Card-not-present fraud rises 24% in the UK
As more UK consumers shopped on the Internet, fraudulent card-not-present transactions rose to £150.8 million last year, up 24% from £122.1 million in 2003, London-based Association for Payment Clearing Services reports. The good news is that card-not-present losses only grew in proportion to the number of businesses offering card-not-present transactions, APACS says. It notes that online credit card payments have increased five-fold since 1999 and now account for 10% of all UK-based credit card payments.
Identification fraud related to payment cards in the UK rose 22% last year to £36.9 million, up from £30.2 million in 2003, APACS said. More than half of that involved stolen account information, it said.
Ironically, the largest increase in the type of payment card fraud in the UK last year was related to the rollout of new credit cards designed for “chip and PIN” transactions. The cards are designed so that information in a card-imbedded computer chip must coincide with a PIN that the cardholder enters when making an online transaction. But because there were so many of the new cards mailed out last year—an average of 200,000 a day—criminals stepped up their efforts to steal them before the cards could reach the genuine cardholders, APACS said. That type of card fraud, which APACS terms “mail non-receipt,” rose 62% last year to a value of £72.9 million.
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