit І Genpact KYC Services and regulatory specialist JWG to look at how firms are approaching the challenges this poses.

Breaking bit

Bitcoin is the poster child of the cryptocurrency world, but it’s not alone. Michael Mainelli and Bob McDowell take a look at the real-world implications of the rise of AltCoins

Why Yahoo’s malware attack is hitting banks hard

At the end of last year, Yahoo was hit by a malware attack. It affected over two million clients, mainly in Romania, Great Britain, France, Italy and Spain, putting their personal data at risk. Upon visiting the website between 27 December and 3 January, users received advertisements, some of which were malicious and infected users’ devices without even a click.

Banks back Swift KYC Registry initiative

A group of major international banks have agreed to jointly develop and use the centralised Know Your Customer Registry announced by Swift at the start of the year.

Swift boosts collaboration push with Financial Crime Compliance unit

Swift has created a dedicated Financial Compliance Services unit to manage a growing number of service offerings. The new unit will focus initially on the development of a Know Your Customer Registry planned for launch later this year as well as the integration and development of existing services.

2014: a good year for the fraudsters

2014 looks to be a good year for fraudsters as government and law enforcement struggle to come to terms with the issues and the continuing spread of mobile continues to offer them poorly-protected targets.

Bitcoin boom prompts banking dilemma

Bitcoin is more traceable but less regulated, less expensive but more volatile, and more decentralised but less accountable, than a regular currency. Feeling confused? That’s not the half of it, according to Ernst & Young.

Cyberspace: beyond the rule of law?

Cybersecurity and cyber espionage have been in the headlines the past few years as leaked stories relating to government-sponsored activities have appeared and sabre rattling between aggrieved nations has moved to the public domain. At the same time an increased volume of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) on banks and other institutions carried out […]

Financial institutions are “missing out” on big data says TeleWare

As financial regulation on mobile phone recording grows ever tighter in Europe, a significant proportion of financial institutions still haven’t put in place any technology to handle it. They could be missing out, according to Steve Haworth, chief executive at computer telephony specialist TeleWare.

Lack of EMV means US leads the world in card fraud

The US leads the world in card fraud, at least in part because it has lagged in the adoption of the EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) Chip & PIN standard, and continues to use signatures for verification. One result, said Carolyn Balfany, group head for US product delivery at MasterCard Worldwide, during Money2020 in Las […]

EMV – driving the global eradication of card fraud

Authentication, risk management, transaction integrity and cardholder verification, are the four features that define the EMV standard, specified by EMVCo, the organisation that manages the EMV standards and associated compliance processes. These are designed to protect merchants, acquirers and cardholders from fraudulent transactions. However, closing the loop on fraud altogether will be almost impossible without […]

Cards top target list for fraudsters

Credit and store cards have returned to the top of the list of fraud targets, with a 28% increase in the first four months of the year – at a time when overall fraud levels fell by 16.5%.

Print is not dead – it’s just turned baaaad

As a rule of thumb, the fastest adopters of new technology are pornographers and criminals (two sets that often overlap). So it should come as no surprise that the latest thing to worry security specialists is 3-D printing. You’ll have seen the stories in the papers about how you can create real working guns with […]

Indonesian bank BCA adopts Nice Actimize AML tools

Indonesian bank PT Bank Central Asia Tbk has adopted an anti-money laundering toolkit from specialist security firm Nice Actimize, to help the bank monitor for suspicious market activity and ensure regulatory compliance.

Experian sets out anti-fraud tools

Information company Experian has improved its Hunter anti-fraud software to help banks and other financial services firms keep track of fraud.

Inside Eurograbber: the £30m mobile banking heist

In the history of bank robberies, the £30 million stolen by the Eurograbber attack in 2012 ranks as one of the all-time biggest, globally. And when you consider that this sum was stolen from more than 30,000 accounts across 30 banks in four European countries, using malware that affected both PCs and bank customers’ mobile […]

Mobile malware headache looms for security managers

A 400% increase in malware for mobile devices masks a security scene where many of the threats are much as they have been for several years – but where the volume of attacks means that firms should think in terms of when they will be attacked rather than if they will be.

Fircosoft signs AML watch list reseller in India

FircoSoft has signed a partnership with Indian IT services specialist iSolve to resell its watch list filtering products to financial institutions in India, where anti-money regulations are tightening. iSolve already sells compliance solutions to financial institutions in India, making the addition of FircoSoft’s filtering solutions to iSolve’s portfolio a logical step. It will be mainly targeting […]

The Return of the Old-Fashioned Villain

The latest bi-annual Fraud Barometer from KPMG has shown a rise in individuals committing more traditional swindles such as Ponzi schemes, cheque fraud and procurement fraud. The findings are in broad agreement with figures from CIFAS, the UK fraud monitoring service, published last week

Financial crime: compliance and failure

Banks worldwide have been struggling in the battle against financial crime. Recent high-profile examples demonstrate that the rate of anti-money laundering compliance enforcement is continuing to rise.

ID theft drives fraud to new levels in UK

Identity theft soared during 2012, accounting for half of all financial fraud in the UK. This drove the level of account takeover frauds up by 53% during the year, according to CIFAS, the UK Fraud Prevention Service.

Internet fraud: follow the money

While the internet has provided inumerable benefits, it has also been the field for new types of fraud and rights infringements. If the financing used by people who illegally upload or otherwise exploit content were cut off, might it be possible to combat the spread of their activities?

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