Online fraud is growing

I found a recent research report produced by consultancy firm 1871 Ltd very interesting. According to this report (based on data for the United Kingdom), more than three million online crimes were carried out last year. These included more than 200,000 cases of financial fraud, twice the official number of real-world robberies carried out during the same period. A breakdown of the crimes committed include more than 90 000 incidents of online identity theft and unauthorised access to someone’s PC with ulterior intent reached 144,500. According to the report, 90% of cybercrimes go unreported with victims deterred from coming forward as they wrongly believe the activity is not criminal or that the police will be unable or unwilling to investigate.

A security briefing published by Lloyds during August, indicate that 51% of people surveyed indicate that they are worried about Internet banking fraud, with more than a quarter indicating that they believe that nothing can be done about this crime as "these things happen".

This is absolutely shocking to me! We are living in a virtual world with crime on the rampant (I would say out of control) and almost nothing is done about it. As a matter of fact, we all visit this unsafe world, because we have to, but we all feel extremely unsafe there. What is so sad about this situation is that a very simple and extremely successful deterrent exists to combat this crime effectively. It is very easy to implement and can almost eliminate virtual fraud as it connects every banking transaction to something physical - something that we have with us all of the time.

The solution is mobile banking - implemented with simple cryptographic tokens. We at Fundamo, have been supplying these solutions to major banks for the past eight years and have excellent case studies to prove the point.