According to Financial Fraud Action UK (formerly known as the APACS or Anti-Fraud Unit of Banking Payments Association), the recent rise in banking scams have been caused by the increasingly innovative and sophisticated malware-based techniques that cyber criminals and online outlaws are continuously developing. Moreover, the ever-malignant phishing scam trend has also risen to 26,000 instances for the first six months of 2009, which is a twenty-two percent increase from the first half of 2008.

Thankfully, there have been a lot of good news in the fight against banking fraud in general; as such, the increase in online banking fraud is just one small blip in an ocean of progress, so to speak. To be more specific, losses for fraud abroad (that is, overseas ATM counterfeit card scams) dropped from £122.4 million to £67.1 million, phone/Internet/mail order scams dropped from £163.9 million to £134 million, and card scams fell 23% from £304.2 million to £232.8 million all in the same period as the rise of online banking fraud.

According to Financial Fraud Action UK, the reduction of plastic fraud can be credited to the invention of Chip and PIN, which made it a lot harder for scammers to defraud cards, as well as the compliance and enforcement actions done by the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit (DCPCU), which is funded directly by the banking industry to address the credit card scam problem. What's more, merchants and banks alike are presently using a multitude of complex and rigorous scam screening detection tools more and more, while the continuing progress of the use of Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode will certainly make life harder for any and all fraudsters out there.

Financial Fraud Action UK's Head of Fraud Control, Katy Worobec, alleges that the most recent scam facts and figures are wonderful news, but the Internet banking scam upturn must still be addressed. According to her, this isn't the time for complacency, especially with the dawn of measures like the MasterCard SecureCode and Verified by Visa. In fact, she further claims that because traditional banking security has been fortified, fraudsters are now seeking other avenues of deceit, and online banking thus became their newest target.