APACS

The UK payments association Apacs conjointly with the Payments Council released a comprehensive overview on all UK payments data including expenditure on plastic cards, repayments and lending on credit cards, cash machine withdrawals, checks, Faster Payments, CHAPS payments, Direct Debits and Bacs Direct Credits.

APACS, the UK payments association, has today advised about the recent rise in popularity of an old-style phone scam that involves fraudsters duping unsuspecting cardholders into revealing their card details by pretending to be from either their bank, card company or one of the international card schemes – Visa and MasterCard.

HSBC has announced that it will be introducing technology to screen all card transactions in order to protect against potential fraud. The bank plans to use technology from SAS.

According to Apacs total card fraud losses in the first half of 2008 had increased by 14 per cent against the same period of 2007 and made up £301.7m, the number of skimmed or cloned cards increased by 22 per cent, and online banking fraud rose by 185 per cent to make £21.4m.

According to Apacs payments industry association, Faster Payments Service (FPS) has made 3.9 million payments on 1 December 2008. This became a new daily record for the company, reports Silicon.com.

In the first six months of its operation starting May 2008, FPS had processed 63 million payments worth £26bn.

Canadian security company Cryptocard is launching a combined payment card and one-time-password generator, with the aim of securing online banking log-in and decreasing the number of card-not-present frauds.

The company, whose customers list includes Apacs, ING, Fortis, and TD Bank, stated that the EMV-ready CD-1 Credit Card Display token is currently being tested. 

[img_assist|nid=8022|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=94|height=100]While the ubiquitous economy disaster impoverishes ones, other are capitalizing on the situation as it is readily apparent from the report of APACS. Financial institutions are warning their customers against the latest series of phishing mails attacks. Fraudsters are making use of the mess and confuse of the bank consumers to drag them into visiting malicious sites where the victims are robbed of their sensitive financial data.