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In the UK, a recent data breach by the UK Government in which 25 million people’s details went missing, has led to a substantial increase in enquiries to Experian’s CreditExpert service, showing that the public are alert to fraud and how, if the missing data got into the wrong hands, it could ultimately affect them. In fact, a recent PWC(1) survey illustrated that public awareness of fraud is high everywhere in Europe, with over 75% of people believing the risk of fraud in the future to be at least as high as it is today, and 33% believe it will be even higher. Whilst the UK suffers the highest rate of card fraud in Europe(2), estimated by its Government to be £22 billion(3), fraud is a growing issue across the rest of Europe. In the UK, application fraud is growing at a rate of 19%(4) year-on-year and we expect this rate of increase to be even higher across Europe where 43% of large organisations in Europe have been the victim of economic crime. With such high levels of fraudulent activity taking place, it is imperative that organisations throughout the world take steps to analyse their own activities, systems and processes and understand how vigilant they need to be to stop fraudulent attacks on their business. Fraud is a truly global problem. In the world of multiple transaction channels, the fraudster can attack your organisation at many levels. In particular, the ease of transacting online makes fraud easier to commit and the increasing number of global services on the Internet such as retailers, social networks and gaming sites mean that you are under the threat of attack from outside of your country borders. Experian has a strong heritage in providing our clients with robust and comprehensive anti-fraud solutions. When we started developing these solutions, fraud was not often recognised as being a problem and was, and to a certain extent still is, hidden within bad debt. Nowadays, fraud is acknowledged as a major issue and costs financial services, insurance, retail, telecoms and utilities organisations and the public sector billions each year. The key to preventing fraud lies in identifying and stopping fraud at the point of application and the identification of fraudulent activity during transactions. Our knowledge of fraud types and methodologies, combined with our understanding of both mature and developing markets, has delivered significant savings to our clients. I’d like to leave you with one question… are you confident that your organisation has the ability to identify and stop a fraudulent attack on your business? Gary Wood Contact us for further discussions about this article (1) 2005 PricewaterhouseCoopers' European Economic Crime Survey
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Fraud is a hot topic in the media at the minute. Never before has fraud been written, talked about and debated as much as in recent months. 